Hurt Feelings and Thin Skin – Session’s Getting Good

[TexasTowelie]

This report from R.G. Ratcliffe reads like something straight out of a bad reality show, The Big Three Breakfast Blows Up.

The weekly kumbaya breakfast between the big three Texas lawmakers broke down today into a round-robin of recriminations that concluded with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick declaring he was tired of Governor Greg Abbott and Speaker Joe Straus “picking on me.”

The blow-up, confirmed by multiple sources, represents the boiling point of long-simmering disputes. The House has been upset that Patrick declared his inauguration marked a “New Day” in Texas and that he pushed a conservative agenda quickly through the Senate with expectations that the House would just pass his legislation. But, instead, most of the Senate’s bills on tax cuts, licensed open carry of handguns and moving the Public Integrity Unit have languished in the House without even being referred to committee by Straus.

The House instead has passed its own version of the same legislation, putting the Senate in a take-it-or-leave-it position. To pass the Senate bills now, the House would have to have an entirely new debate on controversial measures it already has approved.

So the Senate, in what looked like retaliation on Tuesday, ignored a House-approved border security bill to vote on its own measure, putting the House into a take-it-or-leave-it position on border security – a measure that House Ways and Means Chair Dennis Bonnen had crafted to win support of border Democrats.

This may be Patrick’s New Day, but Straus’ Old Guard still runs the House.

Topping off that battle, Patrick’s grassroots advisory council sent out a letter Tuesday on its own letterhead attacking the House bill on pre-kindergarten education that was passed after a bitter fight. The legislation is part of Abbott’s signature set of legislation, but the Patrick advisory board of tea party activists claimed the bill would take children out of religious pre-schools and force them into “a Godless environment.” Patrick immediately put out a statement disowning the letter as “unsolicited and expresses the individual viewpoints of Texas citizens.”[/div class="excerpt"]

Everyone’s pointing fingers and no one appears to be leading. Sooner or later they’ll realize they can’t get anything done without each other. Until then the sniping between the semi-sane members of the GOP and the wing nuts will continue, and for those of us on the left we’ll just get the popcorn.

Certainly there’s quite a bit of bad blood between these two factions of the GOP. The same folks that bankroll the tea party candidates, and the tea party candidates themselves, are with Patrick and against Straus. And vice versa, of course. It’s on display most days on the House floor when Stickland takes the back mike to questions Speaker Joe Straus or Rep. Dennis Bonnen. It’s been on display in the media recently when Bonnen took on Lt. Gov. Patrick.

There are a couple of parts in the Trib article that make clearer what’s going on.

Before the breakfast, Patrick crossed paths at the Capitol with Geren. In the brief encounter, the Fort Worth Republican said he ribbed Patrick about the lieutenant governor’s advisory board coming out against the pre-K plan pushed by Abbott and approved by the House.

“I said, ‘That was a pretty good ambush you put on the governor the other day,’” Geren recalled late Wednesday. Patrick replied that he had no idea what Geren was talking about, according to Geren’s account.

Geren said the exchange was not a confrontation: “I would never do that. I have too much respect for the office.”

“If he got his feelings hurt,” Geren added, “then maybe his skin’s a little too thin.”

Read more: http://eyeonwilliamson.org/?p=14613

[AuntPatsy]

1. Bookmarking... Whatever we pay them it's too much

[Paladin]

2. If Dan Patrick is unhappy---for whatever reason---I'm overjoyed. (nt)