(C) Texas Tribune This story was originally published by Texas Tribune and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The Blast - May 2, 2025 [1] ['The Texas Tribune'] Date: 2025-05 1 day until Election Day for local elections 13 days until the House bill deadline 31 days until sine die That makes next week a critical week for getting members’ legislation to the floor. Those bills need to get heard in time to get reported out by the following Monday. House committees have 10 days to vote out House bills. We’re talking legislation with an “H” in front of it: HBs and HJRs. The anti-leadership conservatives should also be happy to see these bills moving. However, their focus right now will be on House bills. Patrick has been urging the House to take action on his list of priorities, so he’ll likely be happy to see at least seven of his 40 moving next week. There’s also Senate Bill 10 , the Ten Commandments bill , and Senate Bill 24 , the “horrors of communism” bill, which Buckley’s Public Education Committee reported favorably yesterday. Senate Bill 37 , which would define the role of college and university faculty senates, including instructing them to crack down on curricula that opponents would commonly classify as critical race theory, will be up in the House Higher Education Committee on Tuesday. Senate Bill 34 , on wildfire response, is scheduled for a hearing on Monday in State Affairs. Senate Bill 28 , banning lottery couriers, is scheduled for a hearing on Monday in former Speaker Dade Phelan ’s Licensing and Administrative Procedures Committee. Senate Bill 23 , which would raise the homestead exemption for seniors even further, is also up on Monday. The Senate’s homestead exemption plan, Senate Bill 4 and Senate Joint Resolution 2 , will go before the House Ways and Means Committee on Monday. On top of SB 13 and SB 18, there are five Patrick priority bills scheduled for hearings next week: Notably, a couple of the newly moving bills are Senate priorities, as designated by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick . Other Patrick priorities are moving, too. Buckley yesterday also scheduled Fort Worth Rep. Nate Schatzline ’s House Bill 1655 for the hearing on Tuesday. The second-term leadership critic’s bill would cut funding to public schools that don’t have a policy preventing employees from helping a kid come out as trans. Senate Bill 269 , a Luther-backed bill, is scheduled for a hearing on Monday. The bill would mandate the reporting of “vaccine injuries” of experimental drugs and vaccines to national databases. On Wednesday evening, less than 24 hours before the hardliners repeatedly named State Affairs Committee Chair Ken King , R-Canadian, as a roadblock to their priorities, King’s committee scheduled Senate Bill 18 for a hearing on Monday. That bill would ban drag story hour events at public libraries. Yesterday evening, following the hardliners’ press event, Chair Brad Buckley , R-Salado, scheduled Senate Bill 13 for a hearing on Tuesday in the House Public Education Committee. SB 13 would ban sexually explicit books from school libraries. The hearing will come more than a month after the Senate passed the bill. Additionally, four of the bills mentioned yesterday are scheduled for House committee hearings next week. It looks like Leach kept his promise. “If that happens, it will be a great step toward giving Texans a major victory this session,” Luther said in the morning. House Bill 3441 , by anti-leadership freshman Rep. Shelley Luther , R-Tom Bean, passed the committee 8-1, nearly a full month after it was first heard in the Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence Committee. The bill would make vaccine manufacturers liable for “vaccine injuries.” Luther said Chair Jeff Leach , R-Allen, told her he would put the bill to a vote, some potential goodwill from leadership. Senate Bill 1470 unanimously passed the House Elections Committee, chaired by Matt Shaheen , R-Plano. The voter roll clean up bill would hand driver’s license data to the secretary of state to check registered voters against the lists of people whose addresses have changed, who aren’t qualified to vote or who are registered to vote in another state. Yesterday, House committees approved two of the bills, clearing the path for them to get scheduled for consideration on the House floor. Yesterday morning, nearly a dozen hard-right conservatives in the Texas House listed just some of the bills they’re demanding that leadership let through the process. Now, it appears that several of those bills are indeed moving. The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one . BRIAN HARRISON’S TIMELY A&M LETTER State Rep. Brain Harrison requested on Friday a federal investigation of his alma mater, Texas A&M University, saying it is still offering courses with diversity, equity and inclusion elements and engaging in inappropriate student recruitment. Three months ago, Texas A&M President Mark A. Welsh III wrote a letter to Harrison chastising him for taking to social media to falsely accuse the flagship of violating the state’s ban on DEI. Welsh pointed out that courses and student recruitment were exempt from the ban. The Midlothian Republican never responded. After the Texas Tribune sent an open records request to Harrison’s office for a copy of Welsh’s letter a month ago, Harrison posted the letter to social media Friday and wrote that he was asking the Trump Administration to investigate the school. “His preposterous defense of this egregious discrimination is that the Texas Legislature has not explicitly banned it,” Harrison wrote to Sean Keveney, the acting general counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “I have legislation to do so, but universities should not have to be told by the legislature not to engage in discrimination.” Harrison served as the chief of staff at HHS prior to being elected to the House. Keveney is a member of a federal task force charged with combating discrimination at college campuses. Harrison’s bills — one of which would eliminate coursework and student recruitment as exemptions to the DEI ban and another that would prohibit public universities from offering programs or courses in LGBTQ or DEI studies — have not been heard in the House Higher Ed Committee. Welsh has said Texas A&M does not discriminate. “We follow the law. We hire, promote, pay and award employees based on merit and performance. We admit students based on merit, performance and proven potential,” Welsh wrote. And the State Auditor’s Office has backed him up. Harrison said in a phone interview with the Texas Tribune on Friday afternoon that he’s met and talked with many Texas A&M officials and is happy to talk to Welsh, too, but what would make him happier is if Texas A&M and all universities stopped engaging in DEI or lost their funding. He said he had been planning to call for Texas A&M to be investigated for a while. “Today was just the day we got it done,” Harrison said. HHS declined to comment. Welsh is the latest person to criticize Harrison’s behavior this session. Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows supported a water development board chair after Harrison’s questions to her during a budget hearing drove her to tears. Earlier this week, Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, accused Harrison of lying to Texans for attention when he was laying out a bill before the House Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence Committee. [END] --- [1] Url: https://thetexastribune.beehiiv.com/p/the-blast-may-2-2025-f320a599aa3b41d8 Published and (C) by Texas Tribune Content appears here under this condition or license: Used with Permission: https://www.texastribune.org/republishing-guidelines/. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/texastribune/