With GOP maps drawn, the Texas Legislature takes another swing at property tax bills – and gets out of town
The end of the third special session of the 87th Texas Legislature this week, seems to be universally welcomed by almost all involved. In the spirit of everybody seeming desperate from a break, I’m going to keep it short this week. Josh Blank and I took a first cut at an overall assessment of the session in this week’s Second Reading podcast, which we recorded Wednesday.
While there were some calls for calling another special session, consider the sources of these calls, and don't bet the farm on Abbott heeding them. While Abbott's critics on both right and left highlight the dynamic in which the governor's responsiveness to right-wing critics like Donald Trump, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, and primary opponent Don Huffines makes his decision-making seem entirely driven by their pressure, this same dynamic makes calling yet another special session in which the Lt. Governor can leverage his near-absolute control over the Senate an unlikely tactic, particularly with redistricting completed. This could change if the pressure persists, but I expect folks will move on as coverage of such calls for yet another session become less newsworthy in the eyes of the political press.
While most of the energy in the final days of the legislature was focused on the session's ostensible rai·son d'ê·tre, finalizing the new maps produced in the redistricting process, there was also a very last-minute push on one of the perennially difficult policy subjects, property taxes. We posted a look at polling results over several years related to property taxes in a piece called “Feeding the Property Tax Beast.” The point of the piece might be fairly summarized in an alternate title that occurred to me after Josh Blank and I posted it: "On property taxes, pandering is harder than it looks." Below is a graphic preview that illustrates how skeptical Texans were about a previous (and similarly scaled) attempt to get some credit for lowering their property tax bills in 2015. The stem for the responses below: “...the Texas Legislature has approved a measure that would save the average Texas homeowner approximately $125 a year on their property taxes. Would you say that this reduction is.."
 
The promised relief of the increase in the homestead exemption from $25,000 to $40,000 appears to be larger than the average difference the 2015 action promised, but given inflation (past and future, given this won’t go into effect until the 2022 tax year), and the continuing increase in property values, there’s not going to be a big difference from the amount delivered in 2021. (Looking back over our past writing on the topic, there's a certain same-as-it-ever-was feel to all this,)
Last week I flagged an item on John Cornyn's fundraising in Punchbowl DC; as it turns out, this week finds Texas' junior senator making waves in Washington, D.C., too. Have a look at Olivier Knox's Wednesday edition of the Daily 202 in The Washington Post, which details Senator Cruz's big offensive blocking a large number of Biden appointments to cabinet agencies. Cruz has a policy point to make, but it's hard not to note the political benefits of being seen as willing to take the fight to the Biden administration. While there's no telling where his job approval numbers will go once election politics kick into high gear (Cruz's Senate seat isn't up for reelection until 2024, and he may have other plans for that cycle), he has been subject to the same overall dip in job approval ratings among Texas incumbents that we've seen in polling over the summer.
While the legislative session has slouched toward a seeming end, the rest of the world keeps spinning. Registration for the winter term at UT Austin will begin soon, and students are already looking for internships - some are ready to start now. If you have internship opportunities or entry level positions you're trying to fill, I invite you to take advantage of our easy-to-use internship bulletin board at the Texas Politics Project website.
We'll be back with more post-mortem on the session and what it showed us about the state of politics in Texas in the weeks to come, including the growing number of exits by current members in the wake of the new maps and, one surmises, the grating climate in the Capitol. In the meantime, get some rest.
Best,
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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