Big Government Session Ends in Shadow
of Intensified Push for THC Ban Bill Veto
Capitol Inside
June 2, 2025
The curtain fell on the Texas Legislature on Monday after a last-minute vote on a judicial pay hike that capped off a regular session that raised the bar on big government to an all-time high with a record number of bans and new restrictions and a raging war of words on a THC ban in Governor Greg Abbott's court.
The Texas House and Senate both had to suspend rules to clear the way for votes today on the conference committee report for Senate Bill 293 - a measure that gives state district judges a raise that had been long-overdue and difficult to pass as legislation that triggers automatic increases in legislative pensions.
The House approved SB 293 for the final time this year with bipartisan support on a vote of 114-26 for the conference deal that 25 Republicans and Democratic State Rep. Richard Raymond of Laredo opposed. The Senate gave its blessing to the negotiated plan in SB 293 earlier on Monday.
But lawmakers brought the session to a close in the shadow of a ferocious fight over a ban on THC products that American military veterans and advocates for a booming hemp industry urged Abbott to veto at a press conference on Monday. The Texas Cannabis Collective set the stage for the event at the Capitol this morning when it announced that 1.5 million veterans "under the banner" of the Texas VFW had joined the call for a veto when the governor decides the fate of Senate Bill 3.
Cynthia Cabrera - a leading hemp industry and strategist for Hometown Hero in Austin - portrayed the ban that Abbott is weighing in SB 3 as a backdoor attempt to create a state-sponsored monopoly for marijuana with a market that doctors would control exclusively. Cabrera said that a single company controls 70 percent of the market for medical marijuana here with 20 or 30 employees. She said the governor would be putting 53,000 people out of work in Texas is he signs SB 3.
Cabrera said that hemp is direct competition for a medical marijuana program that the state controls. "This is an example of the government picking winners and losers," she said of the prohibition in SB 3.
Cabrera said Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick
bullied Republican lawmakers into backing the prohibition that he conceived and sold to them with inaccurate information that's been discredited. She noted that the federal government legalized hemp while keeping marijuana illegal at the national level.
"So Senator Perry - Charles Perry - and the lieutenant governor are pushing state-controlled monopolies for federally illegal substances over a vibrant, six-year, legitimate industry signed into law by President Trump in 2018 - and then legalized and regulated in Texas by them in 2019," Cabrera said.
Representatives for veterans groups said the medical marijuana program in Texas has been woefully inadequate and restrictive in a state where they'd be stripped of the freedom to easily obtain products that they've found beneficial and enjoyed without being strangled in a bureaucracy.
The Texas Hemp Business Council and Veterans of Foreign Wars delivered more than 100,000 letters to the governor's office on Monday with pleas from constituents for a veto for SB 3. Abbott appears to be facing more pressure to veto the THC ban than he's encountered on any piece of legislation he's considered as the state's chief executive for the past 10 years.
Patrick was poised to declare victories on most of the issues he designated as priorities on an agenda that Patrick crafted, directed and muscled through the Senate and the House as well with the Republicans on both sides of the rotunda voting in lockstep to his demands in most cases.
Patrick ended the regular session as the Legislature's first truly supreme leader in modern Texas history after House Republicans voted in a state of fear of panic for the THC ban in a move that gutted a regulatory plan that GOP Speaker Dustin Burrows and top lieutenants had supported for a booming cannabis industry that Abbott launched when he signed the hemp bill in 2019.
more to come ...
| 
