You wouldn’t want to say this Texas Legislature doesn’t have an agenda. Maybe it’s a secret, or — more likely — it’s just that the list is too obvious to require a proclamation: write a state budget, draw new political maps, revise election and voting laws, address the problems of racial justice and police practices heightened by incidents like the killing of George Floyd last summer.
You can’t say there is nothing to work on. Lawmakers have filed more than 2,200 bills so far. But you can say that Gov. Greg Abbott has now made clear what he hopes to do over the next four months and that the Legislature has not. Those lawmakers have barely taken the field. The session started almost four weeks ago, and nothing requiring your attention — other than the formal selection of House Speaker Dade Phelan and his Thursday afternoon shake up of House committees — has taken place.
Two years ago, the state’s top three leaders made a show of their unified efforts to work on public education, school finance and property taxes. They had a plan, stated it up front, worked on it for the length of a regular session and then got together again to boast about the results.
