Abbott to NFL: Texas politics a rougher contact sport
AUSTIN – Even before the Legislature officially returned to work last month, Gov. Greg Abbott has been playing coy about whether he’ll take sides on the so-called bathroom bill that has divided the leaders of the two chambers in the Capitol.
Meeting with reporters during the holidays, a full month before the session started, the Republican governor gave no hint as whether he thinks Texas needs a law governing where members of the transgender community can take care of their personal business.
At one point in the wide-ranging discussion, he said the issue was “something that needed to be looked at,” but also noted that “we are in a situation where there are more unknowns than there are knowns.”
But then in Washington, D.C., on the eve of President Trump’s inauguration, Abbott told the Texas Tribune that who goes to which powder room is “an alarming issue that is an obvious concern to a lot of Texans.”
So maybe he was gravitating toward the view of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the leader of the Texas Senate who has made the matter one of his priorities and even called a news conference to stand alongside the author of the legislation dubbed Senate Bill 6.
But less than two weeks later at his State of the State address, where Abbott laid out in some specificity the issues he wanted the House and the Senate to spend time on before the session ends May 29, he made no mention of bathrooms what so ever.
So then, maybe he was aligning with House Speaker Joe Straus, who days earlier told the Texas Association of Business that they were right to oppose the bill on grounds that it would needlessly drive away opportunities for trade and tourism coming to Texas.
Or not. Last week, Abbott took to Fox News and conservative talk radio to pick a fight with the NFL after the league suggested Texas could kiss goodbye another shot at hosting the Super Bowl if it enacted “discriminatory” policies based on age, gender, race, religion and sexual orientation.
The governor told radio commentator Glenn Beck the league was “skating on thin ice.” And he wasn’t confusing football with hockey, just for the record.
On Fox News, he said, "The NFL has no business whatsoever trying to get into the politics of various states. The NFL has its own problems that it must fix." Abbott also used his personal Twitter account to, in effect, suggest that politics could be a rougher contact sport than football.
So far, all this has been an amusing parlor game for players around the Capitol. Even though the Senate is well stocked with Republicans, and even though it’s taken as an article of faith that a lieutenant governor can muster up the Senate votes he needs on a pet bill, it hasn’t moved much yet.
It is being carried by Brenham Republican Lois Kolkhorst and she has 14 GOP colleagues listed as sponsors. That makes a minimum of 15 votes for the bill, but that’s not quite a majority in the 31-member Senate.
None of the 11 Senate Democrats have signed on to the measure. And there is no hearing set for the bill in committee. If and when there is a hearing, SB 6 should fly out of committee with little trouble.
But there are some whispers around the corridors and in the lobby that SB 6 does not yet have the votes necessary to bring. Under Senate rules, three-fifths of the members present must agree to allow a bill to come up for a vote in the full Senate. That means Kolkhorst and Patrick need to find four more votes among the five Republican senators who haven’t yet loaned their name to the bill.
Coming up
On Wednesday, the Senate Health and Human Services Committee is expected to vote on three abortion-related bills that were the subject of emotional testimony last week. The bill’s author and the committee’s chairman, Sen. Charles Schwertner of Georgetown, got so annoyed with one witness who ignored repeated warnings that she had used up her allotted time that he smashed the protective glass on the committee’s table when he banged his gavel.
He promised to exercise more control the next time the panel meets.