Chad’s Morning Brief: Rick Perry 2016 Kicking Into Gear, Texas Budget Battle Looms, and Other Top Stories

Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Welcome to December. Here is your Morning Brief for December 1, 2014.

Perry 2016 Ramps Up

On Tuesday of this week hundreds of policy experts and donors will be in Austin and it has nothing to do with the upcoming legislative session. According to POLITICO, Governor Rick Perry will be hosting the gathering as he looks ahead to 2016.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is inviting hundreds of prominent Republican donors and policy experts to a series of gatherings next month that are intended to rebuild his damaged national brand and lay the foundation for a potential 2016 presidential campaign, fundraisers and organizers confirmed to POLITICO.

The small-group sessions kick off Tuesday and Wednesday in Austin with a pair of lunches and dinners held in the governor’s mansion wedged between policy briefings at the nearby office of Perry senior adviser Jeff Miller. In all, Perry’s team expects he will meet in person with more than 500 major donors and bundlers from around the country in December as well as a slew of operatives, Republican National Committee members and policy experts.

Perry’s intensive month of foundation-building comes as other prospective Republican presidential candidates — notably former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — are engaging with the wealthy Texans who for years have been among the GOP’s most significant sources of cash. As the heir to a political dynasty with deep Texas ties, Bush in particular could seriously cut into Perry’s financial base. Bush over the last few months has met with major Texas donors.

Perry has long enjoyed support from Texas’s biggest wallets for his state campaigns, but some of the donors remain skeptical of his presidential viability as a result of his bumbling 2012 run, during which some abandoned him in favor of eventual nominee Mitt Romney.

Perry had entered the race to much fanfare as the most formidable GOP foe to Romney. But his debate performances induced cringes, his anti-establishment tough talk prompted grumbles in the business community and he had only limited success expanding his fundraising basebeyond Texas. When he dropped out not long after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses, Perry further alienated his party’s business wing by snubbing Romney and backing the long-shot rival campaign of Newt Gingrich.

While some in the party wonder if his star dimmed even further this summer when he was indicted on public corruption charges, Perry has nonetheless tried to remake his public image over the past year. In a series of high-profile interviews, the governor, sporting trendy new glasses that give him a more studious look, has admitted that he bungled 2012. He’s said the experience “humbled” him, and admitted he erred by jumping into the race without sufficient preparation and just six weeks after back surgery that left him in pain and unable to sleep.

Things would be different if he ran again, say sources who have interacted with the three-term governor, who is leaving the office after having held it longer than any other person in Texas history. They describe his health as “tip-top” and his policy expertise as light years ahead of where it was in the last presidential cycle — all of which he intends to highlight in his December donor meetings.

“If Gov. Perry is going to run, he’s going to be better prepared, and he’s going to have the resources necessary to compete,” said Henry Barbour, a Republican national committeeman who is helping plan for a Perry 2016 campaign and organizing next week’s donor sessions.

I do believe Perry would do better in 2016 than he did in the last go around. He could even find himself as the "middle" candidate. Not as far right as Ted Cruz but not as moderate as Chris Christie. That dynamic could help Perry going forward. That and Perry as a proven conservative record and can't point to Texas as a road map for the country.

Spending in the 84th Legislative Session

Is a budget battle looming in Texas? According to the Statesman, the answer is yes.

Patrick, of Houston, is among the Republicans elected to top statewide office in a Nov. 4 GOP sweep who have promised to cut taxes and otherwise rein in spending, buoyed by projections that show the state is running a multibillion-dollar budget surplus amid a recovering economy and an ongoing oil and gas boom. But in the weeks before the Legislature convenes to write a budget for the next biennium, Democrats, education advocates and others — including some Republicans — are describing the concept of a surplus as a “myth,” pointing to never-filled holes blown in the budget during harder economic times and other pressing needs tied to a booming population. And even though Patrick and other top Republicans, including Gov.-elect Greg Abbott, are calling for tax cuts, they have yet to reach consensus about which ones to pursue.

Stakeholders on all sides of the looming debate say the question of which tax cuts to give — considered inevitable in the staunchly conservative Legislature — and what, if anything, to spend more on will be the biggest fight of the session, with some predicting it will spill over into a special session as lawmakers grapple with how to do some amount of both.

A fiscal debate already has been raging about where to set the constitutional spending cap, which the Legislative Budget Board will decide at a meeting Monday.

“The budget is the issue of the session,” said Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business. The influential lobby group’s top priority is boosting transportation funding for roads, and if there’s enough money, reducing the rate of the franchise tax on businesses.

David Anthony, CEO of Raise your Hand Texas, an advocacy group pushing the state to completely fund full-day pre-kindergarten, said he hopes the tax cut rhetoric is just more of the usual.

“There’s always an interest in saying things that appeal to voters, which is, ‘we’re going to cut taxes,’ ” he said. “So I’m hopeful that is part of election-year rhetoric and hopeful it is a part of the things that are said that precede every legislative session. The state’s doing very well financially, and we have several extremely important needs.”

But there won’t be enough money to pay for all of them. Not even close.

Dale Craymer, president of the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association and a former top budget official for Govs. Ann Richards and George W. Bush, said tax cuts and transportation are among the “four great wants” that have emerged. The others are paying down state debt and increasing money for public education to address underfunding and a pending lawsuit challenging the state’s school finance method as unconstitutional.

“The Legislature is clearly going to have enough money to meet one of those four – maybe enough to handle two of those four,” Craymer said. “But it’s not going to have enough to handle four of those four.”

Budget surplus

A year ago, Comptroller Susan Combs said the state ended the 2012-13 biennium with a $2.6 billion surplus. After another strong economic year, though, think tanks are estimating the ending balance for the current budget cycle to be as high as $10 billion. (Comptroller-elect Glenn Hegar will reveal an official surplus figure next month when he delivers his first revenue estimate to the Legislature.)

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, is pegging the surplus at $10 billion. That includes $6 billion in excess tax revenue and $4 billion in local school taxes that could reduce state education spending obligations, said Vance Ginn, an economist in the foundation’s Center for Fiscal Policy. (Increases to school district property values — sizable in cities like Austin — will be enough to fund enrollment growth in the current budget cycle, according to the Legislative Budget Board.)

Thoughts?

Other Must Read Links:

Black Friday Sales Slump

Boehner Faces First Days of New Power 

Congress Returns With Top To-Do List 

Incoming Senators Talk Compromise and Divide

These and many more topics coming up on today’s edition of The Chad Hasty Show. Tune in mornings 8:30-11am on News/Talk 790 KFYO, streaming online at kfyo.com, and now on your iPhone and Android device with the radioPup App. All guest interviews can be heard on our KFYO YouTube page after the show and online at kfyo.com.