AUSTIN (Nexstar) – The House of Representatives is facing an Oct. 1 deadline to pass a spending bill and avoid a government shutdown with the election only weeks away. House Speaker Mike Johnson canceled a vote Wednesday that would have combined a temporary spending bill with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act due to doubts on whether it could pass.
The SAVE Act would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and is backed by former President Donald Trump and opposed by Democrats.
Other concerns include the length of a stopgap bill which could force the new president to focus on a spending bill quickly after taking office in January.
Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, voted for the SAVE act but acknowledges that a continuing resolution with the act wouldn’t pass the Senate.
“Under federal law you have to be a legal citizen to vote and [the SAVE Act] tries to enforce that at the state level,” McCaul said. “There’s a lot of loss of faith in our elections and something like this I think would give people more confidence.”
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said the SAVE Act would unnecessarily disrupt the upcoming election.
“It does not apply just to immigrants. It applies to all of us. If you don’t have your birth certificate, if you don’t have a passport, it’s not good enough to use the REAL ID that gets you through airport security, you won’t be able to vote,” Doggett said.
He believes there is no room for compromise on the act.
“Weeks before the election is supposed to begin, that will cause chaos, and maybe that’s what the objective is,” he said.
Doggett said that the House needs to pass a continuing resolution, but that that is not an ideal solution.
“The disadvantage of a continuing resolution is it’s putting in place last year’s funding without any adjustments for needs at the Defense Department or elsewhere,” Doggett explained. He blamed Republicans for failing to pass appropriations bills, setting up the need for a continuing resolution.
Doggett is hopeful that the Senate will pass a so-called clean continuing resolution, without other legislation attached and Speaker Johnson will allow the House to vote on it. Democrats have a 51 – 49 majority in the Senate.
“Some feel it’s to their advantage to threaten to shut down everything in order to get their way, and we’ve had one after another,” Doggett said. “This particular one is really ridiculous.”
McCaul also pushed back at the potential for a shutdown.
“I’ve never been a fan of that because that doesn’t accomplish anything,” he told reporters in Washington. “At the end of the day, it hurts our military more than anything,” McCaul added.
The congressman chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. With two decades on Capitol Hill, he’s been through several shut down standoffs before.
“I’ve been doing this for 10 terms and I’ve seen this movie before,” McCaul said.
One difference this time is the uncertainty of who will be in the White House. Some Republicans are pushing for a CR that lasts until after next year’s Presidential inauguration, with the hope that Trump wins the election. Others want the CR to expire before lawmakers leave Washington for the holidays. Which version, if any, will move forward is unclear.
“I don’t have a crystal ball,” McCaul said.
Harris and Trump open to diverse forms of energy, which could boost business in Texas
Energy sparked some of the most contentious moments of the presidential debate Tuesday night, but the candidates may have found more agreement than expected.
Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump expressed support for both fossil fuels and renewable energy, proposing a more nuanced stance that blurs the stereotypical partisan lines.
While Trump claimed Harris would harm oil and gas, Harris was adamant she will support the industry. Meanwhile, Trump expressed reserved support for solar energy.
“I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president United States, and in fact, I was the tie breaking vote on the inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” Harris said.
“If she won the election, the day after that election they’ll go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead. Fossil fuel will be dead. We’ll go back to windmills, and we’ll go back to solar, where they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out. You ever see a solar plant? By the way, I’m a big fan of solar,” Trump said.
Texas is home to more than one in 10 of American energy workers, and leads the nation in both oil and gas and wind production. In fact, Texas produces nearly as much renewable energy as it does natural gas.
“We need more solar. We need more batteries. We need more natural gas. We need geothermal… it’s all of the above and below,” said Glenn Hamer, Texas Association of Business CEO. “We want to have our cake and eat it too.”
Hamer said “there is no comparison” between the candidates’ records on energy — he supports the Trump administration’s energy policies, citing the Biden administration’s ban on liquid natural gas exports as a particularly harmful policy to the Texas economy.
However, he hopes a second Trump administration would continue Biden’s support for clean energy.
“We want to make sure that the that the promotion on clean energy technologies, and also things like hydrogen development and carbon sequestration, is continued,” Hamer said.
Investors are pouring money into all forms of Texas energy with a bias for profit over politics. They say the market, not politicians, should influence which sectors win and lose.
“The market allows us through signals that we call prices, to let us know what it wants,” said Vijay Marolia, Regal Point Capital’s chief investment officer. “To ignore or to artificially influence a natural mechanism like a price signal is doing everybody a disservice.”
Closing Texas’ mental health care gap a matter of ‘life and death’
During this Suicide Prevention Month, Texas leaders in psychology research and licensing are stressing the dire gaps in mental health care in nearly every corner of the state.
“We all know somebody who’s been touched by suicide or substance abuse,” said John Bielamowicz, Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists chair. “The ability for somebody to have access to mental health care is often the difference of life and death.”
Texas ranks last in access to mental health services, according to a 2023 Forbes study that evaluated states on the availability of mental health services and the barrier to accessing those services. The federal government found that 246 of Texas’ 254 counties (97%) are underserved in mental health needs. There are 137 counties with no psychologists at all and 32 counties that have just one.
Yet, the board expressed concerns in Thursday’s hearing that additional requirements and bureaucratic barriers could make it harder to license more psychologists. Bielamowicz explained the nation’s only psychology licensing exam company is now requiring Texas to adopt an additional test at a “tremendous” cost.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen such a threat to our ability to license psychologists in this state,” he said. “We don’t need to be making the barriers higher and harder in this profession.”
Just across the street from the board, Dell Medical School is working to recruit the psychologists of the future and get them into underserved communities. Their Integrated Behavioral Health Scholars Program serves to “build a diverse and culturally responsive behavioral health workforce with expertise in delivering integrated behavioral care, particularly to underserved Texans.”
“Texas is a proud state, and we should not rank 50th in anything,” said Dr. Lloyd Berg, Chief of Dell Medical School’s Division of Psychology. “It’s incumbent on us as a society to speak to our state representatives about understanding, emphasizing, and funding the mental health concerns that we have as a state.”
Last year, the legislature invested a historic $11 billion to build 17 more hospitals across Texas, focusing on rural areas. Rural mental health care made Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s list of top priorities. Berg said more should be done next year.
“Texas is already leading the nation in providing more access to child behavioral health and mental health services,” he said. “One of the things that the State of Texas and our legislature could do could be to build upon these initiatives to provide this access to a greater segment of our population.”
Next week, Bielamowicz will testify on behalf of the board at the Texas Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee, which will consider legislation relating to children’s mental health and access to healthcare.
“We understand and see very acutely the shortage that we have in access to care, and we’re doing everything we can to address that shortage and to be part of that solution,” he said.
Lawmakers craft fixes to crime victims fund
Lawmakers announced reforms to the Office of Attorney General’s Crime Victims’ Compensation program and new performance measurements that would give lawmakers a more accurate picture of how fast, or slow, victims receive assistance, according to testimony at a House Appropriations Committee hearing Tuesday.
State officials are crafting the changes after multiple KXAN investigations into the CVC program. KXAN was the first to expose how skewed measurements of victim payments were submitted to lawmakers and, for years, made it appear victims were being paid far faster than reality.
“We need to get to some actual performance measures that mean something,” Deputy Attorney General Josh Reno told representatives at the hearing.
The warped performance measurements have been caused by a formula that averages victim claims – which were recently taking nearly eight months on average – with sexual assault examination claims that are paid directly to health care providers in a few days.
By averaging the two different payments together, the measurement made it appear victims were being awarded claims in less than 60 days in April. Meanwhile, in the same timeframe, internal records showed victims were actually waiting an average of 230 days for a first payment in that timeframe, according to data obtained by KXAN through the Texas Public Information Act.
The Appropriations Committee was tasked with reviewing the CVC program’s operation ahead of the 2025 legislative session. The CVC program reimburses victims and close family members for crime-related expenses like hospital bills, therapy, lost wages, funerals and more.
Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, said the state will set two new and separate benchmarks: 90 days for awarding a victim claim and seven days for a sexual assault claim.
Lane Brown, the CVC’s new division chief since May, acknowledged mixing data made it inaccurate.
The skewed measurements “make it really hard to do what I’m here to do, which is look for opportunities for improvement,” Brown said at the hearing. “If those (numbers) are all jumbled into the same bucket then it is hard to see where the actual truth lies.”
The two types of payments will be separated so lawmakers can get a clear picture of how long it takes for victims to get a first payment. That change is expected to be included in the General Appropriations Act, and will go into effect next September, if approved by the Legislature.
Rep. Mary Gonzalez, D-Clint, vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, told KXAN in 2023 the performance measurements are supposed to help lawmakers make funding decisions.
“This data is critical,” she previously said. “This is exactly the type of information we use to decide how much money gets appropriated; how much staff is needed.”
KXAN has interviewed numerous victims over the past two years who have complained of extended wait times and obstacles to getting payments.
Terry Reager, a victim of a January 2022 parking lot robbery in Austin, waited more than six months for assistance from CVC. She struggled with the program’s website and application process.
“What they are putting me through is very traumatic, and there’s never any closure to it,” Reager told KXAN over the summer. “There’s never a feeling that somebody is advocating for me and moving forward with this.”
Steven Heller, a victim of an attempted hit and run on New Year’s Day of 2023 in Pflugerville, told KXAN he waited over half a year to get approved for help with medical bills. Heller was riding his bicycle when he was sideswiped by a convicted felon fleeing police in a stolen car.
Reno and Brown told lawmakers the program has been making headway on a backlog of claims, and they expect wait times for victims to improve.
The department is now nearly fully staffed, after losing dozens of employees — including senior staff — during and after the COVID lockdowns. The CVC officials said they are also retaining staff with higher wages, a new building location downtown and revamped job titles.
“This is a group of people that care about what they do,” Reno said about his CVC employees. “We know this program is not without its faults.”
The CVC program’s impact is vast. In fiscal year 2023, victims filed nearly 42,000 applications and received more than $58.7 million to aid crime victims, according to an annual report.
That $58 million in disbursements was $17.6 million less than forecast, due to “persistent staffing shortages and loss of key management,” according to CVC reports submitted to the Budget Board.