An already packed special session agenda grew exponentially last week — due in part to the catastrophic Hill Country flooding over July 4 weekend — and now it looks like Texas lawmakers could spend more than just a month in Austin tackling big-ticket items like emergency alert systems, redistricting, THC reform, property taxes, and the STAAR test.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott originally called for six items to be discussed in the special session starting at noon on Monday, July 21, with THC regulations at the top of the list. The agenda released in a proclamation July 9 contained a whopping 18 items.
The massive docket is the most ambitious we’ve seen from Governor Abbott, according to University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus.
“The first thing that popped out to me was that this is a list chock-full of priorities that didn’t get done and some regulatory issues that need to be cleared up,” he said. “That’s a tough mix of items for a special. Typically, the governor will be very narrow in what he wants, and this is a much more expansive agenda than that.”
Freshman Sen. Molly Cook, D-Houston, said the docket looks more like a regular session than a special session.
“I think a lot of folks are not optimistic that it gets done in 30 days,” she said. “We’re preparing for a longer stay in Austin for sure.”
Abbott called four 30-day special sessions in 2023, hoping to get school vouchers approved, but instead that was delayed until the 89th legislative session that ended June 2. Rottinghaus said the dense agenda released last week indicates the governor has seen an increase in support for his priorities from lawmakers.
“It reflects the fact that he has much more confidence in his abilities legislatively and it shows a clear persuasive impact of Donald Trump,” Rottinghaus said. “The risk with a big list of menu items is that the Lege gets too full too fast. They can only eat so much. Even if it’s a set of menu items that they’re hungry for, because of timing, it just may not all come to pass.”
The professor said he thinks lawmakers will tackle redistricting, flood response and THC in the early days of the session and pick up the other items later.
“There’s lots of three-dimensional chess being played,” he said. “The Democrats almost have to show up because the partisan angle response will be that Republicans wanted to spend more time on disaster preparedness and the Democrats didn’t show up, so they’re going to have to show up. Leadership, including the governor, will want to start with bills that they need a quorum for.”
There are several items on the list that will require a lot of negotiation and thoughtfulness, Rottinghaus added.
“The rules relating to natural disasters could take a long time to finish,” he said. “If they’re serious about the STAAR test elimination, that’s going to be something they spend a lot of time with. THC reform is going to be, by itself, a full special session if not more. There’s a lot on this list that’s going to take much longer than 30 days. To get them all done is going to be a real challenge.”
Rice University political science professor Mark Jones disagreed. “Legislatively, it’s possible. You think of what they can do in 140 days, more like 70 days, they get the entire legislative agenda passed. Here they have less than 20 items, some of which the governor already signaled exactly what he wants,” he said. “Some have already been redrafted and rewritten and are ready to go.
“Redistricting is actually going to be pretty simple in that they have a map and they push that map through,” he added. “There won’t be debate over changing district boundaries beyond the technical levels. I would assume that the Trump administration has already presented Texas Republicans with maps they’ve redrawn.”
Immediately after Abbott’s proclamation was released last week, residents called out the governor on social media about previous suggestions to eliminate property taxes. That’s not happening, Jones said.
“The property tax relief that was carried out in the regular session leaned heavier on homestead exemptions than compression,” he said. “I don’t know if the goal would be to add some compression to alleviate property taxes through that route. Even the most conservative Republican knows you can’t get rid of property taxes. Compression is the way you reduce it proportionally.”
Rottinghaus said he didn’t think Texans will see property tax relief in the special session: “I think they’ve gone about as far as they can go, at least for now,” he said.
What has to pass, the professors agreed, is redistricting.
“If they’re going to redistrict, it has to be sooner than later,” Rottinghaus said. “The legal challenges that will likely result will take time to sort out and they want to make sure they meet the November deadline for candidate filing.”
Redistricting
Among those legal challenges could be a suit from Christian Menefee, the Harris County attorney and a candidate for U.S. Congressional District 18.
“It’s been no secret that President Trump and his MAGA Republican allies expect to have major losses in the House of Representatives in the midterm,” Menefee said. “Instead of doing what’s necessary to pass good policy and help people, work across the aisle and be a good steward of government resources, they’re trying to stack the deck.
“They’re trying to power grab in Republican states,” he added. “We all know there is no distance between the governor’s mansion and the White House because Greg Abbott wants to be president one day. It’s unfortunate and disgraceful that the governor of Texas is playing this game.”
Menefee said he plans to testify in Austin during the special session and expects that collusion between Trump and Abbott will be exposed in discovery when a lawsuit is inevitably filed.
“I think it could be catastrophic for Black and brown voters across Texas,” he said of redistricting. “Every district they’ve mentioned has a Black or brown representative and is from a district that has a majority Black or brown population that is electing folks. These districts came to be in this country because, for so many years, states excluded people who were not white men or white landowners from participating in our political process.”
The Texas Republicans should take back their party instead of letting Trump run it for them, Menefee added.
“At no time in modern history could a president of the United States just send out an edict to governors telling them that they should redraw their already heavily gerrymandered maps and the governor just does it, no questions asked,” he said. “It’s despicable. I want Governor Abbott to know that Black folks and Latino folks in this state will not forget this.”
Redistricting arose as a probable special session item when the U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter to Abbott saying that the district boundaries are drawn so that Black and brown voters are “artificially merged together in a way that is not legally fair when you draw majority minority districts,” Rottinghaus said.
“You can’t merge together African Americans and Latinos to say this is a majority minority district,” he said. “The law is clear that it has to be one minority that has been excluded or ostracized historically and this district is a way to remedy that.”
But redistricting poses risks for both Republicans and Democrats and is clearly on the agenda for no other reason than it was suggested by the White House, experts say. The president wants to retain his five-seat majority margin in the U.S. House, Jones said. Absent Trump’s involvement, “there’s no way, shape or form that Texas Republicans would have put that on the agenda,” he said.
“Democrats will shed fake crocodile tears about redistricting but they love the idea of changing the current maps because any changes Republicans make to the current maps are far more likely to benefit Democrats than they are Republicans,” he said.
“Republicans squeezed about as much juice out of that orange back in 2021,” he added. “There aren’t any more districts that can be created to give the Republicans anything better than their current 25-13 advantage.”
Rottinghaus explained further that GOP lawmakers can redraw boundaries that will move voters from moderate Democratic districts to regions that Republicans currently represent or hope to win, but there are a lot of unknowns in a period of rapid population changes and significant political flux.
“Republicans are going to have to guess when it comes to where they think their prospective voters are going to be,” he said. “They try to get certain places in the Valley that they think they can win. That can switch the other way. They’re looking for certain suburbs they think they can do better in, and that could switch back the other way, the way it did in ‘18.”
Notable shifts from red to blue occurred in 2018 in Hays, Williamson, Fort Bend and Tarrant counties, and in several Dallas suburbs.
There’s also an issue of optics. Some lawmakers like Texas Democratic Caucus Chair Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, have implied that Abbott is capitalizing on the Hill Country flooding tragedy to get Democrats to the table so he can tear up their districts.
“Governor Abbott listed flood preparedness at the top of his special session call, but then buried it under a pile of cynical political distractions,” Wu said in a statement. “While families need relief funds and infrastructure to prevent the next disaster, the governor is more focused on redrawing political maps, prosecuting election officials, and further restricting women’s healthcare.
“We will not allow this tragedy to be used as political cover for an extreme agenda that does nothing to help families get back on their feet.”
More than 100 deaths were reported due to flooding on the Guadalupe River over the July 4 weekend.
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Cook, a public health nurse, had similar comments.
“If we are serious about passing life-saving policy around flooding and disaster resilience and recovery, we should not be muddying that conversation with heavily partisan agenda items. Every single heart in Texas is broken right now. I certainly don’t want to talk about anything else except for how to help those families in and around Kerr County and how to make sure this never happens to anybody ever again.
“I will be honest. I will be sick if I have to watch that kind of policy get used as a bargaining chip for wedge issues and campaign messaging,” she added.
Jones said redistricting could be done in a “passive-aggressive way” with minimal damage to either party.
“You do it but you don’t undermine the Republican incumbents. At the same time you don’t give Trump much hope of flipping any of these seats in 2026,” he said. “You hope that you can show by making an effort and doing things at the margins that you have effectively complied with his request. The other option is that you earnestly attempt to do everything possible to set things up so, if 2026 is a really good year for Republicans, you are able to flip seats.”
U.S. Congressional Districts 18 and 9, which cover parts of Houston, have lines that veer “all over the place” and go out of their way to soak up as many African Americans as possible, Jones said. District 18 has been vacant since former Rep. Sylvester Turner’s death; District 9 is represented by Al Green.
“I’m sure they’ll change them a little bit because that’s the justification for the call, but those districts aren’t going to change to become less Democratic,” he said. “You could add a few progressive Anglos to a couple of those districts but that’s about it.”
Flood Warning Systems and Communications
Four items spurred by the recent Hill Country floods are likely to pass, and lawmakers like Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, are already working on proposals.
Abbott is asking for discussion on improving early warning systems and preparedness infrastructure in flood-prone areas; strengthening emergency communications; providing relief funding for response and recovery from the Hill Country floods; and streamlining rules and regulations to expedite preparedness for and recovery from natural disasters.
The flood bills will be the most difficult because most of the other items on the agenda have already been debated, Jones said.
“There’s been less preparation on what that legislation would look like,” he said. “Relief funding is relatively easy. That’s just writing a check. They did have legislation that failed during the session that was about coordination, so they do have some things to fall back on.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, pictured with U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd, talks to reporters at a press conference in Kerr County.
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Committees and task forces can work on the new items and they’ll likely move swiftly because of the urgency of the recent disaster and because they’ll want to go home eventually, the professors said. Abbott could call special sessions through the end of next year in order to get his priorities passed, but that’s unlikely.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have already lamented the fact that House Bill 13, filed by Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, didn’t pass in the session that ended June 2. The bill would have created a new government council to establish an emergency response plan and administer a grant program, facilitating better communication among first responders. The bill passed the House but died in the Senate.
Soon after storms developed in Central Texas on July 4, causing the Guadalupe River to rise 26 feet in less than an hour, state officials said they would revisit disaster preparedness measures. To date, the Hill Country floods have killed at least 120 and more than 100 remain missing.
“There’s not a single legislator in Austin who wants to be seen as getting in the way of passage of those bills,” Jones said.
Cook added that she’s willing to stay in Austin as long as it takes to get good policy passed.
“Houston has faced disasters in the past, and as somebody who was very recently just a regular voter, I was not impressed with the Legislature’s response to those disasters,” she said. “That being said, I am eternally hopeful. My hope and my heart is in the people of Texas. The people of Texas have risen up and spoken loudly about a few different issues over the last year, and it has made a difference. We’ll do the right thing.”
THC Reform
Banning THC was a priority in the 89th session for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and to say he expressed disappointment at the governor’s veto is an understatement.
State government watchers at the time said they expected Abbott wanted to impose regulations on hemp-derived products, including where they can be sold and how the items are packaged. The veto, they said, was likely because of pressure from the hemp industry and concerns about litigation.
Opponents say a ban would obliterate Texas’ $8 billion hemp industry and wipe out 50,000 jobs, including those of farmers who have obtained expensive licenses and equipment to produce CBD products, moving those dollars into the hands of medical marijuana companies that lobbied heavily for the ban.
Abbott’s proposal aims to “comprehensively regulate hemp-derived products, including limiting potency, restricting synthetically modified compounds, and establishing enforcement mechanisms, all without banning a lawful agricultural commodity,” according to the special session call sheet.
STAAR Test
Disagreements between the House and Senate during the regular session stalled and ultimately killed a plan to eliminate the STAAR test in public schools.
Both chambers wanted to get rid of the standardized exams, but lawmakers sparred over how to calculate school ratings and how involved the Texas Education Agency should be in regulation. The failure of the bills was a huge disappointment for educators and parents who supported its removal.
The governor’s special session agenda proposes legislation to eliminate the STAAR test and replace it with “effective tools to assess student progress and ensure school district accountability.”
Rottinghaus said the STAAR test bill isn’t a must to get through the special session, but if lawmakers take it up again, it’s going to require some thoughtful discussions. “How are you going to replace it, and with what? “ he said. “That’s a logistical challenge and a debatable conclusion.”
Jones said neither conservative Republicans nor liberal Democrats are “great fans of the STAAR test.”
“There will be debate over how to assess the districts, but that’s one I think that, barring some conflict over the details, which are important, should pass,” he said.
Other Special Session Agenda Items
The other items on Abbott’s special session call list include:
Protect unborn children — The governor’s agenda describes this item as “further protecting unborn children and their mothers from the harm of abortion.” Political experts were unsure what exactly that means and said they don’t expect anything to pass.
Rottinghaus said the abortion bill is “window dressing for the call,” something lawmakers will discuss if they have time. Texas already has a near-total abortion ban.
Jones added that the current Texas abortion legislation is unpopular with a majority of voters.
“Today, most women who want to obtain an abortion in Texas can still obtain one,” he said. “They have a meeting with a teledoc. Their [medication] gets shipped to them from out of state and they perform the abortion at home. If you start to close off that escape valve, it increases the possibility that abortion becomes a more salient issue in the 2026 election, and that is not good for Republicans.”
Ban taxpayer-funded lobbying — This item has been introduced several times by Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, to eliminate, for example, the hiring of lobbyists by the City of Houston. Proponents say municipalities need eyes and ears in Austin to fight for important legislation; those against it, like Cain, say it’s a waste of taxpayer money.
Protect human trafficking victims — Abbott vetoed Senate Bill 1278, referred to by cosponsor Rep. Senfronia Thompson as the “pimp bill,” saying it needs refinement. The bill protects victims of human trafficking from criminal liability for non-violent acts closely tied to their own victimization.
Rottinghaus said he thinks it will pass with minor changes.
Police personnel records — Legislation that protects law enforcement officers from public disclosure of unsubstantiated complaints in personnel files.
Protect women’s spaces — Legislation protecting women’s privacy in sex-segregated spaces. If it comes up, this will likely be a version of the “bathroom bill” to restrict transgender people from locker rooms and public restrooms, experts say.
Attorney General election powers — Legislation proposing a constitutional amendment allowing the Attorney General to prosecute state election crimes.
Title theft and deed fraud — Legislation, similar to the vetoed Senate Bill 648 from the regular session, that provides strengthened protections against title theft and deed fraud.
Water project incentives — Legislation, similar to the vetoed Senate Bill 1253 from the regular session, that authorizes political subdivisions to reduce impact fees for builders who include water conservation and efficiency measures.
State Judicial Department — Senate Bill 2878 was vetoed in the 89th legislative session. It would reform several aspects of the state’s judicial system, including court administration, procedures, and juvenile justice. Jones said it has to pass because many courts can’t open without it.
The bills on water projects, the judicial department, title fraud, THC, and human trafficking just need a little tweaking, Jones said.
Governor Abbott could be giving Republican lawmakers “room to legislate” some of the hot-button items like abortion, law enforcement public disclosure, and protecting women’s privacy, potentially knowing that those bills won’t pass, Rottinghaus said.
“I think that’s partially what’s going on here, that the governor is giving Republicans extra cover politically to justify the session,” he said. “These are all hot-button, red meat conservative issues that give Republicans a chance to justify the cost of the special session.
“There has been a greater concern among Republicans that legislators are doing too much: too many rules, too much spending, kind of too much government. That is something they’re going to have to justify, so having opportunities to have these political issues they can legislate on, that the base cares about, will help to assuage some of that.”