Austin's Long Recess

What Sacramento Is Deciding opened this site's legislature beat with California, mid-session, bills moving through committee on a clock. Texas is the second region on that beat, and it immediately breaks the format that piece assumed: there is no Texas floor vote to report on this month, because there is no Texas legislature in session.

That gap is itself the story. Growing a Movement as a Design Problem argued that a region's legislative terrain differs in substance — water law in one region, e-bike rules in another. Texas adds a dimension that essay didn't get to: regions don't just legislate on different things, they legislate on different clocks, and when a state's clock stops for nineteen months, the decisions don't stop. They just move to whoever's still operating — an agency, a court, or an interim committee taking testimony nobody outside Austin is watching.

A legislature that meets once every two years

The Texas Constitution caps the regular legislative session at 140 days, convened only in odd-numbered years. The 89th Legislature's regular session ran January to June 2025, then Governor Abbott called two special sessions that summer — 30-day windows, limited entirely to whatever items the Governor puts on the call, which only the Governor has the constitutional power to set. Those sessions ran through early September 2025 and adjourned. There has been no Texas legislative session since, and there will not be one until the 90th Legislature convenes January 12, 2027.

For nineteen months, then, the only way a new Texas state law gets made is if the Governor calls another special session and chooses to put it on the agenda himself. That's a meaningfully more concentrated gatekeeping structure than California's Appropriations suspense file — a single committee sorting hundreds of bills is a chokepoint, but it's a chokepoint inside an active, ongoing process. A single official who alone decides whether the legislature convenes at all, and alone sets what it's allowed to talk about if it does, is a chokepoint on the process itself.

THC: the legislature failed twice, so an agency finished the job

Nowhere did that gap show up more clearly this year than hemp. Senate Bill 3, a near-total ban on consumable THC products, passed both chambers in the regular 2025 session — and Governor Abbott vetoed it in June, urging lawmakers to regulate hemp sales the way the state regulates liquor instead of banning them outright. Both special sessions that followed tried to pass a replacement. Both failed: SB 5 and SB 6 each died before reaching his desk, and the second special session ended in September 2025 with no statewide THC framework enacted at all. Hemp products stayed legal.

Then, in March 2026, the Texas Department of State Health Services — an executive agency, not the legislature — proposed a rule recalculating how "total THC" is measured to include THCA, a change that effectively caps most smokable hemp flower regardless of what its label claims. A separate DSHS action reinstated 2021 controlled-substance definitions that reclassify a wide range of hemp and THC products outright; both took effect this summer, the THCA rule on March 31 after an appeals court lifted an injunction against it in June, the controlled-substances reclassification on July 31. Litigation over both is ongoing.

The Rule of the Unquestioned made the general case that whoever gets to declare a category open for redefinition acquires real power by that declaration alone. Texas just supplied about as clean an example as exists: elected lawmakers tried and failed, twice, in full public view, to answer the question of what counts as legal THC. An agency answered it anyway, by rule, while the body that actually represents Texans on this question was out of session and had no vote scheduled on the outcome. Whatever the merits of the new limits — and there's a real public-health case for them — the process that produced them bypassed the one branch structurally designed to be argued with.

Redistricting: a boundary redrawn mid-decade, and a court that said that's fine

The second special session's other headline item was congressional redistricting — not the ordinary once-a-decade kind that follows a census, but a mid-decade redraw pushed by the White House, engineered to hand Texas Republicans up to five additional U.S. House seats. Abbott signed the new map August 29, 2025. A federal district court blocked it that December, finding the record showed "much more than just politics" behind the lines. The U.S. Supreme Court stayed that injunction on a 6–3 vote days later and, in April 2026, upheld the map outright — Justice Alito's opinion calling it "indisputable" that partisan advantage drove the redraw, and permissible anyway.

A congressional district is exactly the kind of administratively drawn boundary Growing a Movement as a Design Problem treated as a design choice rather than a fact of nature — and the normal argument for leaving district lines alone between censuses is that redrawing them on demand, whenever a party has the votes to do it, turns a boundary into a standing weapon rather than a periodic administrative update. The Supreme Court's ruling didn't dispute that the map was drawn for exactly that purpose. It ruled that the purpose doesn't matter. That's a court declining to police the boundary question at all — leaving whichever coalition controls the state government free to redraw the electoral map whenever it's convenient to do so, with no cycle, no waiting period, and, after this ruling, no real judicial backstop either.

Flood relief: a public good funded the way it's supposed to be

Not everything from 2025 fits the pattern of authority migrating away from an accountable vote. The Hill Country floods of July 2025 killed more than 130 people, and the response is one of the more straightforward items on this list: Senate Bill 5, signed September 18, 2025, appropriated $50 million from the state's Economic Stabilization Fund — the "Rainy Day Fund," not incidentally — for flood sirens, stream gauges, and related equipment across the 30 counties covered by the disaster declaration. A separate $4 million grant funded UT Arlington and Rice University to build a faster real-time warning system.

Who Pays? argued that a funding mechanism always encodes an answer to who bears a cost, whether or not anyone says so out loud. This is the rare case where Texas said it out loud and got the honest version right: a known, location-specific risk, funded directly and visibly out of a reserve built for exactly this kind of expense, passed by the one body actually accountable for the choice, while it still had the chance to make one. When flooding returned to the Hill Country this July, local officials credited the new systems with getting people out in time. It's a small, boring, well-targeted bill next to the THC and redistricting fights, and boring is what public-goods funding is supposed to look like when it's working.

What's being decided right now, without a vote

The interim between sessions isn't idle — it's where the next session's agenda gets set, by two people. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has released several waves of interim charges directing Senate committees to study and hold hearings on his priorities for 2027, including property tax changes and, more controversially, a study of "Sharia law" in Texas courts; the Speaker's House counterparts are doing the same on the House side. None of this is legislation. An interim charge is a research assignment, not a bill, and nothing produced by these hearings has the force of law until the 90th Legislature actually convenes and votes.

It's worth naming anyway, because it's the only visible legislative activity happening in Texas right now, and because it previews which fights move fast once the clock restarts in January 2027 — the same way this year showed that when the legislature itself is offline, the questions it left unanswered don't wait for it.

What to watch

Litigation over both DSHS hemp rules continues in the Texas courts; the redistricting map is now settled for the 2026 midterms but not necessarily beyond them; and Senate and House interim committees will keep holding hearings on Patrick's and the Speaker's charges through the rest of the year, with the 90th Legislature convening January 12, 2027 for its own 140-day clock. For anyone tracking a specific bill, agency rule, or committee hearing, the state's own tracking site at capitol.texas.gov and the Legislative Reference Library at lrl.texas.gov carry the primary documents. The next dispatch on this beat will be a region with yet another legislative rhythm of its own — which is rather the point of doing this region by region instead of once, nationally, and calling it done.

---

Sources: Texas Legislative Reference Library, Special Sessions of the Texas Legislature; Texas Legislative Council, 89th Legislature dates of interest; Texas Tribune, Gov. Abbott orders special session on Hill Country flooding, redistricting, THC and unfinished GOP priorities; Texas Tribune, Texas Senate passes bill to ban THC — again; KVUE, Texas lawmakers end special session without taking any action to ban or regulate THC products; Texas Policy Research, New THC Rules Take Effect July 31. Here's How Texas Got Here.; Texas Tribune, What is still legal under Texas' latest THC ban; Wikipedia, 2025 Texas redistricting; Votebeat, Supreme Court lets Texas keep new congressional map in 2026 midterms; Texas Tribune, Texas' new congressional map can be used, Supreme Court rules; Texas Water Development Board, Senate Bill 3 Implementation (flood infrastructure funding); WFAA, Texas invests $4 million for new, real-time flood alert system; Texas Public Radio, As flooding returns to Hill Country, Texas lawmakers say new safety laws already making a difference; Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, 2026 Interim Charges to the Texas Senate; Texas Tribune, Property taxes, Sharia law among Dan Patrick's 2027 targets.