But it’s sure no path to popularity.

Tax collectors have had a rotten reputation since biblical times. For all the services and all the people that depend on it, our work has to be viewed as fair and even-handed. It’s a basic bond of trust, and once that trust is lost, it’s hard to get back. Our entire nation was born when the colonists decided Britain’s taxes were unfair.

That’s why it’s so infuriating to learn that this administration has breached that trust so profoundly, by persecuting groups explicitly for their politics.
Just a few weeks ago, President Obama told The Ohio State college students they should reject voices claiming that government is sinister, that tyranny is lurking “just around the corner.” Now it seems that those voices might just be on to something. When you hear the phrase “troubling questions,” you just know someone’s been lying.

As I write this, new revelations are cascading down each day.

Thanks to the IRS Inspector General’s report, here’s what we know: In spring 2010, the IRS began singling out Tea Party groups claiming nonprofit status for “special” treatment. That included excruciatingly detailed questionnaires — intrusive demands for information about members and employees, donor lists; printouts of Facebook posts, websites and tweets; minutes of all board meetings; they even wanted to know what was being read in a group’s book studies.

And even if they got their data dumps, the IRS delayed rulings on nonprofit status for months and even years. In an election season, as it happens.
At this writing, we don’t know who came up with this idea, although the administration initially wanted to blame “low-level employees in Cincinnati,” in a turn of phrase that may join “third-rate burglary” in the scandal hall of fame. It’s false on its face anyway, since we now know at least two other IRS offices were involved.

By June 2011, the targeting had spread to organizations that were critical of government spending, debt or taxes, that criticized “how the country is being run,” and even groups whose stated cause was to “make America a better place to live.” Now there’s a pack of dangerous notions.

In March 2012, then-commissioner of the IRS Douglas Shulman told a hearing of the U.S. House that, “There’s absolutely no targeting.” He also said, “we pride ourselves on being a non-political, non-partisan agency.” Not so much, as it turns out. Top IRS officials had known about the targeting since the previous summer. The current acting commissioner, Steven Miller, was briefed on the affair in May 2012, but didn’t reveal it to Congress either.

The IRS tells us that “mistakes were made initially, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale.” Some statements parody themselves. And can you imagine the chaos and consternation that would have broken loose in the press if the IRS targeted organizations with “progressive” or “social justice” in their names?

This is a sorry record, folks. Talk about government transparency is cheap. But actions speak louder than words. And these actions are pretty damning.

For too long, “education” and “marketplace” have been two words that didn’t go together. Public education was set up as a public enterprise designed for students and parents from similar backgrounds and experiences.

However, just as the private sector continues to identify and cater to a multitude of needs in the areas of business, health care and more, schools must to do the same to effectively hone students’ intellects and skills so they can reach their full potential.

While many schools remain on target in this mission, those that educate children from economically disadvantaged households have a greater challenge. These schools must be willing to become marketplaces, if you will. They must reinvent themselves to meet the specific needs of their students, who should be inspired to learn, determined to graduate and encouraged to seek higher education.

While a high school degree was once sufficient to enter the workforce, more entry-level positions require some form of higher education. As the Houston Endowment Inc. reported last year, only 21 percent of Texas schoolchildren earn that level of certificate or degree.

We must look at those who leave high school prematurely and who choose not to seek higher education and encourage them to stay in the classroom.

As a father of four and 11-year member of the Texas Legislature, I have had countless opportunities to witness the challenges of many families and schools. After years of research and numerous conversations with educators, parents and students, I have realized that to best serve disadvantaged communities, the education marketplace must design new schools supported by five fundamental pillars:

A relentless focus on a new mission statement: “Students are expected to attend and graduate from a technical school, a two-year college, or a four-year university.” All activities, projects, evaluations and testing should constantly be measured by whether or not they support the mission statement. If they don’t, they must be jettisoned.

A culture of high expectations: Values such as hard work, self-discipline, commitment to excellence, integrity, imagination, kindness, gratitude, respect, self control and “no shortcuts” must become the new language, not just buzz words. Because children spend more time awake in their schools than they do in their homes, the new marketplace must acknowledge and accept this responsibility.

Strong campus leadership and powerful teacher collaboration: School leaders have local control with oversight over budgets and faculties. They must run their schools instilling in students the importance of higher education while building a culture that ensures intelligent and kind leaders of tomorrow.

Parent commitment: A partnership involving both family and faculty working together and focused on the individual child. If parents or guardians won’t or can’t come to the school, the school must go to them. Parents must understand and commit to such things as a structured, predictable time for learning at home.

Extended Learning Time: This new school model involves longer hours for student learning to mirror the 8-5 workday and may involve some weekends and a modified summer break. Learning and understanding difficult subjects can only be mastered by spending more time studying those subjects or by offering two blocks of key subjects such as math, grammar and science. ELT includes such integrated experiences as including sports, dance and the arts.

Several charter schools like KIPP Academy and YES Prep, along with Spring Branch ISD, have already employed many of these pillars with success.

One size no longer fits all. If we truly care about effectively educating all of our children, this is the new formula.

Bohac, a Republican, represents the Houston area.

Last weekend, as I traveled through South Texas, I met some of these people.  The stories they shared with me illustrate the humanity of the immigration debate that all sides must acknowledge.

In Rio Grande City, I met a young woman who came to Texas to escape persecution in El Salvador several years ago. She did so illegally, paying thousands of dollars to be smuggled across the border.

After arriving in Texas, she fell victim to the same man she had entrusted to bring her into the country. He beat her, raped her, and forced her into a life of prostitution. For years she endured this terror and misery, until she summoned the courage to reach out for help.

By the tragic standards of illegal immigration, some would say she’s among the lucky ones. Unlike so many others, she survived the grueling trek through South Texas that has needlessly taken the lives of so many.

For ranchers in Brooks County, some 70 miles north of the border, the sight of illegal border-crossers traversing their land is routine.

In my short time there, I saw many.

Even so, it is often the migrants you don’t see trudging through the brush that offer the most heart wrenching reminder of the dismal state of our immigration system.

These ranchers told me how terribly common it is to find human remains around their homes.  These are the ones who didn’t make it – the ones who fell behind and were left to do die by a smuggler who treated them like expendable chattel.  In an effort to save lives, many ranchers leave stashes of water throughout their property, but the corpses continue to accumulate at an alarming rate.

It falls upon the Brooks County Sheriff’s Department to respectfully retire the unidentified remains.  I met with County Judge Raul Ramirez in Falfurrias, where he led me through a section of the local cemetery that has been set aside for this purpose.

Row after row of burial mounds cover three sections of the cemetery.  At the head of each mound is a simple aluminum marker bearing a serial number, a date, and a brusque description of what lies beneath: “female skeleton,” “skull,” “bones.”

Unknown and unidentified, they lay far from home and far from the American dream that lured them across the border.

Each grave tells a story that ends in tragedy, and collectively they tell the story of a broken immigration system and a border that is still porous.  The notion that these people died for the chance to live and work amongst us is at once humbling and horrifying.

As Americans, we have built a great country, but we have not built the immigration system necessary to serve it.

A great country deserves a great immigration system.  This means recognizing the incentives that lead to the growing number of nameless burial mounds. It means understanding the malevolent forces that transact in human flesh.  And it means giving federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies the resources they need to save lives and uphold our laws.

The basic challenge of immigration reform will be to reconcile our compassion as Americans to the fundamental importance of the rule of law, without yielding to either.  As a policymaker, I have a responsibility to find real solutions to these issues that are all-too-familiar to Texans.  Anything less only perpetuates this grotesque human tragedy playing out every day on American soil.

We deserve better. We deserve the truth.

President Obama, tell us the truth about what happened in Benghazi, the truth about political groups being targeted by the Internal Revenue Service, and the truth about how problematic Obamacare is turning out to be.

First, Benghazi. Long-simmering skepticism over the State Department’s contention four Americans were murdered in the midst of a “spontaneous” protest against an anti-Islamic YouTube video was confirmed when it was revealed high-ranking administration officials edited out the references to terrorism in their talking points.

Why? The State Department worried the information “could be abused by members of [Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings…”

The lives of our countrymen are surely more important than any concerns about political fallout. How could such a statement be written in the wake of these tragic murders? And why did the White House, just last week, falsely tell the American people that the State Department never edited the talking points?

Next, the Department of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has found that conservative and Tea Party groups, after complaining for years of being unfairly targeted by the IRS, were indeed, singled out for extra scrutiny – harkening back to the dark tactics employed by the Nixon Administration and its “enemies list.”

Likewise, it appears that Jewish and pro-Israel groups were also targeted. Senior officials at IRS have known since 2011 that the agency had inappropriately flagged these groups, yet, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman testified – falsely – to Congress in March 2012, “There’s absolutely no targeting.”

In 2008, the state of Oregon decided to extend Medicaid eligibility to the same population group that Texas is now considering: low-income, able-bodied adults who are currently uninsured.  Without the funding to expand coverage to everyone meeting that criteria, Oregon lawmakers devised a novel solution — a randomly-selected lottery for qualified applicants.  This lottery afforded an intriguing opportunity to conduct a large-scale, scientific survey comparing the 6,387 low-income adults newly enrolled in Medicaid with another 5,842 individuals who remained uninsured.

Though individuals enrolled in Medicaid utilized 35% more medical services and 15% more prescription drugs than the uninsured, the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment found that the Medicaid group’s measurable health outcomes (such as blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar levels) showed no statistically significant improvement when compared to the control group.  More puzzling still, the study found no decline in emergency room visits and a 30% increase in overall hospital admissions.

Clearly, this counterintuitive outcome has raised a number of questions.  The study would seem to suggest that in spite of increased access to preventative care and improved identification of individual health risks, the Medicaid group didn’t take advantage of that knowledge to make the kind of lifestyle changes needed for any lasting improvement to one’s health.

The inherent flaw of Obamacare is that an individual’s health is, above all else, a matter of personal responsibility.  No matter how well-intentioned, no law handed down from Austin or Washington can ever force a person to quit smoking, eat healthier, or exercise regularly.  Each are personal choices left to the individual, and each plays a far greater role in determining individual health than insurance coverage ever will.  This may come as a surprise (or at least a disappointment), but there is no magic bullet to improving one’s health…it requires commitment, diligence, and self-control.

If providing comprehensive, preventative health care in Oregon resulted in increased utilization and cost but no corresponding improvement in actual health, then why would Texas expand its Medicaid program as well?

However, the news isn’t all bad.  Despite showing no measurable improvement in overall health, those covered by Medicaid suffered almost no catastrophic, out-of-pocket medical expenses over the study’s two-year timeframe.

Which gets to the heart of what health insurance was originally intended to be: not all things to all people, but a safety net to guard against the crushing expense of a truly catastrophic medical emergency.

Let’s think about this another way.  All drivers in the state of Texas are required to carry automotive insurance. These plans are relatively affordable, generally carry high deductibles, and are designed as a financial safeguard against only the most serious auto accidents.  Most Americans would never dream of billing their car insurance company for routine, low-cost auto maintenance, such as an oil change or tire rotation, but that’s precisely what we’ve come to expect from our health insurance.

If Oregon has anything to teach Texas, it’s that Medicaid expansion really shouldn’t be a comprehensive, gold-plated health plan, but rather a low-cost, high-deductible system of emergency health coverage that focuses on the one thing we’ve actually proven we can change…keeping patients who suffer from a serious medical event from going broke as a result.

Try as it might, government will never be able to legislate personal responsibility.  But what it can do, and should do, is form the kind of health care system that rewards personal responsibility and puts patients back in charge of their health care.  Options such as variable benefit packages, copayments, health savings accounts, and high-deductible emergency care plans have a far greater potential to keep costs under control and keep patients out of bankruptcy.

However, the federal government won’t allow Texas the flexibility to implement these solutions in our state’s Medicaid plan.  Rather than forcing a poorly-conceived expansion of our overburdened Medicaid program, Washington should give Texas the freedom to use these kinds of innovative approaches to provide real, sustainable relief to our state’s uninsured.

We can solve the challenges facing our health care system, but a one-size-fits-all Medicaid solution just doesn’t fit Texas.  We should learn from the lesson of Oregon, and realize that the government’s role in health care should be as limited as possible and narrowly focused on improving the things we can change, rather than throwing more and more money at the things we never will.

Senator Charles Schwertner is a medical doctor serving his first term in the Texas Senate.  Dr. Schwertner represents the citizens of Senate District 5, a ten-county region of Central and East Texas which includes Brazos, Freestone, Grimes, Leon, Limestone, Madison, Milam, Robertson, Walker and Williamson counties.

We face a number of critical issues this session, and two of my top priorities are the budget and public education.

I have always believed that a good leader is a good listener, and I am committed to working closely with local elected officials, community leaders and local citizens to solve these issues in a way that best represents our local community.

The Texas State Constitution requires that the legislature pass a balanced budget. Two years ago while facing a $27 billion shortfall, the Texas Legislature passed a balanced state budget without raising taxes while maintaining essential state services. We had to prioritize spending, make tough choices, and balance our books, just like Memorial/Spring Branch families and businesses have to do. And because we were able to balance the budget without raising taxes, the state’s economy is recovering, revenue projections are on the rise and the state’s unemployment rate is at its lowest in four years.

This session, I remain committed to balancing our state budget without raising taxes. Burgeoning revenues and low unemployment validate our “Texas Model” as an economic engine, and we must continue to promote policies, principles, and a balanced regulatory environment that keeps our state and citizens on the path to prosperity.

Public education spending makes up nearly 57 percent of our state budget, the largest single expenditure in our state’s budget, followed by healthcare spending at 26 percent. While I support adding more money directly to our classrooms, different approaches to educating our children must also be pursued in order to truly achieve education excellence and encourage innovation. We must have an education system that focuses on student outcomes, and our measurements must be in line with our mission statement.

The state of Texas should establish its primary education goal as ensuring that each student is fully prepared to receive a technical certificate, two-year degree or four-year degree upon high school graduation, with no remedial education; in other words, they must be prepared on “day 1” to do post high school educational classroom work. With every decision we make concerning education, we need to ask ourselves, “Does this get us closer to the goal?

The education model and calendar of Texas schools is built largely on an agrarian, antiquated system. Our children need to be educated for a 21st century world and we need to assess the effectiveness of our current school calendar and strategy. Extended learning time, virtual learning, public school choice, and increased teacher quality are all components that can contribute to bringing the education industry’s “best practices” together to redefine public education in Texas. Our children, especially those in economically disadvantage areas of Texas, are counting on us to give them true access to a high quality public education.

The cap on charter schools in Texas should be increased, but equally important is accountability. We hold poor performing public schools accountable and we must do the same with poor performing charter schools. Spring Branch ISD is an innovation-oriented school district and has collaborated with KIPP and Yes Prep to form a public/charter partnership at two schools in West Houston. These partnerships should be encouraged to help spread the best practices developed in one school or district with those around the state. We are very fortunate in Spring Branch to have a school system that is not afraid to think “outside of the box.”

There is a lot of work to be done in the 83rd Texas Legislature, and I look forward to working with members of our local community to represent the best interests of West Harris County.

Rep. Dwayne Bohac, a Republican, represents Texas House District 138.

A study by the International Water Association notes that agriculture uses 70 percent of the world’s water to irrigate 20 percent of the world’s cropland in order to produce 40 percent of the world’s food. In the United States, the energy sector withdraws 40 percent of the nation’s water to cool power plants and fuel turbines.

In the face of a growing population, rapid urbanization, and limited access to diminishing natural resources, it’s imperative that we embrace a progressive shift in the way that we think about how to ensure future security in these three areas.

Fortunately, the state’s leadership came to Austin in January prepared to tackle this challenge head-on, and finally put together a solution to our water crisis that would address the Stress Nexus and prepare Texas for the 80 percent population increase we’re expected to see by 2060.

House Natural Resources Chairman Allan Ritter worked hard to bring forward a solution in the form of HB 4 and HB 11. These bills were developed to create a water infrastructure bank that will lend money to local entities, at much lower rates than they could get on the open market, to build projects that will ensure every community in Texas has the water it needs for the future.

HB 4, the bill that set up the framework for the State Water Infrastructure Fund, passed both the House and Senate early in the session, signaling the Legislature’s commitment to fixing our water predicament. However, when it came time for the Texas House to fund the solution proposed in HB 4, it appears some let politics get in the way of fixing a major problem facing our state.

HB 11 would take $2 billion from the state’s Economic Stabilization Fund, also known as the “rainy day fund,” to provide the seed money for the water infrastructure bank that will fund these low interest loans.

Due in large part to the booming oil and gas industry, the rainy day fund contains nearly $12 billion. Using just 15 percent of this fund to address one of the most vital needs of our state should be a no brainer.

As the House began to move this proposal forward, it became clear that a contingent of the membership was intent on holding water funding for ransom in exchange for more education money.

Despite the House’s commitment to funding education — in the form of a $5 billion increase over last session — and fully funding Medicaid, these members imprudently killed HB 11 using a procedural tool.

The Republicans in the House have worked in good faith with the Democrats to make education a top priority this session. While adequately funding education is a major goal of this Legislature, so should be addressing our water crisis.

The Democrats in the House are risking all of the gains in education and health care they realized through negotiations with the Republicans by attempting to stop us from accessing the rainy day fund, unless they are allowed to sweeten their top two priorities even more. This is undermining the unprecedented bipartisan cooperation we have seen over the first four months of the session and, frankly, it is bad for Texas.

Without water we will stop attracting jobs to Texas and severely limit food supplies. Providing education, healthcare and water funding are all major responsibilities of the Legislature, but they shouldn’t be competing priorities.

Rather, members of the Legislature can and should work together to achieve all of these worthy objectives.