Re: Sarah Palin

OK: I shoulda knocked wood.  Just read on the crawl that Sarah Palin is coming to Texas to campaign for Rick Perry. 

In a sense, it's a good fit.  I mean, can't see Sarah campaigning for Kay Bailey, can you?  Sarah Palin and the woman who was once described as a female version of George H.W. Bush, only without the personality?  But have you ever seen Rick Perry in the flesh?  He is one animated dude.  And then there's the folksiness quotient of this combo.  If there were a down-home Richter scale, a campaign event with the two of them would be a 9.0.

The 81st Legislative Session

Some of my colleagues in the political sphere are feeling a bit traumatized/beat up/ left for dead after this legislative session.

To non-Texans: The Texas Legislature only meets once every two years for 140 days. 

I followed this session much more closely than any previous, in part because I was actually a part of the lobbying activity on two bills relating to higher education.  Also because I had a niggling sense of guilt that I hadn't really educated myself on the ins-n-outs of the legislative process as it is practiced here in Tejas.

There are plenty of reasons why neophytes don't get directly involved in the process.  Once you get past the "call your rep" stage of political activism, things get very complicated.  As a friend of mine says, there are a million ways to kill a bill, but only one way to get one passed.  I'll use a couple of very simple examples.

Bill "A" was written and publicly read, then referred to the House Higher Education Committee, which had only a one person Republican majority.  It died in committee, despite the fantastic hearing testimony that its supporters put together (for the grassroots activist, this is one of the few areas of influence.) So, end of the line.

Bill "B" was a common sense, cost-free law that had bi-partisan support (issue: transparency, which is big in Texas).  It needed no extra 'splainin' and it was unopposed (really, unnoticed) by the target institution.  It was a victimless crime, so to speak.  It beat the rush in the House by getting onto the calendar early, and a companion Senate bill also sped through. It passed the Senate (2/3 majority vote required) and will be signed by the Governor on the 16h of June.

By getting on the calendar early, which is a trick in itself, Bill B avoided the stalling that ran out the clock on many, many bills this past week.  The Democrats "chubbed" hundreds of bills (spoke on each for the maximum amount of time) to delay a vote on the Voter I.D. bill so that it wouldn't make the session deadline.  In the process, they killed many of their own bills, some quite rich for them.  Some bills were saved by making them amendments of other bills that were further along in the process, a tactic that I still don't completely understand.

This year, the end-of-session crush was especially bad because we had a new speaker, a compromise candidate who has taken bi-partisanship to new heights.  The House is very evenly split, so he didn't have a lot of choice in some ways, but many Republicans feel he gave away the store with his committee appointments.  His delay in making appointments put everything behind schedule from the very beginning, and the session's "Big Bill," Voter I.D., became the hill Democrats were willing to die on.

You have to wonder, though, that if Democrats think they'll lose 10 seats in the House if voters are required to show identification, maybe we really do have a voter fraud problem in this state.  Sounds like a good bill to me.

Up Close and personal with Governor Rick Perry

I was at a mini-conference sponsored by Americans for Prosperity (Texas) on Saturday. While I was disappointed in the overall shape the conference took (see next post), I did get a chance to ask Rick Perry a question. It was one that Michael Barone asked in one of his last posts as an employee of U.S. News & World Report (he's moved to the Washington Examiner): what can we learn from Texas about forclosures, that is, Texas has relatively few. Why is that?

Let's look at an interactive map, shall we? Last weekend, I went to Las Vegas and spent quality time with people who live in Deschutes county, OR, Las Vegas (Clark Cty,) NV, and Rupert (Minidoka Cty), ID. If you run your cursor over the state of Texas, you'll see that foreclosure rates are pretty low, and the total economic stress index, as measured by AP, is also low statewide. But check out Deschutes County in Central Oregon, or Clark County, NV. My cousin from Bend said that homes in her area are down 40- 50%. My aunt is a real estate agent in Las Vegas, where home prices are down about a third overall. . She says that the rental market is booming because so many foreclosures mean that more people are renting- interesting for the landlords, I'm sure. I mean, what do they use for references and credit history?

So I asked Governor Perry to what did he attribute this low foreclosure rate: was it something other than the overall excellent fiscal health of the state? Texas leads all states in exports, business climate, and has no state income tax, and began 2008 with a budget surplus. He gave credit to the conservative nature of the banking industry in the state, which suffered from an extremely severe housing bust in the mid-'80's. He didn't credit some excellent legislation that was on the books until 5 years ago, which disallowed homeowners from taking out second mortgages on their homestead. In practical effect, it kept people from cashing out based on the appraised value of the home, so no matter what the prices of housing were doing you could only refinance the existing mortgage at its face value (if I recall correctly...). This had the effect of putting the skids on the refi craze, at least until five years ago, which was enough to buffer much of the effects of the bubble that had been in the works around the country for nearly two decades.

Maybe Governor Perry didn't mention the change in the homestead law because he signed it. Just saying.