Pub. 60 2019-2020 Issue 4

33 SUMMER 2020  TEXAS LEGISLATURE — CONTINUED ON PAGE 34 Success is no accident It is hard work, perseverance, commitment, never giving up, sacrifice, getting results and the LOVE of what you are doing. For over 20 YEARS we have been LOVING what we do…. WHY WOULD YOU TRUST YOUR BUSINESS TO ANYONE ELSE? 20 years of putting YOUR dealership profits FIRST! www.firstinnovations.com www.firstinsuredgroup.com The First Group Family of Companies Better Products • Better Prices • Better Service four years after the establishment of home rule in Texas, Hobby took the lead at the Capitol on behalf of the women suffrage movement. Hobby acquiesced to a push by the state’s only Hispanic lawmaker for an investigation into the Texas Rangers amid accusations of brutality and executions of innocent people in battles on the border with Pancho Villa and other Mexican outlaws who’d been leading raids there. While a joint House and Senate committee cleared the Texas Rangers despite findings of blatant violations of state criminal and civil laws, the probe culminated in the elite crime-fighting unit’s reorganization and the adoption of professional standards with a new code of conduct and higher pay. Convening less than two months after the Spanish Flu had overwhelmed Texas hospitals before it peaked in the fall of 1918, the 36th Legislature paved the way for the creation of the State Board of Medical Examiners that would be charged with the regulation of policing of physicians with higher standards than those that had in been in place during the influenza outbreak. Lawmakers played supporting roles in the expansion of the Texas health care system in 1919 when the Houston Methodist hospital and other facilities were founded. Lawmakers headed off a push that year for the removal of limitations on liability for physicians and hospitals amid concerns that greedy lawyers would attempt to capitalize on the carnage and suffering that the Spanish Flu had inflicted here several months earlier. The disease had killed at least 2,100 people in Texas where that unofficial death toll had been dramatically higher across the state where doctors hadn't been required to report Spanish Flu cases and were unable to confirm them with testing like they have now. The Legislature appropriated several million dollars in 1919 for the expansion of the Houston Ship Channel, created the State Home for Dependent and Neglected Children in Waco, added the state College of Mines and Metallurgy in El Paso to the University of Texas System before it became known as UTEP. While the state budget had been a patchwork quilt of ap- propriations that were contained in an assortment of other bills and difficult to track, lawmakers in 1919 inserted a  TEXAS LEGISLATURE — CONTINUED FROM PAGE 30