The Voter ID bill passed by a House committee Monday afternoon probably can't win a majority of the full House, according to its author. Rep. Todd Smith, R-Euless, waited until close to the deadline to pass the Senate's version of the Voter ID legislation, after trying for weeks to win a compromise on a version that's acceptable to moderates in the House. He says he and others will offer amendments when the bill gets to the floor — probably next week. And he says the bill won't pass unless it's acceptable to the moderates in the House, since their votes will likely make the difference in a legislative body that's almost evenly split on partisan lines. Smith's Elections Committee voted 5-4 for the same bill passed earlier by the state Senate. The vote didn't break exactly along party lines, with Democrat Joe Heflin, D-Crosby, voting in favor (with four Republicans) and Republican Dennis Bonnen of Angleton voting, with three Democrats, against it. Heflin said he wanted to move the bill along to the full House, but wasn't expressing his support of the idea (he voted against similar legislation two years ago). And Bonnen said he wanted a much tougher version than the committee approved. He'll offer a complete rewrite when the bill gets to the floor. And, he said, he'd have voted in favor of the bill had Heflin not tilted the scales without him. He wanted to register displeasure, he said, but didn't want to kill the bill. Smith tried to win support for a photo ID bill that would let voters substitute two non-picture IDs from an approved list of documents. Bonnen and other conservative Republicans are pushing for a bill that would count votes of people with picture IDs while putting the votes of those with other identification in a "provisional" vote stack, to be counted only if there are enough provisional votes to swing an election.

The Governor's race hasn't officially caught fire, but sparks are already flying in the blogosphere over U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's strategy and polls showing her neck-and-neck with incumbent Gov. Rick Perry. Bloggers are also talking about voter photo identification, other folks who've run for political office and bills going through the Lege. At the end: Tequila!

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Primary Data

Burnt Orange Report heard that Houston Mayor Bill White said Hutchison told him "she'll resign in a fashion that will lead to a May 2010 special election." [ed.—That's at least three layers of hearsay.] Later, several people told Burnt Orange that White's been saying the same thing since January.

The Burnt Orange post got the Houston Chronicle's Texas Politics to asking around, and Hutchison's spokesman Hans Klingler gave them two statements, one saying she "will resign her seat" and one saying she "may." PoliTex, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's blog, says the whole thing seems to be a "misunderstanding."

Trail Blazers, the Dallas Morning News's blog, says the question is not if Hutchison will resign, but when. Off the Kuff doesn't think Hutchison is going to give up her seat, partly "because I firmly believe in the principle that nobody knows what the hell KBH is going to do."

Results from a recent survey by Rasmussen are pretty close to what Perry's pollster Mike Baselice has been saying, that the Perry-Hutchison contest is pretty close. "He wiped out her early lead with nothing but earned media," says BurkaBlog, adding that the poll numbers shouldn't be a game-changer for the Hutchison campaign.

Hutchison's pollster says the results of Perry's poll are "propaganda," according to Texas Politics. Meanwhile, the Austin American-Statesman's Postcards has a back-and-forth from the two camps. And here's Trail Blazers's take on the survey.

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Wizards of ID

KVUE's Political Junkie has a letter from high-ranking House Democrats demanding another public hearing on voter photo identification. The letter includes a legal memo "saying that without a public hearing/vetting of the bill, it will more likely "doom" whatever passes the legislature when the bill goes before the U.S. Justice Department for preclearance" (assuming the Voting Rights Act still applies). Junkie also has a breakdown of the latest incarnation of the bill in the House.

KUT's Notes from the Lege interviewed House Elections chair Todd Smith, R-Euless, who's "a little frustrated" but says he's willing to have the extra hearing if there's enough time.

Republican Reps. Linda Harper Brown and Betty Brown are blocking a consensus bill, says newsdesk, the Austin Chronicle's blog. The El Paso Times's Vaqueros & Wonkeros has a list of principles being touted by anti-photo ID groups. And here's the view from the Postcards.

[eds. note: The committee zipped past the blogs, voting 5-4 to send the Senate's version of Voter ID along to the full House.]

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Also-Runs

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Schieffer spoke with reporters after an event at an Austin beer garden, and Texas Politics had a microphone. Meanwhile, Dos Centavos has videos of Cinco de Mayo speakers, including former Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rick Noriega.

According to Greg's Opinion, the next round of redistricting will probably give the GOP a few more seats in the short term, but the war will be won by Democrats, who claim the favor of demographic trends. But the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential doesn't bother to mention Texas in its lineup of 2010 U.S. Senate races.

Texas Watchdog is promising to post every state legislators' ethics forms for the year 2008. They haven't put them all in one convenient location yet, but eager beavers can look at what they've got here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

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Killing Floor

Kuff says legalized poker is "off the calendar and possibly officially dead for the session." A Keyboard and a .45 is watching the clock tick on firearms-related legislation, including the campus carry bill. And Blue Dot Blues is keeping readers up to speed on the legislation Travis County Republicans like and dislike.

Capitol Annex is following legislation that would extend the journalist shield law to bloggers. Mike Falick's Blog posts the blogger's testimony on HB 1281 about "adult responsibility education." And Williamson Republic has video of Rep. Dan Gattis, R-Georgetown, talking about the budget.

The all-male Texas House General Investigating & Ethics Committee had a meeting at an exotic game ranch in Buda. Musings wonders what they were doing there.

Burka says the House was "out of control Thursday during the debate on the TxDOT Sunset bill." Rep. Carl Isett, R-Lubbock, says, "If you think this was a wild process, wait until the insurance bills [get] the floor and there's real money at stake."

NewspaperTree.com Blog reports on discord among El Paso state legislators, here and here. And Vaqueros has a letter from Rep. Norma Chavez, D-El Paso, to Calendars chair Brian McCall, R-Plano, saying she's on board with the rest of her hometown delegation on a local ethics bill.

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Mishmash

Those needing help with the Texas Public Information Act can get assistance from Watchdog. The Houston Chronicle's Texas on the Potomac has a clearinghouse for profiles they've been doing on Texas congressmen and senators. In the bloggers' spare time, they took a trip to Mexico and did a special report on tequila.

Word on the street is that Lynne Cheney, wife of the former vice president, could be nominated for a social studies curriculum board for Texas schools, according to Annex.

Texas state school board chair Don McLeroy is down, but is he really out? TFN Insider says McLeroy and a lobbyist have been making the rounds in the Senate. Meanwhile, UrbanGrounds was relieved of his misapprehension that Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, is a Republican. And A film about a self-taught lawyer won an award from the American Bar Association, reports Tex Parte Blog.

The Houston Press's Hairballs wins Headline of the Week award for a post related to the NBA playoffs, titled, "Five Ways to Fake Your Way Through a Rockets Conversation."

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This edition of Out There was compiled and written by Patrick Brendel, who hails from Victoria but is semi-settled in Austin. We cherry-pick the state's political blogs each week, looking for news, info, gossip, and new jokes. The opinions here belong (mostly) to the bloggers, and we're including their links so you can hunt them down if you wish. Our blogroll — the list of Texas blogs we watch — is on our links page, and if you know of a Texas political blog that ought to be on it, just shoot us a note. Please send comments, suggestions, gripes or retorts to Texas Weekly editor Ross Ramsey.

Robert Scott, the state education commissioner, says the budget being finalized by lawmakers would "result in shortages in textbooks for Texas students." Scott, in a letter to state leaders distributed to the press by textbook company representatives, says a contemplated 25 percent reduction in what his agency sought — $547.4 million — translates into a million fewer literature and English language arts texts. He's asking for smaller cuts in the letter, addressed to Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Speaker Joe Straus and attached below. Lawmakers working on the budget say — without attaching their names — that the funding cuts are based in part on their believe that the textbooks are overpriced. Some want the textbook companies to offer the state a better deal — thus, the cuts in what Scott requested.

Remember the cartoons where the sheepdog and the coyote would meet at the time clock every morning, say hello, ask about the families, punch in, harass each other all day, then greet each other pleasantly as they punched out for the day?

That's not a bad metaphor for lawmakers right now. There's some time pressure, but they're in pretty good humor.

The first big deadline slipped by this week, with the House working on House bills for the last time this session. The good news, if you measure by volume, is that lawmakers chewed through almost eight pages of the agenda on the deadline day, considering dozens of bills in their march toward midnight. The good news, if you measure by restraint, is that that agenda had 17 more pages and the House left two thirds of those bills in the white paper recycle bin.

The clock killed a lot of House bills, to be sure, but a lot of the next week will involve resurrection and reincarnation, with ideas that appear dead suddenly finding new life attached to Senate bills and conference committee reports.

Dr. Frankenstein did his big project at a time like this.

Senate bills have to clear their House committees during the week ahead and have to win initial approval by midnight on Tuesday, May 26 (so much for your Memorial Day weekend). That'll make supplicants of senators. And everyone in the Lege and the lobby will be trying to find ways to graft their choice issues onto the increasingly scarce pieces of viable legislation.

The budget is still out there, and the deadline by which businesses must pay their corporate franchise taxes is nigh (May 15). That's usually an opportunity for a comptroller to adjust the official estimate of revenue that'll be available for the next two years. But Susan Combs plans no changes to the estimates she made at the beginning of the session. Revenue, for budgeting purposes, is locked down. And the House and Senate conferees are closing up their work, writing in money for CHIP expansion, finding middle ground on Medicaid funding and settling other differences.

Expect fights over the voter ID bill and the sunset legislation for the Texas Department of Insurance, first in the House and, potentially, when the House's work gets to the Senate for inspection. Voter ID is the closest you'll get to a party-line fight this session — more on that in a moment. And the insurance bill will divide partly on party lines, partly on business/consumer lines, partly on tort reform/trial lawyer lines.

The list of agencies with unfinished sunset bills is shrinking, but big ones remain: insurance, transportation, the state police, and racing all still remain.

Another, quieter deadline will pass at mid-week: It will be too late for lawmakers to override anything vetoed by Gov. Rick Perry after that point. And the governor's veto power continues for another 20 days after the session ends.

The House Calendars Committee is still sitting on an unemployment Insurance bill that would uncork $556 million in federal stimulus money.

That measure got through the Senate but chills the heart of Gov. Rick Perry, who says the requirements are too costly. Add to the debate a district-by-district analysis of the bill from the Center for Public Policy Priorities. In HD-22, represented by bill sponsor Joe Deshotel, D-Beaumont, for instance, the stimulus would add up to $2.5 million in annual unemployment benefits. Actual mileage varies by district, but you get the idea.

The legislation — SB 1569 — is also the only way to change another UI provision that would qualify the state for $250 million in federal funds that don't have any strings attached, according to CPPP. Texas has to make a statutory change to get that money, but it's a change that wouldn't add to the costs of the UI program. With only a couple of weeks left, that's the only available vehicle, unless lawmakers suspend a mess of rules to get a single-shot fix through the system.

• Rep. Jose Menendez got his poker bill all the way to the floor of the House on the last day it could be considered. But the San Antonio Democrat, saying he'd been promised a gubernatorial veto, told the House he wasn't going to ask them for a vote and pulled down the proposal. "You need to know when to hold them, and you need to know when to fold them." The bill would have allowed card rooms and started state regulation of poker games.

• The ban on smoking in workplaces, bars and restaurants appears dead in the House and the Senate hasn't voted on it yet. That is to say: The Senate version is probably the only one that has a chance, and time is running out. Smoke-Free Texas, which is pushing the bill, has resorted to shame, pointing out that Wisconsin and North Carolina joined the ranks of states with similar laws just this week.

The House narrowly okayed a workers' compensation bill inspired by a pair of Texas Supreme Court rulings. In Entergy v. Summers, the court said an injured worker can't sue a premises owner if that owner is acting as its own general contractor and also has workers' comp coverage. The court's first ruling in the case was unanimous. They agreed to rehear it and lost three from the majority, but the second ruling was essentially the same. The House bill by Rep. Helen Giddings, D-Dallas, would make it clear that a premises owner is liable for such accidents and can't escape legal responsibility by calling itself a general contractor. They were divided almost evenly on the bill. The preliminary vote? 75-69. The final vote? 73-71.

• Dallas is a step closer to getting another law school. Legislation creating a downtown Dallas school attached to the University of North Texas got through the House and already went through the Senate. The versions are slightly different, and the startup also depends on funding in the next budget.

• The Department of Public Safety's sunset bill got through the House's first deadlines, after Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, pulled out a section that set up different drivers licenses for citizens and non-citizens. The Texas Racing Commission's fate is tied up in the Senate version, as the House version didn't come together before the clock struck midnight on House bills. And one agency's in line for a name change: The Office of Rural and Community Affairs would become the Texas Department of Rural Affairs if the House goes along with a Senate proposal that passed this week. Oh, and the Texas Department of Transportation got a new 'do in the House: If that version stands, the agency will have a 15-member board with a chair elected statewide and 14 members elected from geographic districts. The Senate's version has an appointed board.

• Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon, D-San Antonio, worked her way around parliamentary technicality — a point of order — to tentatively pass her version of an "innocence commission" that would investigate all "post-conviction exonerations" to find out what went wrong in the prosecutions.

• Now there are two versions of "buy-ins" for families that want to get coverage in the Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. The House plan, if finally approved there, would allow families at 200 to 300 percent of the federal poverty level to pay premiums to get into CHIP by paying a premium to cover part of the costs. (The current eligibility cap for CHIP is 200 percent of the federal poverty income.) Families with household incomes between 300 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level could participate by paying a premium to cover the full cost (what the state pays for subsidized coverage), but only if they'd previously been in CHIP or the Medicaid plan and only if they couldn't get access to health insurance elsewhere. There would still be an asset test to guard against including people with material wealth and low incomes, but the House voted to exempt the value of one family car — no matter what it's worth — from that test. The Senate passed a different version earlier.

• Sometimes, the skids are greased. Sen. Kip Averitt, R-Waco, filed a new bill on Wednesday and it was introduced and referred to the Senate Business & Commerce Committee that day. On Thursday morning at 9 o'clock, the committee met and voted it out. SB 2585 extends insurance premium tax credits for insurers that invest in companies — certified capital companies, or CAPCOs — that, in turn, invest in particular types of small businesses and startups. The credits will cost the state $200 million starting in 2015.

The state's senior U.S. senator apparently has an itchy trigger finger — she's breaking her campaign vow to avoid commenting on what's going on during the session. After video footage of the "fight club" in the Corpus Christi State School became public, Kay Bailey Hutchison's campaign tried to hang the mess around Gov. Rick Perry's neck as proof of his "failed leadership." Her campaign manager, Rick Wiley, kept going: "Perry was first notified that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating allegations of abuse in the state school system over four years ago. Since then, the problem has only gotten worse and Perry has done nothing to address it. All Texans deserve better than this appalling failure of leadership but specifically those who are the most vulnerable among us." With a geographical difference, it's the same campaign Perry's running against Hutchison, blasting the federal government and tying its shortcomings to her.

On the circuit: U.S. Senate explorer Roger Williams will give the commencement address at Lamar University this weekend. The former Texas Secretary of State is one of several Republicans who wants the job when Kay Bailey Hutchison gives it up. Hutchison is sending off the graduates at Sam Houston State University. Gov. Rick Perry will do the honors at Prairie View A&M University. The South Texas College of Law got Houston Mayor Bill White, who wants to run for the Hutchison seat as a Democrat.

Houston attorney Richard "Racehorse" Haynes and Austin beer distributor and former City Councilman Lowell Leberman Jr. have jumped into the Kinky Friedman remix. They join former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower in the entertainer's attempt to win the governor's race as a Democrat.