On Rick Perry's Support of Idling Buses

Remember a couple of days back when I was scratching my head about Rick Perry’s veto of Scott Hochberg’s HB 3457? The bus idling bill? Well, in today’s Austin American-Statesman there is an entire article devoted to this veto, so I looked to it for some answers.

Guess what? There still aren’t any. No one knows why Perry vetoed this bill. All anyone can conclude is what Jim Marston, head of the Texas office of Environmental Defense says: “Either (Perry) doesn't understand what (the proposal) does or somebody who didn't have the decency to stand up and testify misled him”.

We also learn that there was one message left on Perry’s voice mail that asked him to veto the bill. One. Who was it? No one knows.

Maybe, or maybe no one is saying.

It really is a one-off deal. There was no prior communication or discussion from Perry’s office about any problems he was having with the bill. None. The veto just came in out of the blue.

I just don’t get it. No one is going to make any money if he vetoes this bill; it was a win-win bill, or as Scott Hochberg says “Here's a chance to both save the taxpayers' money and improve health. Usually those things are in conflict. Here you get to do both.”

It’s an enigma and it gets worse. Fellow Republican Governor of Vermont, Jim Douglas, just signed one of these bills into law last month.

No, no one can come up with a reasonable answer or explanation of his veto, so maybe we have to come up with an unreasonable one. Like maybe it got stuck in the wrong pile and . . . oops . . . he stamped his veto and signed it. Too embarrassed to ask for another copy, he had his staff cobble up a veto statement that sounded pretty much like “I vetoed it because it was a bad, bad, bill.”

That’s all I can come up with.

Sad, huh?