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May 26, 2025 3:36 PM
Kronberg: Abbott risks becoming the face of widely unpopular THC ban
Patrick set the trap and Burrows led his members into a bad vote but the political debris will stick to the Governor
Now that Speaker Dustin Burrows has apparently
collaborated with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick to hotbox House
members into what may well prove to be a politically terrible vote banning and
criminalizing THC in exchange for teacher pay raises, Governor Greg Abbott
gets to decide whether he wants to own the issue.
We use the word collaboration intentionally. The Lieutenant Governor
laid out the roadmap for how he intended to force the House into doing
something the members did not want to do. There were at
least a half a dozen choke points at which the Speaker could have exercised
leverage to protect his members from this but he elected
not to do so.
Rather than defend the will of the House on money for schools, Burrows
abandoned the House plan before the ink was dry and immediately endorsed the
Patrick plan leading some to conclude that he deferred to the power of one
rather than the 142 who voted for a carefully negotiated House blueprint for Texas
public school funding.
As members are discovering, THC has become an integral part of the
fabric of Texas society. While the lieutenant governor’s last-minute come to Jesus acknowledgment that THC is a valuable tool for chronic
pain, expanding compassionate care still leaves cuts off the access of millions
of Texans who have it today. What was a personal choice now requires
permission of the nanny state and still excludes many who suffer from PTSD,
sleep issues, the parents of children suffering seizures, those seeking an
alternative to alcohol, and of course all adults over 21.
After they were manipulated by the lieutenant governor and
abandoned by their Speaker, House members are wondering if constituent blowback
will be sustained.
Every session has an issue that comes to define it. While Abbott’s
signature issue of the session was supposed to be a multi-year battle to pass “school
choice,” he may well be more remembered as the governor who banned THC.
By Harvey Kronberg
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Copyright May 26, 2025, Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved 