Here is some good news: “State Rep. Dan Huberty, a Houston Republican and chairman of the House Public Education Committee, said Tuesday morning that school choice legislation has no path forward in the House during the current legislative session.”

The Texas Senate, under the fat thumb of former radio talk show host Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, is gungho for vouchers. Patrick is also pushing a bathroom bill, modeled on North Carolina’s HB 2, to keep transgender girls or boys out of the bathroom of their choice. He has not suggested who will be in charge of monitoring genitalia in every public bathroom.

The Texas House of Representatives is not as eager to pass voucher legislation as the state senate. . The voucher bills so dear to Dan Patrick may not even get out of committee in the House.

This is what the Texas Tribune says:

State Rep. Dan Huberty, a Houston Republican and chairman of the House Public Education Committee, said Tuesday morning that school choice legislation has no path forward in the House during the current legislative session.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has called Senate Bill 3 one of his top priorities. The bill would create two separate public programs to subsidize private school tuition and homeschooling, including one giving parents debit cards backed by taxpayer money.

“Yes, this is dead to you as an issue?” Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith asked Huberty as a Tribune event Tuesday morning.

“I believe so, yes,” Huberty said.

School choice advocates are having a hissy fit and they want to censure Rep. Huberty.

School choice is an issue that divides Republicans; battle lines are often drawn more along rural-urban lines than party lines. Last session, the House did not take up the leading private school choice bill for a vote. In the past couple of months, Patrick has called on the House to at least take a vote on this session’s Senate Bill 3, which would create two public programs subsidizing families’ private school tuition and homeschooling expenses.

“We want a vote up or down in the Senate and in the House this session on school choice. It’s easy to kill a bill when no one gets to vote on it,” he said at January’s “National School Choice Week” rally.

On a talk radio show Monday, Patrick said the school choice bill would have the 76 votes needed to pass in the House if it made it out of committee.

Smith asked Huberty on Tuesday to weigh in on Patrick’s comments: “Do you believe you can get the 76 in the House on the floor if you let this go out of committee?”

“Your responsibility as chairman is to protect your membership,” Huberty replied.

When Smith asked what Huberty was protecting them from, Huberty said, “We’ve had a vote count over many sessions about where these numbers lie. I look at the committee and I know where the membership is on this particular issue and where we stand. Why don’t we focus on the things that we can do?”

We can thank House Speaker Joe Straus (R-San Antonio) for selecting Rep. Dan Huberty as the new chair of the House Committee on Public Education. The retiring chair, Jimmie Don Aycock (R-Killeen) was a supporter of public schools, and so is Rep. Huberty.

Huberty understands that no one ever got criticized for a bill that never made it out of committee. Rep. Huberty is protecting his fellow legislators from the wrath of the voters by strangling the voucher bills in committee.

Texans are divided about vouchers. A large association of home schoolers called Texans for Homeschool Freedom oppose vouchers, because they fear that government money will be followed by mandates about textbooks and testing, and they will lose the freedom they treasure.

Ross Ramsey, writing for the Texas Tribune, warns that the battle is far from over:

Elected officials who want vouchers have never been able to get them through the Texas Legislature. And if Huberty holds, it’s probably not going to happen in 2017, either.

One of those truisms borne of experience: Nothing is dead in the Texas Legislature while lawmakers are still in session. Resurrection is part of the game.

Vouchers could turn up as an amendment to another education bill, to legislation that rewires funding for public schools, to anything that has a similar enough subject to justify that sort of an attachment.

It would be weird, but Straus could always decide to send the vouchers bill somewhere other than Huberty’s committee for consideration. The members of the House could express an overwhelming change of heart and demand the opportunity to bring vouchers to the floor for a vote — either to pass it along to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has said he would sign such a bill, or to kill it outright to make a statement.