- Coming up, the highs and lows of the 2025 Texas legislative session, a reporter's round table, next on "Austin InSight."

- [Announcer] Support for "Austin InSight" comes from Sally & James Gavin, and also from Suerte, Este and Bar Toti restaurants, bringing Austin together around culinary excellence to celebrate creativity, conservation, and culture in Central Texas.

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) - Hi, and thanks so much for watching.

I'm Laura Laughead.

11,498.

That's how many bills were filed in the Texas legislature for the 2025 session, which ended last week.

3,500 bills and resolutions were passed as the conservative legislature approved a raft of right-leaning policies.

On today's show, a round table discussion with reporters who closely followed the session, which included a few late night and even overnight hearings and floor debates.

The end of the session is called Sine Die.

- And the House stands adjourned, Sine Die, pending the receipt of messages, signing of bills and resolutions and completions of administrative tasks.

(members cheering) - Joining us now is Scott Braddock, editor at the Quorum Report, Bayliss Wagner, politics reporter at the Austin American Statesman, and Blaise Gainey, who covers state politics for KUT and the Texas Newsroom.

Thank you all for joining us.

- Great to be here.

- Thanks for having us.

- Good to see you.

- Absolutely.

So first, let's talk education, school vouchers and school funding.

They really dominated this session.

Here's the governor at the vouchers bill signing.

- I am about to sign into law the largest day one school choice program in the United States of America.

(audience cheering) - The vouchers debate was rigorous, but was passage of this policy ever really in doubt?

Let's start with Scott.

- Absolutely, and it's very telling that the governor after his Scorched Earth campaign last year, taking out Republican Texas House members who didn't agree with him about this, lying about their records, all of that, just going all in.

Even with all that, he still had to call in the biggest gun in the Republican party on the day of the vote.

That was when Donald Trump, president of the United States, made a call to the Republican caucus of the Texas House and said fall in line and just vote for what Governor Abbott wants.

There was some talk at the very end there that there might be some, you know, quibbling about the details on this, maybe sending it to a vote of the people, a vote of Texans on this, a referendum on it.

But no, once the president called and said just do what the governor wants, and maybe I'll have your back in your Republican primary next year, all the starch came out of any opposition, and everybody just fell in lockstep.

- Bayliss, Blaise, anything to add to that?

- I would say the details were very much up in the air as well.

And so what we ended up with was something resembling the universal program that Governor Abbott wanted.

Really, he wanted sort of a blank check.

We have some limitations.

No more than 20% of people in the program can be from families that earn more than 500% of the poverty level.

But a lot of, I mean, Democrats wanted 0%, right?

And there also is a priority structure.

Students with disabilities and students whose families make less than around 64,000 for four people are prioritized.

But we'll see how it's implemented.

And that'll be a big question.

- Yeah, I mean, I think it was sort of given that it was gonna happen.

It was just more so what was gonna be the makeup of it.

I mean, I think I spoke with some people that said it may have been better to pass earlier versions that we seen in prior sessions because the one that came out this time, Democrats really didn't like.

I mean, I think they just ultimately didn't like the program in general, but this one, it seems like it could benefit those above the 500% above the poverty level.

- And now let's talk about school funding overall.

Lawmakers are touting the $8.5 billion funding package, but critics say it's not even close to catching up to inflation and still leaves schools underfunded, when the state has plenty of money.

What does the funding bill do?

And this one goes to Blaise.

- Yeah, I mean it gives teachers a big sum of that 8.5, I think about 4.2 billion goes to teachers.

They get around 2,500 at the lowest in raises and 8,000 in the highest is raises.

So it does a lot for teachers, it does a lot for students.

I think, you know, does it match what they were, their funding power in 2019?

No, but are they happy to get something?

Of course.

I mean, if you don't give somebody anything for a long time and then give them crumbs, they'll be happy with that.

- And Scott, anything to add?

- Oh yeah, I mean this would be, you keep hearing about how this is a historic investment in public education in Texas.

It would be, to Blaise's point, it would be like if you didn't pay your rent or your mortgage payment for six years and then showed up with a big check and said, "This is the most amount of money I ever tried to give you."

You know, the natural conclusion there would be that if you tried that or I tried that, you'd be evicted, you'd be kicked out.

So schools have a long way to go with what they're gonna need.

There's still going to be, you know, school closures, school consolidations.

And I do think that the plan that the House passed actually would have allowed for some even higher raises for certain teachers, right?

But a lot of this got caught up in the weeds.

And I do think that it's fair to say that the House really got rolled by the Senate on this and a whole lot of other things as well.

Lieutenant Governor Patrick really got his way when it came to the idea of not trusting school boards for how to spend the money.

The way this is gonna work is they'll have a lot of money that's there, but the ISDs are gonna have to come, almost beg TEA for certain things to fund different aspects of public of life at public schools.

- And there were definitely, it seems like a lot of wins for the lieutenant governor this session, and education and conservative social policy combined in several bills this session, like requiring the posting of the 10 Commandments at schools, more oversight of library books, and a contentious debate over banning DEI and LGBTQ+ clubs in public schools.

- These two organizations are not about social clubs.

They're about efforts to fundamentally change our social structure and the moral fiber of this country.

They're doing it through these clubs, and they're using it to attack us.

They're attacking us through our children.

- The real reason we're here is because there's one party, there's one group of people who like making monsters out of others.

The real monsters are not kids trying to figure out who they are.

The monsters are not the teachers who love them and encourage them and support them.

They're not the books that provide them with some amount of comfort and information.

The real monsters, real monsters are in here.

- Bayliss, what do you think is driving this kind of policymaking?

- I think there are a few answers.

The most direct would be primary contests.

So primary contests have very low turnout, and the people who show up are, in the GOP primaries, in particular, are much more socially conservative than the average Texan voter and much more even, you know, more conservative than the average Republican.

So they care a lot about these issues.

They've elected people who care a lot about these issues, and those lawmakers knowing how bloody the primary seasons have been in past years want to keep having something to bring home.

That's part of it.

Another part is the courts.

We have right now the Supreme Court of the United States, which President Donald Trump has stacked with a really big conservative majority.

And we have federal courts that he's also appointed a lot of people to, and the state courts in Texas are very conservative.

So lawmakers now know they can pass these laws and the courts are more likely to uphold than they have been.

Take for example, the 10 Commandments bill.

In 1980, the Supreme Court struck down a Kentucky law doing the same thing.

Now, why are we trying this again now?

Because we think the courts will be favorable.

- Very controversial bill this session, the bill that would ban products that contain THC, a big win for Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, despite testimony from veterans who oppose this bill.

Now a bill to expand the use of medical marijuana seems intended to blunt that criticism, no pun intended.

Why was this so important to the Lieutenant Governor?

Blaise, take it away.

- I mean, I think he's just been at it for a long time.

It's the same with the governor was at vouchers for a long time, and you wanna see something get passed.

He had the House's school funding bill in his possession, and knew that he could use that as a bargaining chip to say, "Hey, I'm gonna alter this bill in a way that you don't necessarily like, or I may not even pass it at all if you don't gimme my full ban."

And it seems like they basically caved in.

Why it matters?

I'm not really sure.

I think maybe that's more, you know, something that lies within him.

But yeah, it's really interesting to see him take this stance.

Definitely, like you said, veterans, business owners, it is gonna impact a lot of people, and it made money for the state.

The regulation path would've made more money for the state.

So it wasn't like a financial thing, at least, you know, making money for the state.

Maybe people could talk about lobbyists and other money that is put into this by big pharma and the alcohol industry.

- Well, there certainly was, Laura, a fight within the alcohol industry that we haven't seen in Texas before.

Usually, all the big alcohol players move in the same direction, the liquor stores and the beer distributors.

But this time around, they were against each other.

It's not that hard to understand why.

If you went down to your liquor store in your neighborhood, and you see they have those THC drinks for sale.

And the beer distributors, which by the way, they only make money by moving beer, right?

They don't do any, the beer distributors don't make beer, they just move it, right?

And so they don't get paid anything to move a THC drink.

And in their estimation, when you have a THC drink that's on the shelf, they think that that's where beer should be, right?

And people should be buying that.

So you had the liquor stores and the beer distributors against each other.

The lieutenant governor is with the beer distributors on this in a big way.

But I also do think that it speaks to his, maybe his, just his personal morals as somebody who was on mind altering drugs, quote-unquote, when he was in a mental institution years ago in the 1980s.

He's, you know, he finds all this to be disgusting.

And that really comes across in his commentary about it.

You saw how angry he was about it, yelling at reporters, calling my co-hosts on the Texas Take podcast, basically calling him an idiot for even asking the question about whether adults should be able to do this.

To protect children, all day long.

Let's do that, you know, do that the same way that we do with alcohol, right?

We just ID people, you know, card people, but he's not for that at all.

And I think the big question on this is, what's the governor gonna do?

Is he going to veto that or sign it into law or let it go into law without his signature?

And for the first time in 10 years, I can't figure out what Abbott is gonna do.

I think 50/50 jump ball.

I'm not sure what he's gonna do on this.

It's been my reporting that he's pretty personally against anything that he sees as opening the door to recreational THC and marijuana use.

But there's the politics of it.

As I said, one Republican poll after another, these done by Republican pollsters of Republican voters shows that those voters who, for example, the voters are gonna decide, you know, the contest between Attorney General Ken Paxton and Senator John Cornyn, those voters don't agree in a big way with a full ban on THC.

It was 57% of Texas Republican voters don't agree with it.

Only about 29% do.

And so, again, this is one place where the lieutenant governor's out of step with the GOP base.

- And that's a big shift in opinion on this issue among Texans as well.

And you mentioned that press conference, that video is doing the rounds and even a video of Patrick throwing a pack of edibles at reporters causing a lot of noise on social media.

And it's very unique to call a press conference for a bill that's already on the governor's desk.

And then of course, other videos circulating in just the past two weeks of like boxes being wheeled in, carrying over a hundred thousand letters and petitions against this ban.

So something definitely to watch.

And now let's switch gears.

Let's talk about the water crisis.

Obviously water is a precious and dwindling resource in parts of Texas.

The governor is expected to sign legislation that gives Texas voters a chance to approve a 20 year, $20 billion water infrastructure program.

Why though was this question put to voters versus directly funded by the legislator, and what will this funding be used for, Bayliss?

- So yes, they could have just put 2 billion in the budget for the next two years and called it a day.

But what lawmakers said is they feel we need to be planning ahead in Texas for water supply much more than we have been.

So we have a growing population, we have increasingly hot temperatures, and water supply projects can take 20 years in and of themselves.

So keep the funding flowing, we'll keep the water flowing basically.

And if voters approve this, that means that all of this funding is insulated from the political headwinds of the next 20 years and insulated from having those budget fights every single session.

- And now let's pivot to LGBTQ+ focus legislation.

A bill to define gender passed and is now causing concerns among the transgender community here in Texas.

But is the story more so than about that specific bill, about the sheer number of bills targeting transgender people that did not pass, Blaise?

- You know, I saw the question ahead of time, and I thought that was, you know, I think actually for a person in the community, I don't think they would view it that way.

I think they would say like any bill passing is a gut punch.

And so like if Mike Tyson was punching you for years and years, and then a lighter fighter starts hitting you, it's still gonna hurt.

I mean, so I think the bill is still are gonna hurt.

I think they're happy, like the bathroom bill didn't pass.

Some of the more volatile ones.

Also the one about abortion pills and access to those, yes, people are happy those didn't pass, but there are other bills that passed, and that just means next time around, they'll be able to put more focus on the bills that didn't pass this time.

- Anyone wanna add to that?

- Yeah, I'd say that leaves something for them to look ahead to.

Sometimes, like I was thinking about all these culture war policies.

Well, they don't wanna do everything so that next primary season they are searching around for what else they can do.

So holding some things back was maybe in their interest.

- You're having to come up with, you know, even I would just say objectively just crazier and crazier ideas to attack the same issue because you wanted to be able to say to voters that you're dealing with that.

And I will say on this, on the attacks on the LGBTQ community, in some ways those have ramped up, I think because conservatives have run out of things to do on other things.

So for example, on the abortion issue that you cover all the time, so well Bayliss, what did they do this time mostly?

Kind of go back and moderate on something that they had passed before.

And as I travel the state and cover these campaigns all over the place from, you know, the Red River to the Rio Grande, the fact is conservative voters don't even bring up abortion anymore.

They kind of feel like the legislature dealt with that.

And so they need, they're creating new boxes to check off.

- And that's certainly a sentiment echoed by transgender advocates we've had on our show recently, that there's been an unprecedented amount of noise this session, conversations we've had before, that then seemingly died down and then have come back with a new force.

And we've covered a lot of ground so far.

Let's get a broader picture and talk about overall political dynamics this session.

Is it fair to say that Democrats have maybe less power than ever?

They certainly impacted the speaker of the House race, but Scott and everyone, did they get that much from that?

- You know, the word that kept coming to mind throughout the session was acquiescence.

So the Democrats acquiesced during the speaker's race.

They were promised by him, by Dustin Burrows privately, that he would be the guy to stand up to Dan Patrick.

I was privy to those conversations.

That didn't happen at all.

And the way the speaker's race played out, I'll just say it was kind of fake.

It was a fake speaker's race.

The way everybody was talking about it was just fake.

It was as if, you know, Dustin Burrows was some sort of a moderate Republican alternative to a conservative David Cook, but both these guys are pretty conservative.

In fact, Cook's voting record was more moderate than Dustin Burrows.

Dustin Burrows is a guy who helped lead the charge for a sanctuary for the unborn out in Lubbock County, right?

- I covered that back then.

- Right.

So you know about, so this is a very conservative legislator lawmaker and now speaker.

And so you had the Democrats acquiesce there.

I have had in the last month or so, a lot of Democrats privately say that they regret that vote, that they wish that could have gone differently.

Not that they would've voted for Cook, but they wish they had more options.

That's one thing.

But then the House acquiescing to the Senate on everything.

And Bayliss had a great story this weekend in which you said, I think, something about how the House kind of lost its independence, right?

That the House members were kind of compliant, right?

When it came to what Patrick wanted and Governor Abbott wanted.

The nationalism of our politics.

Everything's been nationalized completely to where when the governor wants something, he calls Donald Trump and tells the Republican caucus what to do, as we talked about.

- Bayliss, you wanna jump in here too?

- Yeah, what's really interesting about this is that it absolutely reflects the control that the lieutenant governor and the governor have.

I think it was interesting that it was kind of portrayed as Burrows the Democrat or Burrows the hostage of Democrats and David Cook the, you know, person who would be beholden to the Senate.

It ended up being that Burrows was very much in lockstep with Dan Patrick, but the fact that he complied with so many of Patrick's desires in some way reflects that the House has become more conservative and more in line with Dan Patrick's priorities, partially because he has so much control over primaries.

Governor Abbott also has a huge amount of control over primaries and has flexed that in recent years.

And so I think what Democrats are feeling right now is that they need to have more seats if they want a seat at the table.

They really just don't have the margins to force this kind of change.

So even though they could have maybe done differently with the speaker's race, there's also an element that the electoral makeup of the body is changing.

and they haven't really caught up.

- Yeah, I fully agree.

I mean, Democrats don't really have a lot of power though.

I think the most they could do is stop certain constitutional amendments that they just really didn't agree with.

But other than that, yeah, they didn't really have much of a say in what happened.

I mean, they tried a lot on the school funding bill.

I think they, Diego Bernal, Representative Diego Bernal got a full-day pre-K in there like he wanted to.

It's funded differently, but it's still in there.

He was happy about that, but you know, they have to take their wins when you're in the minority.

You have to take the wins that you can get, and yeah, I think moving forward, obviously they want more seats, but getting those is also gonna be pretty difficult.

- And lastly, let's note a few key bills that failed this session.

Those are voter proof of citizenship bill, the so-called bathroom bill that you brought up, impacting the transgender community, banning minors from social media and eliminating the STAAR test, the public school standardized test that is much despised by many educators and some parents and some students.

Which group would you say though is the most disappointed right now about these outcomes this session?

- You know, I think that the grifter class, the folks who make their living off of Republican primaries that we're talking about, there's various groups that raise and spend their money, you know, solely around the idea that the speaker of the House is too liberal.

And that has not been true for 20 years that have been covered, 25 years I've been covering this, going back to when I was a Democrat.

The Democratic speakers were conservative too, by the way, but these guys do this, and so when you look at the things that passed or didn't pass, there are going to be Republican primary challenges next year that are based on some of those things not passing that you mentioned, and you know, how much success that they had with that, I'm not sure, but I know that they'll have well-funded campaigns to talk about all that.

- Yeah, I think who lost the most were parents and students with that STAAR test still being around.

I mean, it seemed like it was going to happen, at least on the House floor, it did, and then it just made it over to the Senate, and it didn't seem like it was a top priority for them to take up and pass that bill.

To me, it wasn't a thing of them running out of time.

It just seems like they didn't really, it wasn't a top priority so it didn't get passed.

- Yeah, I, you know, went to school and have covered politics in Texas for long enough to have either taken or covered the task, the tax, the STAAR and all of this stuff.

- All the attacks, yeah.

- Well, our legendary, You know, move around here is just to get rid of the test that we have and just replace it with another one.

I think they hadn't come up with a new acronym yet, so we'll see what they have in two years.

- Oh gosh, godspeed to all the students with whatever tests they come up with next.

Well, we wanna thank all of you guys for coming on and joining our reporters round table and sharing your insight onto some of these very complex ideas.

So Scott Braddock with the Quorum Report, Bayliss Wagner from the Austin American-Statesman, and Blaise Gainey from KUT and the Texas Newsroom.

Thank you all for coming on and sharing your insights with us.

- Pleasure to be here.

- Thanks for having us.

- Thank you.

- Any objection?

The chair hears none.

The senate of the 89th Legislature is adjourned, Sine Die.

(members cheering) (upbeat music) - Women's health and especially abortion-related policy also were big topics under the capitol dome.

Joining us with more on that is Eleanor Klibanoff, women's health reporter at the Texas Distribute.

Eleanor, thanks so much for joining us.

- Thanks for having me.

- So Eleanor, let's start with the so-called Life of the Mother bill, which passed both Houses.

The bill's intent is to clarify when abortions are permitted to save the life of the mother.

It follows Pulitzer Prize winning reporting from National Media Outlet, "ProPublica," their investigative series revealed that at least three Texas women have died due to changes in maternal care resulting from our state's abortion ban.

From your own reporting on this, do physicians OBGYNs here in Texas believe this bill goes far enough?

- Certainly there are some OBGYNs who are celebrating this, who feel like, you know, particularly those who are having to make these sort of decisions where they could face up to life in prison or the loss of their medical license, hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines if they were to sort of make the wrong call in these extremely time-sensitive cases.

They feel like this is getting the endorsement of state politicians to say, we are not trying to criminalize doctors who are using their good faith judgment to, you know, perform life-saving abortions.

But there are a lot of doctors who feel like this actually doesn't really clarify when they can intervene, and it doesn't give them the certainty that they need.

They would really like to see, you know, the state lawmakers, the Texas government taken out entirely from the doctor-patient relationship, and they won't really be satisfied until that happens.

- Do you expect the governor to sign this bill?

- Certainly, this bill has widespread support from Republicans, which is hard to imagine, you know, even just a couple years ago to think about, you know, Republicans rallying around a bill that while it doesn't expand abortion access, it does certainly sort of seed that there are some problems within your total ban, and it is resulting in really negative outcomes that frankly they don't want, you know, hung around their necks politically.

- And a bill to further restrict abortion medications, it failed, disappointing anti-abortion care advocates.

Why do you think it failed?

- So this is an issue that, you know, for anti-abortion groups and certainly many conservative Republicans is a huge deal.

Right?

The idea that people are circumventing the abortion bans that they worked so hard to put in place by, you know, obtaining abortion pills from any number of sources, right?

People are getting these online.

You can get them shipped to your house in 24 hours.

You can get them prescribed by a doctor in another state.

This is extremely frustrating to them, and they would like to go, you know, they think there's no limit to how far you should be able to go to crack down on that.

Most Republicans though kind of feel like, we did what we needed to do on abortion.

It's banned.

We're kind of getting, still getting a lot of flak for it.

Let's just leave this issue alone.

And that's certainly what we saw play out in that bill.

- Also, meanwhile, a bill banning cities from providing funding to women to travel out of state for abortion care was passed.

Is it safe to assume the governor will sign this bill as well?

- Certainly, this is a bill that has pretty widespread support among Republicans.

It's really targeted at cities like Austin and San Antonio that have tried to use state or taxpayer dollars to support abortion funds and groups that help people travel out of state to get abortions.

This will put an end to that.

It's a pretty narrow restriction, certainly not anything like we've seen in previous sessions in terms of sweeping crackdowns on abortion.

- Now, what about funding healthcare services, like expanding Medicaid or otherwise?

Were any measures passed to provide more or maybe better care to women in a state with the highest rate of people who lack health insurance?

- Certainly we did not see any sweeping changes on this front, right?

Texas remains unwilling to expand Medicaid.

We did see some additional funding almost, you know, as always going towards groups that support, you know, what used to be called the Alternatives to Abortion program, now it's called Thriving Texas Families.

These support families who, or these dollars support families who choose to not terminate and carry a pregnancy to term.

Again, it's a pretty small program.

It's a lot of dollars, but it serves a pretty narrow constituency.

We saw some changes, some additional funding for family planning programs, things like that, but nothing, you know, really widespread or no major change on that front.

- Certainly a memorable session, to say the least, the 89th session of the Texas legislature.

Eleanor, thank you so much for this update on women's health policy.

I hope you and all of our other amazing panelists today can get a much needed break and maybe even a drink after this session.

- Thanks for having me.

(uplifting music) - That's our show.

For more from our reporter panelists, you can view a longer version of today's discussion on the Austin PBS YouTube channel.

And as always, all "Austin InSight" episodes are available for free in the PBS app.

Thanks again for watching.

We'll see you next time.

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) - [Announcer] Support for "Austin InSight" comes from Sally & James Gavin, and also from Suerte, Este and Bar Toti restaurants, bringing Austin together around culinary excellence to celebrate creativity, conservation, and culture in Central Texas.

(bright music)