Takin' Care of Business? Who knew it could be hard.
We’ve come a long way since the Battle of Salon a La Mode. Governor Greg Abbott kicked off the last full week of the third special session of the legislature Monday by issuing an executive order banning any entity in Texas, most notably any business, from compelling the “receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine by any individual, including an employee or a consumer, who objects to such vaccination for any reason of personal conscience, based on a religious belief, or for medical reasons, including prior recovery from COVID-19.” That conscience exception contains a lot of open space, which was widely taken as the point. The governor also added the issue to the agenda of the waning third special session. As we noted in a post on the Texas Politics Project website, Abbott’s latest effort to limit the latitude of entities other than the governor’s office to implement responses to the pandemic is triggering a mixture of criticism and defiance from businesses now being ordered to comply with a state order that, for many, conflicts with federal law and potentially opens them up to litigation. While groups ranging from Texas for Lawsuit Reform to the Dallas Regional Chamber (of commerce) have pushed back on the ever-more-aggressive effort to limit vaccine, mask, and testing requirements, as Joshua Blank and I lay out in the aforementioned post, the August 2021 Texas Politics Project poll shows that the Republican base, especially the most conservative among them, likely applauded Abbott’s approach.
 
The Texas Senate hopped right to it, and by Friday, SB 51, an act “relating to prohibited COVID-19 vaccine mandates and vaccination status discrimination and to exemptions from certain vaccine requirements,” had landed on the Senate calendar. (Late note: As I was trying to get this email out the door, a long list of business and trade groups, including some of the state’s most politically active, issued a statement opposing “an unprecedented intrusion into the liberty of employers to operate their businesses as they see fit,” singling out HB 51 and potential amendments to other legislation. H/t Harvey Kronberg's Quorum Report)
SB 51 was authored and shepherded through the State Affairs committee by the Lt. Governor’s go-to Senator this session and chair of said committee, Bryan Hughes, who also carried the high-profile election and anti-abortion bills. This comes after Chair Hughes' in-character appearance on last Sunday’s episode of Showtime’s “The Circus,” in which correspondent Jennifer Palmieri had a strained (at least for her) interview with Hughes that included her informing him that some of his Democratic colleagues had referred to him as “the Ted Lasso of the Texas Senate.” This made me think I might have missed some big dimensions of Ted’s persona, though I have to admit that I’ve nodded off during a few episodes. (The whole episode of "The Circus," titled “Lone Star Blues,” was set in Texas, and also included interview segments with Matthew Dowd, State Reps. Nicole Collier and Gina Hinojosa, Joe Straus, and a regional medical director of Planned Parenthood of Texas.)
The quick action on SB 51 in the Senate was part of a lot of interesting call-and-response between the governor and lieutenant governor. The governor’s proclamation later in the week calling for “legislation to improve higher education” came shortly after the Lt. Gov. Patrick requested the addition of tuition revenue bonds to the legislative agenda, per Kate McGee’s account in The Texas Tribune. I’ve included some job approval ratings for each, broken down by intensity of Republican party identification, as some broad context; readers might also find former speaker Straus’ reflections on the Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Patrick in that “Circus” episode interesting.
 
Looking toward Washington for a beat, a hat tip to the folks at Punchbowl News, a recent entry in the insider-y DC newsletter game. The Thursday edition of their early morning “Punchbowl News AM” mailer (which is free) flagged Senator John Cornyn’s fundraising in the last quarter (more than $2 million) and the fact that “he’s spreading it across the Senate Republican conference.” Cornyn’s lukewarm polling numbers at home (being elected to five terms in the Senate notwithstanding) have always been at odds with his position in the Senate, and the brief Punchbowl item highlights this. “When Senate Republican insiders talk about who will be the next GOP leader,” the team of authors write, “they say Cornyn’s chief advantage is his fundraising prowess. This is a clear example of that.”
And yet...
Even as the agenda continues to grow, the third special session expires Tuesday, October 19. While the legislature seems to have handled the primary reason for the session, the passage of new district maps, anxiety among participants in the process about the possibility of yet another session seems to be growing in tandem with the late-breaking additions to the agenda. Next week might get interesting, though most, I suspect, are hoping for less-interesting times to take hold in the Capitol.
We’ll know more a week from now. In the meantime, enjoy the weekend.
JH
Jim Henson
Executive Director, The Texas Politics Project
College of Liberal Arts / Department of Government
The University of Texas at Austin
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