Rules of the House

The first rule is obviously not to throw a football in the House. Second is know who you are pairing your vote with.

The Statesman story today about Jim Pitts switching his vote on the tax bill does a good job of making conspiracy theorist bloggers (like myself) think that it was all a big ploy by Speaker Craddick to get his crazy-ass HB 3 through the House.

What I think is the bigger question that is kinda being skipped over in this story is why are any legislators absent right now?

I can understand that things come up and they have lives outside of the Lege. But the whole reason why these people are here for the Special Session is to pass legislation to finance our schools. I would think that they would try to make the time to be in Austin for that vote.

As my 8th grade Social Studies teacher Mr. Farmer would say, "You aren't putting forth the effort." And we have a hard deadline of Aug. 1 to get this done or the state doesn't get any money to pay for school from its creditors.