Texas GOP Vote

The Texas Legislature is designed to kill legislation, not to pass it. There are countless ways in which legislation can die. Put simply: That's usually a good thing. The vast majority of the time, the government should get out of the way and let the private sector do its thing. After all, less legislation usually equals less government and less government always equals more freedom.

The flip side of that, though, is that there are times when the machine of Austin politics can kill very good legislation. Our readers know that one thing that has got to stop in Texas is the intentional misclassification of workers, sometimes called payroll fraud. It's a huge problem in the construction industry, and there are some companies that would love to go right on cheating taxpayers by avoiding payroll taxes and using the gray areas of the law to hire illegal immigrants.   Read more »

Texas Senator John Carona (R-Dallas) has been working hard for several years trying to get the State of Texas to enforce the existing laws on employee misclassification and add some teeth to the current laws by increasing the penalties for misclassifying workers as independent contractors when they are truly employees. Misclassification is also one of the biggest ways unethical employers skirt employment law and give jobs to illegal immigrants who work as day laborers.

Last week, I reported on a hearing held in the Texas Senate on Sen. Carona's bill, SB 676. While no one spoke in opposition to the bill, and commercial

Just last week, our own Bob Price wrote about how our readers can make a difference when it comes to the fight against misclassification in Texas. Bob urged you to reach out to the state senators who are considering a bill by Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, that would impose penalties on companies found to be cheating on their taxes by misclassifying their workers.

Coming up this Wednesday, on the House side, a committee is

For several years, TexasGOPVote and ConstructionCitizen.com have been sounding the alarm about issues related to employee misclassification and why this is a problem for Texas taxpayers and businesses. The 2011 Legislative Session was unable to pass any meaningful changes to the law to help correct the problems caused by misclassification. It now appears that a coalition of business associations and concerned legislators may well move the issue forward during the 2013 session.

Testimony was heard in the Texas Senate on SB 676 filed by Senator John Carona (R-Dallas). The committee heard testimony from business owners, trade association and labor groups, all of whom

Construction industry leaders, associations, labor unions and others testified before lawmakers in Austin last week that the state needs to aggressively go after companies that misclassify their employees to avoid paying payroll taxes.

The bill was laid out and the latest version does the following:

• Leaves the current common law test definition in place for independent contractor.

It is clear that border security and immigration reform are two separate issues. Yet the two must be linked together as we try to develop a responsible solution to both of these problems facing our nation. Today, in Houston, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is visiting to make a speech about border security and the job her department is doing. It is interesting that she chose Houston as the place to deliver this. Texans have been hammering her about border security from the day she took office.

The truth is, and we must acknowledge this, the border between the U.S. and Mexico is more secure now than it has ever been. One of the few good things the Obama Administration has done is to increase security along the border.

Construction mogul Donald Trump stood before CPAC last week and called for a de facto amnesty for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in this country. Trump said Republicans should block immigration reform because 100% of any new citizens created by immigration reform would be Democrats.

This is more of the typical block-everything, solve-nothing immigration policy that has left Republicans on the short side of the vote in the past two presidential elections. We have followed this path for many years now and we are no closer to solving our nation's broken immigration system now than we were then.   Read more »

Efforts to pass a worker misclassification bill are moving forward after what was called "the big stakeholders meeting" on Monday. Sen. John Carona, Chairman of the Senate Business and Commerce Committee, brought groups like the Texas Construction Association, AGC Texas Building Branch, some individual companies and others to hash out the best way to deal with the growing problem that has often been referred to as "payroll fraud." One longtime observer of the legislature said that this kind of meeting of the minds is part and parcel of the way Sen. Carona operates when he's on board with something and thinks he can win on an issue.   Read more »

For 140 days every two years, lawmakers, their staffs, armies of lobbyists, activists, journalists, and others descend on the Texas Capitol for the regular session of the legislature. 

The legislative issue we're watching closely is worker misclassification. The problem, sometimes called "payroll fraud", has been a real scourge in the construction industry.

Researchers at the University of Texas backs up what we've been saying for years: far too many construction workers in Texas are the victims of payroll fraud.

They released a study this morning in Austin called “Build a Better Texas”.

Among the study's findings:   Read more »