Many of you have probably been seeing reports on the news about what is happening on the house floor. I wanted to give you a firsthand update from my desk.
This will come as no surprise to those of you who have been following Texas politics for some time now but because Democrats in the House are out of touch with Texans on both policy and tactics they are manipulating the House rules in order to kill hundreds of important bills that matter to all Texans including Voter ID. Heres what theyre doing: When a bill is to be heard on the House floor it is set on something called a calendar which are like dockets in court. Basically its a list of bills well hear that day. We set them either on a Daily House calendar or a Local and Consent Calendar. The Local and Consent calendar is a list of bills that have no objection and are usually local or limited in scope. Because there is no reason to debate them they appear on a special calendar with special rules that say if a member asks more than 10 minutes worth of questions then the bill must be removed and sent to the Daily House calendar. The intent of this rule is to allow members to ask questions on a bill if they have legitimate concerns about its intent so that in the rare case that a bill is misunderstood it can be explained before moving on. Because these bills are so simple it is not uncommon to hear 100-200 at a time. On Friday a local calendar was set with 212 bills. Typically a bill might take 30-60 seconds to lay out and pass. But as soon as the first bill hit the floor something different was happening: a Democrat at the back mic announced he intended to ask nine and a half minutes worth of questions. That is just enough questions to avoid killing the bill but enough to take the maximum time. Democrat after Democrat followed suit. And it soon became obvious what they intended to do. With 212 bills on the calendar if they were to speak for approximately 10 minutes on each bill it would take at least 45 hours to move through the calendar when you include additional complications on time. The House is facing a major deadline on Tuesday at midnight for the passage of important bills. Before we can even get to the Voter ID bill we are required to finish the Local and Consent calendar and then continue work on two major bills that are highly controversial: the top 10 bill and the unemployment insurance bill. Each of those bills could easily take a day to debate with Democrats stalling for time every second of the debate. The Democrats plan is to talk so long on these local bills that we will have no time to get to not only the dozens of major state issues we have yet to address but also hundreds of other pieces of legislation ranging from issues like benefits for retired veterans to funding of law enforcement agencies. All of these bills will die at midnight on Tuesday all of them because of these stalling tactics executed by Democrats. So what are doing on the House floor right now? We are standing by while we watch Democrats wax poetic about the intricacies of bills that create municipal utility districts in West Texas or a bill that marks the second week of October as Monarch Butterfly week. For almost ten minutes at a time Democrats are engaging everyone in meaningless childlike debate (one example Representative this bill creates MUD #9 in your district… can you tell me how many MUDs there would then be total in your district if this passes?) These are the tactics that Democrats place above your right to have your vote count in an election. Testimony on the Voter ID bill during the committee process estimated that an average of 1000 voters per legislative district might not be able to vote under the requirements of this bill. That is to say up to 1000 people in each members district cannot prove that they are here legally. That is the only statistic you need to prove why Democrats are so insistent on killing this bill no matter what the tactics no matter what the costs. Just as telling is the fact that almost 70 percent of Texans approve the Voter ID bill. But that doesnt matter to Democrats who would no longer be able to steal elections through the efforts of sham voter-registration groups like ACORN if voters had to prove they who they were when they showed up to vote. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Action Needed: If your State Representative is a Democrat contact him/her. Polls have shown that Democrat as well as Republican voters support Voter ID. Tell your Democrat Representative that you and 70 of all Texans support Voter ID. Helpful links: Find your State Representative Find out if your Representative is a Democrat or a Republican Find your Representatives contact information
