Would you buy a used car from Dan Patrick? His desperate sales job on taxes, vouchers | Opinion

The Texas Legislature has passed into its retrograde phase, where the lieutenant governor has started pouting and calling the House speaker names.

This is not good for Texas. But there Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is on WFAA/Channel 8, waving $100 bills with all the fervor of a TV evangelist and calling the leader of the Texas House “California Dade.”

Patrick is a 73-year-old grown man.

But with the Legislature at loggerheads over how to cut property taxes and whether to give parents money to switch to private schools, Patrick has reverted to his old antics from his previous career as a Houston radio talk-show host.

If the Legislature doesn’t want to pass school vouchers, he told Spectrum News 1 and local KAZD/Channel 55, he will make lawmakers come back until they do.

“I can’t call a special session,” he began, in a not-very-humble nod to the only elected official with that power, Gov. Greg Abbott.

“But I can create one,” he went on, “by not passing a key bill that has to pass. If we don’t get some major priorities that people want us to pass because [the House] acted very slowly in the session, then I think we ought to finish the job. I’ll leave it at that.”

In other words, his message is: My way or no highway.

In that interview and in a WFAA/Channel 8 “Y’all-itics” podcast airing at 9 a.m. Sunday on “Inside Texas Politics,” Patrick called House Speaker Dade Phelan, a Beaumont Republican, “California Dade.”

“You know, Calfornia Dade over there wants to give us a tax plan like California and New Jersey and other blue states,” he said, holding up wads of $100 bills in each hand and shaking them at the camera like a used-car dealer offering a special on a 2018 Kia.

“And property taxes under their plan will actually go up in several years,” he went on, “so we’re not going to let that happen.”

Is this really how Texans want our business conducted?

It’s one thing to stage performances for cable news shows during political campaigns.

But this is supposed to be serious work time for the House and Senate. They largely wrap everything up in mid-May and come home May 29.

So far, the House is doing exactly what Phelan wants, which is to focus on cutting taxes and addressing the state’s most important needs. The Senate has been racing like quarterhorses through Patrick’s daunting to-do list of his “top 30” priorities.

“We’re right on pace,” Patrick told WFAA, saying the Senate has passed 316 bills to the House’s 85.

The tax plans are stuck because the House and Senate are totally different.

Patrick positioned the Senate to back increases in property tax exemptions, politically popular with voters older than 65 who mostly already benefit from a seniors’ tax freeze. The House wants to put stricter limits on how much everyone’s appraisal can go up, homeowners and businesses alike.

Patrick waved the cash and said his plan is worth $1,000 a year. “I’m not going to take away $25,000 over ... a 25- or 30-year mortgage. ... Hell will freeze over before I would do that. ... It’s ridiculous and it’s bad math.”

On school vouchers, Patrick said the No. 1 reason parents want to leave public schools is “the immorality that they believe is being taught.”

The final state budget has not been passed yet. But the House’s version includes an amendment banning the use of state money for private schools, passed by an 86-52 vote after the state’s high school football coaches lobbied heavily against vouchers as bad for small-town Texas.

In the WFAA interview, Patrick again evoked California when he said the state is becoming too dependent on renewable energy and should loan companies $10 billion to build extra gas-powered energy plants.

“I’m not anti-renewable,” he said. “Texas is the fifth largest renewable — country or state — in the world. There’s the U.S, China, India, Germany and Texas, and right now we’re becoming California. ... If the wind isn’t blowing, we don’t have power.”

There is no shortage of wind in the Texas Legislature.