May 24, 2017      4:27 AM

SB: Patrick scams Hotze for two sessions in a row with anti-gay venom in county catch-all bill

With restrooms and rollbacks, Patrick is taking Harris County GOP politics statewide; a strategy that’s left the county solidly blue. If demographics represent opportunity, the GOP in Houston has blown it

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s office has refused to say how long it has been since he and Houston arch-conservative anti-gay activist Steve Hotze stopped being business partners. But they were for at least a decade.

Last session, Hotze was obsessed with passing a ban on taxpayer dollars being used to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. When the bill on that failed in the House, Patrick had Sen. Eddie Lucio, D-Brownsville, insert the same language into the county catch-all bill carried by House County Affairs Committee Chairman Garnet Coleman, D-Houston. The bill then died after the sneak attack was discovered.

This session, same thing.

In a late-night move that was disgusting but not surprising to many Capitol observers, the Senate added bathrooms – Hotze’s latest obsession – and property tax rollback provisions to the county catch-all bill.

Your editor was asleep for two hours when Coleman’s office was scrambling to let us all know, of course, that the additions of anti-LGBT vitriol and property tax rollbacks would prompt him to kill his own bill.

Sincere apologies to Chairman Coleman for sleeping at 1am.

Dr. Hotze deserves an apology as well, but from Patrick.

Hotze has been on a 35-year anti-gay crusade and Patrick has helped when convenient.

By Scott Braddock

Copyright May 24, 2017, Harvey Kronberg, www.quorumreport.com, All rights are reserved