From Cape Unuse in Austin,
you're watching Texas this
week with actually good, oh.
Good Sunday morning legislation.
Inspired by the deaths of two
Texans came to the floor of the
Texas Legislature and a bipartisan
congressional delegation is trying
to tackle the crisis at the border.
That's where we'll start with
the three things you need to
know in Texas politics. US
Senator John Cornyn is one of
four lawmakers who introduced the
bipartisan Border Solutions Act.
The bill implements strategies to
better handle the surge of migrants
crossing the southern border.
Some of those strategies creating
4 new regional processing centers,
increasing the number of judges,
an asylum teams,
and offering new protections to
unaccompanied children crossing
the border who are released
to sponsors in the US.
Thursday marked the one year
anniversary of the disappearance of
Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillen.
The 20 year old was brutally
murdered by another soldier.
Her remains were found two months after
she was reported missing this week.
Members of the Texas House of
Representatives stood together on
the House floor to remember her
and unanimously pass a resolution
calling on Congress to pass
the IAM Vanessa Guillen Act.
The act reforms the way
the military addresses
****** harassment and misconduct. In
the Texas Senate,
lawmakers unanimously passed bills
written in response to the death
of Houston native George Floyd.
Cindy Bill, 68, by Senator Borris Miles,
requires an officer to intervene
if they see another officer using
excessive force and SB 2212 by
Senator Royce West requires officers
to request medical help and render
aid to someone who is injured while
interacting with an officer this week.
After hours of debate,
the Texas House of Representatives
passed the state budget,
but the state has.
A lot of money that lawmakers
haven't yet decided how to spin.
Ross Ramsey, executive editor and
co-founder of the Texas Tribune,
joins me to break it all down.
This week the House passed the budget.
Talk to us about your overarching
thoughts on this massive
budget that they passed,
so it's a it's
a huge bill. It's really about the
same size as the current budget.
It's right at a quarter
of a trillion dollars,
247 billion right now.
The Senate's at 250 billion.
The two bodies have to go together
and reconcile their differences,
and you know the thing that strikes
me about this budget is that two of
the biggest pieces of spending that
the state will do over the next few years?
Martin, the budget,
the Biden administration and the Trump
administration before it said a lot of
covid relief money in the direction of Texas,
there's about $38 billion out there,
some of its school money,
some of us for cities and counties,
some of it's for the state itself.
None of it's in the budget yet.
And then there's a couple of big
pieces of the state's Medicaid
program that are in flux right now.
The state applied for some federal what
they call a federal waiver an 11:15 waiver.
And it's basically how the state
handles uncompensated care for Medicaid
patients at hospitals around Texas.
They thought they had a 10 year
extension from the Trump administration
and the Biden administration
said you need to reapply it.
You didn't do a couple of things right here,
so that's in play.
And then there's a group in the
legislature that wants to expand
Medicaid and this would bring
insurance to about a million Texans
who are currently not insured.
It's a matching program,
so the state puts down a dime and
gets back a dollar in benefits.
But Republicans have had reservations
about this program since it started
under the Affordable Care Act and.
The state hasn't gotten past those yet.
Both of those things are in play.
It's billions and billions of dollars.
Also not in the budget,
so
let's chat about that just a little
more 'cause I want to really
hone in on some of those things.
The money that came down the
covid relief money for schools
for hospitals WHI have it.
We spent that money yet.
There's a question of who should
spend it and how they should spend it.
So one argument is that this money should
go to the school districts in the state
there's between 11 and 1200 of them,
and that they should get to
work first on learning loss.
This is the distance between what
kids would have learned if we hadn't
had all these pandemic disruptions
and what they have learned with work.
You know, learning from home and
all of those kinds of things first,
you gotta catch the kids up.
The schools want to get on that
starting in summer school,
they want money to do that.
And the Biden administration money
is what they're talking about.
The state is sort of looking at
this and saying we want to see
what strings are attached to this
before we spend any of it.
And we also wonder if this wouldn't
work better if we had a learning
loss program that was signed up for
by the Texas Education Agency and
then handed to the school districts.
So the money would flow through the state.
That way there's only five weeks left
in the session and the Legislature
wants to have its fingers on that money.
The governor's office in that EA
want their hands on the money.
The school districts want the money.
We've got a little bit
of a debate. Let's talk about that.
115 A waiver, an Medicaid,
and so we have tons of people
moving to Texas every day,
so some of them may not be familiar
with the fact that Texas is one
of a dozen states that have not
expanded Medicaid and talk to
us about some of the reason why
Conservatives are against the
idea of expanding Medicaid. OK,
so there are two issues here.
One of them is Medicaid expansion.
And as you say, the Conservatives in the
state from Rick Perry on have been very,
very leery of taking this money.
In the federal government,
they didn't want to create a new entitlement.
They think it has strings attached
that will obligate the state at the
federal government were to pull out.
They don't.
They don't think that taxpayers
should be paying for this thing an
at the beginning of the argument.
A lot of states weren't in
its most states weren't in it,
but now we're to a point where all
but twelve states, including Texas,
have expanded their Medicaid program,
including some really conservative
states like Missouri,
Arkansas and Idaho.
But Texas is kind of holding
its ground on this.
It's a program it's designed to insure the
uninsured and get them into health plans.
So that first of all, their insurance.
They have insurance.
Second of all that they get
preventative care instead of waiting
until they need emergency care,
which is more expensive.
And they also put a load on hospitals
because they're coming in for free care.
The 11:15 waiver is a program that's
already in place in Medicaid and
that Texas takes advantage of,
and it basically they.
The reason it's a waiver is there's
a set of federal laws in the states
can apply for customized pieces
in the state of Texas has one.
It's a big fat document like that.
They are asking for a waiver
from the 11:15 program.
The Biden administration says they didn't
do all of the things they needed to do,
including holding public hearings and
that if they go like they're going,
our current waiver will expire.
In September of 2022.
So we've got time to deal with it,
but we've got these two issues.
The waiver takes care of uncompensated
care for hospitals and some other things.
The Medicaid expansion, if we had it,
would ensure some of the Texans
who are not insured now, Texas.
The nation,
both in the number of uninsured and
the percentage of the population
that is uninsured.
It's complicated,
but
it's really important there.
Reason why you know I'm taking
this in bites in steps.
The reason why I want to talk
about this is because there was an
amendment to the budget when the
House was debating that kind of opened
the door to Medicaid expansion,
and there was so much hope
that this could actually pass.
There was the thought that it
had enough support to pass that
ended up failing, right?
Sorry to spoil it, it didn't.
It didn't end up passing,
but talk to us about what happened.
So
there's a piece of legislation
that separate from the budget that
would expand the state's Medicaid
program and the people bringing that.
It's mostly Democrats, but they've got
enough Republicans signed on that.
That piece of legislation actually
has a majority of the Texas
House signed on as cosponsors,
so if the IF that gets out of committee,
presumably it would pass on the
floor because everybody with their
name on it would vote for it.
In the meantime, because that's
stuck in committee Garnett Coleman,
Democrat from Houston,
put up an amendment to the budget
that basically would have got
the state rolling Tord Medicaid
expansion program of a kind,
and it got voted down.
And, as it turned out,
seven or all,
but one of the Republicans who have signed
on to Medicaid expansion as a separate bill,
voted against it as a piece of the budget.
It's a set back for those supporters,
but that issue isn't dead yet.
So
when we talk about the budget,
you know, obviously, the House.
Spend all that time spent
almost hours going through.
You know nearly 240 pre filed amendments to,
you know on the floor and now
everything that they work for
those two behind closed doors
to the conference committee is
what's going to happen next.
Tell us about the next
steps so the Senate passed
a bill a little bit earlier.
It was the Senate's turn to go first.
The Senate passed a bill
a little bit earlier.
The house passes a bill and they basically
go into room to reconcile their differences.
The house will appoint.
Five of its members.
The Senate, will appoint five of its members.
That's called a conference committee.
They'll go in and bang this out.
As you say, it's mostly behind closed doors.
It's supposed to be open.
Open in the Covid age is
a little bit different,
but even when we don't have
a pandemic going on,
a lot of this gets settled in the
backroom and back hallways and they
basically go line by line through
the budget and say you have this.
We have that.
What do you want to do?
You know,
scissor paper,
rocks or however they want to do it as
as we pointed out in the first part of this,
there are some big differences
to settle and there are some
big issues that are going to
have to be part of the budget
conversation that aren't yet there.
So that's going to be kind
of interesting over the next
month. You can read more about the
budget the House passed at kview.com.
That's Texas this week.