Get Out the Vote PAC

The latest campaign finance reports reveal that the Texas Democrats who broke quorum collected $491,000 between their July 12 departure and the end of the first special session. Over 25 percent of that money came from out-of-state donors.

Lobbying is big business in Austin. Over $667 million was spent by lobbyist clients to influence lawmakers during the 2020 election cycle (January 1, 2019 – December 31, 2020), with the vast majority of that spending occurring while the Texas legislature was convened in 2019. Yet only two percent of all those expenditures have a legislator’s name attached to them. That’s right. In the entire two-year cycle, only $12,944,291 ever made its way onto a detailed report filed with the Texas Ethics Commission.

Last month, the bill attempting to ban taxpayer-funded lobbying appeared unlikely to make it out of the Texas House State Affairs Committee. The atmosphere has shifted in the last week, after so many people came to testify at a hearing for House Bill 749 that the meeting lasted until early the next morning. The sheer volume of advocacy has thrust the lobbying ban bill back into the spotlight, and we’re seeing a surge of renewed interest in the Texas lobbying conversation.