The specific terms and content mentioned in the record are remarkably close to those of the final bill. To rule in prescience one would have to rule out premeditation. Not forgetting the question of its incestuous origins, SB 1746 specifies few policy requirements or legislative constraints to which the Partner must adhere. Although it does create a general operational framework, it fails to establish any check on its influence over environmental education policy in Texas schools. Such a procedural deficiency allows the Partner complete latitude, making it accountable only to its directors and a sense of its own limits, beyond which further excesses would likely stir public outrage.
All programs claim to be scientifically sound and unbiased, no matter how radical or skewed.
So while it may stipulate the preeminence of such laudable generalities, SB 1746 provides no basis for discriminating between competing definitions, allowing everything and prohibiting nothing. TEEP supporters are quick to point out that the programs it supports are not mandatory. And, although TEEP is not an official government agency, its appearance as such will bestow on its programs the imprimatur of the state. The mechanism used to pass SB 1746 through the House was the Local Consent Calendar. The Senate has an equivalent procedure, and SB 1746 passed the Senate that way.