The big battle this coming year in the Texas Legislature is about whether public agencies will be allowed to lobby for their interests. No one argues that private interests should be banned from advocating for what they want. Only public agencies—like public schools—would be banned because they use public money.
You can see where this is going. Supporters of public institutions would be gagged and censored, but promoters of privatization would be free to wine and dine legislators.
The Dallas Morning News tells both sides of the story here.
The issue, which has been dubbed “taxpayer-funded lobbying” by supporters and “community censorship” by its detractors, is a major divider between traditional Republicans — particularly those in rural areas who support public schools and their local county governments — and hard-line conservatives who see it as wasteful spending by local officials.
Local officials and the organizations that represent them — like the Texas Association for Counties, the Texas Municipal League and the Texas Association of School Boards — say such a lobbying ban would hurt local jurisdictions and make it more expensive for them to advocate for their constituents. They say the ban is nothing more than an effort to silence the voices of local officials.
Democrats and some Republicans banded together to block the bill last year. That vote resulted in House Speaker Dennis Bonnen and one of his top lieutenants, Rep. Dustin Burrows of Lubbock, meeting with conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan to target several fellow Republicans who voted against the bill.
The scandal forced Bonnen into early retirement and Burrows had to resign as chairman of the House Republican Caucus. Nonetheless, the bill’s backers say it will return next session.
Arch conservatives claim that cities, counties, public schools, and other public agencies should not be allowed to use taxpayer money to defend the public interest. Profiteers, buccaneers, entrepreneurs, and raiders of the public treasury would be allowed to lobby with no restraints.
Just one more loathsome effort to cripple the public interest by Governor Abbott and his allies.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
DFER
DFER_News
·Dec 1
What should POTUS-elect
JoeBiden
do for #edpolicy on Day 1? Join us at #EdPalooza tomorrow (Wed) at 4:15 w/
Ed reformers convened yet another panel of people who don’t use or support public schools to set policy for public schools.
It’s led by Jeb Bush with George W Bush as a keynote speaker.
Nothing ever changes in the ed reform echo chamber. For some inexplicable reason the Bush family still run public education policy. Decades pass, the Bush’s leave office, STILL, 50 million public school students and families must comply with the Bush family recipe for public schools.
My youngest child will graduate high school and his entire public school career will have been conducted under the absolute policy dominance of these people, people who were last elected either prior to his birth or shortly after it.
It’s really not fair to public school students that public school advocates have been barred from public education policy. The Bush’s don’t value public schools. In their ideal ideological scenario our schools wouldn’t exist. These are the “advocates” our students get stuck with.
Horrors! 🤮😱🤯
All my hexes live in Texas
As usual Texas Republicans speak with forked tongues and out of both sides of their mouths.
Laws should never be written that favor one entity over another. Clearly these legislators are not interested in what is the best policy/law for ALL who would be impacted by their decisions.
My son-in-law is a teacher in the El Paso ISD. He basically says the Texas education system sucks starting with Governor down to the local district.
Texas has been hit by the libertarian stupid stick. The objective is to put the power in the hands of a few and neutralize labor, government or otherwise. Right to work states like Texas seek to keep labor weak and undefended.
Texas has always been hit by the Libertarian stupid stick.
They created it and then proceeded to flagellate themselves with it.
This issue is a perfect example of how Reps leave a mess in their wake, ‘governing’ via tax-cutting. Banning so-called “tax-funded ‘lobbying’” is justified by claiming these groups “advocate against their constituents’ interests.” For examples of this preposterous claim, Terry Harper, member of the State Republican Executive Committee “said he saw lobbyists hired by local governments advocate against annexation bills last session and the property tax bill that was a Republican priority.”
Per Texas Municipal League, July 2019: “Texas is now one of the only states in the nation that denies both state financial assistance and annexation authority to its cities… Prior to H.B. 347, state leaders realized that annexation was a means of ensuring that residents and businesses outside a city’s corporate limits who benefit from access to the city’s facilities and services share the tax burden associated with constructing and maintaining those facilities and services.”
The 2019 property tax bill is a series of caps, including an even lower 2.5% cap on school taxes. Travis County e.g. [includes Austin] faces a $30million revenue loss by 2024 : ‘There’s only so much effective, efficient and equitable government that we can provide within that shrinking envelope [the state provides us],’” say county officials.
Austin is the largest city in the country without a general public defender’s office (some 80% of their court cases involve indigents). Plans have been in the works for years. A state grant was approved for 50% of the costs. Around the same time, the property tax caps were approved, which will impact the county’s ability to complete it.
This is par for the course with little dan and his anti-public school philosophy. It will not be soon enough when he is finally out of office.
Michael Quinn Sullivan, mentioned in the post, was head of Empower Texans from 2006-2020. Now he’s at a media operation associated with the group. Also reported, Empower Texans is an ally of Texas Right to Life. Sullivan’s Facebook page has lots of quotes from Bible scriptures. Both he and his followers post them.
A report about Empower Texans was written 9-25-2019, “The Money Behind Empower Texans…How Private Equity and the Fossil Fuel Industry are Propping up the Texas Far Right”. The paper is available on-line. Its conclusion states, “…the far-right agenda that
aims to erode women’s rights, LBGTQ rights, civil rights and workers rights …(is facilitated
by the institutional investments of those) such as CALPERS, the University of Michigan and Michigan State….State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio, the Colorado Public Employees Retirement Association, the Denver Employees’ Retirement Plan, the Pennsylvania State Employees Retirement System …and the Church Pension Fund.”
Interesting to see how the pro-public ed rural Republicans respond. We hope our new House Speaker will find a quiet way to shut this bad, dumb bill down. We have two R parties in Texas: conservative R’s mainly in rural communities and far rightwing, libertarian R’s in suburbs. We call the latter “anti-publicans” because they do not believe in the legitimacy of a public. Basically, they want to privatize our schools without anyone pestering them about it. We at Pastors for Texas Children, who receive ZERO tax dollars, will be camping out on their doorstep to block their agenda.
Thanks for the work you are doing to make America a better place for this and future generations.
These deficit hawks are trying to create a population of serfs. Krugman writes here ” Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Debt” – The New York Times
“We’ve discovered some things about how the world works; the rest of the answer is that the world has changed.
It made some sense, nine or 10 years ago, to worry that the financial crisis in Greece was a harbinger of potential debt crises in other countries (although I never bought it). As it turned out, however, the full list of countries that ended up looking like Greece is … Greece. What briefly seemed like a spread of Greek-style problems across southern Europe turned out to be a temporary investor panic, quickly ended by a promise from the European Central Bank that it would lend money to cash-short governments if necessary.In other words, those dire warnings we used to hear (and will soon be hearing again) that America faces imminent disaster once government debt crosses some red line were always misguided. We weren’t and aren’t anywhere close to that kind of crisis, and probably never will be.
But what about the longer term? Doesn’t debt impose a burden on future generations, who will have to spend money paying interest that could have been put to better uses?Here’s where it becomes crucial to realize that the world has changed: Interest rates are much lower than they were in the past, and all indications are that they’ll stay low for years to come. READ MORE ABOUT THE TRUTH”