Public Opinion and a Big #TxLege Agenda for Tuesday, March 7

It’s hard not to see the late-breaking addition of the Public Education Committee chair Dan Huberty’s just-filed HB 21 to the committee's agenda Tuesday as a bit of a chess move against both voucher advocates and the Senate (see below). The runs have been released using the funding scheme in the bill, and there will no doubt be a lot of discussion of this in committee once people have had a chance to read the bill and digest the runs. All this takes place in the context of little consensus on what to do to address the public education finance system, declared dismal but barely constitutional by the Texas Supreme Court last year. Note: Harold Dutton's HB94 got bumped from the agenda.

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The (now other) headliner at the Capitol Tuesday is the meeting of the Senate State Affairs Committee to take up SB 6, Senator Lois Kolkhorst’s bill that would require school districts, state agencies, and political subdivisions to develop policies that would govern access to bathrooms based on “biological sex” as defined by their birth certificate, among other related policies. Josh Blank and I wrote recently about the tangle of (largely unformed or at least fluid) public opinion in this area, subject as it is to many attitudinal cross-currents.  Last month’s UT/Texas Tribune Poll found underlying attitudes about gender similar to those discussed in that piece, with the addition of a new item that suggested that most Texans aren’t thinking it’s important for the legislature to make a priority of the subject.