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The Blast - April 28, 2025 [1]
['The Texas Tribune']
Date: 2025-04
18 days for the House to pass legislation that originated in the House 35 days until sine die
GOP HARDLINERS THUMP THEIR CHESTS
The House’s local and consent calendar is dead. Truly dead.
As of this afternoon, 72 bills have been offloaded from the House Local and Consent Calendars Committee to the House Calendars Committee. Precisely zero bills are left in the Local and Consent Calendars Committee.
It’s fallout from the blowup that occurred on Friday, as a tit-for-tat between House Democrats and the chamber’s most conservative flank brought lawmaking to a halt. Most bills that were on the local and consent calendar were sent to Calendars instead, and will be on the floor soon, some for a third time.
Republicans kicked off the volley Friday in response to Democrats withholding their votes on constitutional amendments. But the band of Republicans are also telling House leadership, under the command of Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, that the conservative priorities are dying in committee.
In a post backing on Saturday evening, Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, said the anti-Burrows band won’t be backing down.
“What we did yesterday not only killed the misused and abused Local and Consent Calendar yesterday, but you won’t see another one for the rest of this Session and we’re not even close to being finished,” Toth said. “Burrows’ Leadership team has left us no other options than to burn it all down.”
In a separate post thread that evening, Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, said that legislative priorities of the Republican Party of Texas are languishing in committees. He named the bill to ban taxpayer-funded lobbying (Senate Bill 19/House Bill 3257/House Bill 4860) as one of the several pieces of legislation that are stuck in the House State Affairs Committee. He named Public Health as another bottleneck.
“Committee leadership knows it,” Cain said.
With less than three weeks for the House to pass its bills, it’s crunch time in the chamber. Given the amount of time it takes to schedule a hearing, get the paperwork ready, and place a bill on the House floor calendar with sufficient notice, bills really have only a couple weeks, if that, to start moving.
The local and consent calendar is an important vehicle in the House, because it allows members to quickly pass all their “good government” bills that help out their folks back in the district. Without it, all those personal must-pass bills must end up on the regular calendar like every other bill. There, they’ll be subject to last-minute amendments, debate and all the joys of lawmaking.
More importantly, the House will have to squeeze those bills into its regular calendar.
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