| The day after far right wing yelled at government for spending their taxes, the Texas House will debate a massive supplemental appropriation. The fiscal note on the item is $3,298,596,795. Yep, that is $3.3 billion dollars according to the fiscal note.
As Jason Embry points out, this will be the single most important vote on the House floor to date (of course, the House is voting on Senate Bill 1, a.k.a the budget, tomorrow).
The highlights on the bill include:
The bill includes more than $3 billion in federal stimulus dollars, including $1.6 billion for Medicaid, $758 million for education and $662 million for transportation. The bill also includes $300 million in general revenue for the UT Medical Branch at Galveston and more than $160 million for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
The House convenes at 10 a.m. today and there are only 5 bills on the floor today. House Bill 4586, the supplemental appropriation, will take the bulk of the time.
To read everything the bill is intended to do, read the House Bill analysis here, and please feel free to watch the debate here and keep tabs of the debate in the comments.
It will be interesting to see if the far right votes against this bill or if yesterday was just a press stunt as so many have speculated.
Update: From Quorum Report:
The "No" votes were Republicans Warren Chisum of Pampa, Wayne Christian of Tyler, Joe Crabb of Atascocita, Charlie Howard of Sugar Land and Sid Miller of Stephenville.
None of these elected were involved in yesterdays press stunt. In addition, none of the House members involved in the press stunt yesterday voted against using federal money in Texas. Interesting... |
