Updated at 10:19 p.m.: to include final roll call on budget.

AUSTIN — The Texas House late Thursday passed a $246.8 billion, two-year state budget that would move cautiously and delay spending tens of billions in forthcoming federal aid.

“These are one-time relief dollars,” said Rep. Greg Bonnen, the House’s chief budget writer, referring to nearly $35 billion in federal COVID-19 money already approved by Washington for the state and its public schools. The dollars appear likely to sit idle for months.

“We want to use them appropriately, so that we don’t create a dependence,” explained Bonnen, a Friendswood Republican.

Democrats warned of ceding too much control to GOP Gov. Greg Abbott after lawmakers go home when the session ends May 31. And at the urging of Victoria Republican Geanie Morrison, the House voted 147-0 to require that none of the piles of federal relief and stimulus money be spent unless the Legislature – in regular or special session – has approved.

The budget, which advanced by a vote of 149-0, now goes to the Senate, setting up an end-of-session haggle over a final product.

In a daylong debate marked by unusual calm, House members sidestepped most incendiary topics, as members of both parties pulled down amendments likely to provoke lengthy wrangles.

A few times, tempers flared, such as when Fort Worth Democrat Nicole Collier called an amendment by freshman Bedford Republican Jeff Cason “evil” because it would bar the teaching in public schools of anything about “critical race theory.” Arlington Republican Tony Tinderholt called that out of bounds, and Speaker Pro Tem Joe Moody, D-El Paso, reminded members to be civil.

While Democrats generally failed to loosen any of the state’s purse strings — in what even GOP budget writers acknowledged is a tightfisted spending plan — they won two largely symbolic victories for traditional public schools.

By 115-29, House members adopted Robstown Democrat Abel Herrero and New Boston Republican Gary VanDeaver’s amendment that would bar spending any state funds on school vouchers, educational savings accounts or tax credit scholarships to send kids to private schools.

As in the past, the amendment, which tends to be discarded in late-session budget negotiations, enjoyed strong support from virtually all Democrats and many Republicans, most of them rural.

By a voice vote, the chamber accepted Austin Democrat Eddie Rodriguez’s proposed prohibition of using federal relief dollars for education to lessen the state’s pledge in the budget of its own financial support of public schools. The money would have “to supplement state spending, not supplant it,” Rodriguez explained.

But in a major setback for Democrats, Republicans closed ranks and, invoking a decade of hostility to Obamacare, rejected a proposal to coax leaders of the state’s executive branch such as Abbott to seek a “Texas solution” on health care for the working poor.

Democrats pleaded that the state could tap into long-rejected federal Medicaid money and buy insurance for about 1 million low-income adults, using private plans with “tailored benefits” and copayments, and not through expanding traditional Medicaid. But the chamber defeated the proposal, 80-68, with only one Republican voting “aye,” San Antonio’s Lyle Larson.

Abbott, though, took some hits — some of them of a familiar variety.

Led by two of the House’s most staunchly conservative Republicans, Tinderholt and freshman Bryan Slaton of Royse City, members pulled $145 million of general-purpose state revenue from two of Abbott’s most cherished economic development funds.

The $45 million proposed for film, music and video game production subsidies instead would go to retired teachers’ health care.

“Texas can prioritize Hollywood filmmakers and record labels or … fund retired teachers’ health care costs,” said Tinderholt, author of that switch.

Also striking a conservative populist tone, Slaton defended his push to remove all $100 million proposed for Abbott’s deal-closing Texas Enterprise Fund and shift it to easing the tax bills homeowners and businesses pay to school districts.

“We should be … lowering property taxes before we support big business with corporate welfare,” he said.

In the past, many such swipes at governors’ pet programs have disappeared in subsequent negotiations, as five senators and five House members decide the budget’s final shape. As governor, Abbott has weapons to fend off incursions into his office’s budget, such as the power to veto bills and call members back for a special session.

Paxton pushback, abortion, voter law

Attorney General Ken Paxton faced pushback against his ask for $43 million to hire two law firms to assist in a multistate antitrust suit against Google.

Dallas Democrat Jessica González noted news reports that senior lawyers at the firms could receive as much as $3,780 an hour.

“We really need to protect our hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” she said. The House voted 73-64 to impose a cap of $500 an hour for state reimbursement of outside lawyers hired by Paxton.

By 81-62, members rebuffed a proposal by freshman Democrat Ann Johnson of Houston, a former prosecutor, to take $20 million in the next cycle from Alternatives to Abortion, a state program that finances crisis pregnancy centers, and give it to efforts to combat human trafficking.

Moments later, Fort Worth Republican Matt Krause won adoption, 88-58, of his plan to give the program that seeks to dissuade women from ending their pregnancies an additional $20 million, taken from IT programs at the Health and Human Services Commission.

Cypress Republican Tom Oliverson, one of many state GOP leaders upset that airlines such as American and Delta, and companies such as Dell Technologies and Coca-Cola, have criticized voter-law changes pending in red states such as Texas and Georgia, submitted language that would require businesses that receive state grants to certify that they hadn’t spoken out that way.

“I, like many of my colleagues, feel frustrated that somehow Fortune 500 companies believe that their voice is more important than the voice of my constituents,” Oliverson said. He then withdrew his amendment, though.

Rep. Kyle Kacal, R-College Station, won approval by voice vote for sending $14 million to the state Department of Public Safety to install bulletproof windshields and windows in patrol cars.

In or near his district, he recalled, state Trooper Damon Allen was gunned down during a traffic stop in Freestone County in 2017. Trooper Chad Walker was ambushed last month while stopping to assist what he believed was the driver of a disabled vehicle in Limestone County, Kacal said.

“It will save lives,” he said of his amendment.

At the last minute, Kacal changed it to take the $14 million from an unspecified portion of the economic development and tourism promotion programs in Abbott’s office — not the criminal justice grants the governor controls, as originally proposed.

Moody, the speaker pro tem, successfully tacked on a requirement that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice prepare a plan on how much it would cost to provide air conditioning in all inmate housing areas of the 100 state-run jails and prisons. Currently, only about 1 in 4 of the lockups’ dorms have air conditioning.

2.6% budget hike

House members’ budget would spend $117.9 billion of state general-purpose revenue, or 2.6% more than the one they passed last session. That’s almost exactly the same amount that the Senate’s version, passed last month, would spend.

Like the Senate’s, the House’s version would fully fund improvements to school finance and the state’s buying down of local school property tax rates that lawmakers approved in 2019.

But as the chief education budget writer, Rep. Terry Wilson, R-Marble Falls, explained, “Overall, you won’t see many additional funding items adopted at this time.”

Southlake Republican Giovanni Capriglione, who oversaw drafting of the House’s health care and social services budget, put the same thought another way:

“What this budget accomplishes is largely maintaining.”

The state would continue, as in the Senate version, to spend $797 million in the next cycle to ramp up a state law enforcement presence at the Texas-Mexico border. That’s about $3.5 million less than Texas is spending on border security in this cycle.

On the $16.7 billion the state will receive from President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, and the nearly $18 billion that law and one signed in December by then-President Donald Trump will provide Texas schools, Democrats tried to pin down Bonnen on when it might be spent.

Bonnen, the choice of Speaker Dade Phelan to head House Appropriations, said the state was still seeking clarification from federal officials on how to use the assistance, intended by Congress for fighting COVID-19 and the recession caused by the pandemic.

The prospect that the coronavirus pandemic might be in the rearview mirror — though that’s hardly a certainty — before state GOP leaders disgorge the federal money nettles most Democrats in the Legislature, who want to see it spent faster.

“We shouldn’t have unilateral control of the executive branch over this level of funding,” said House Democratic Caucus chairman Chris Turner of Grand Prairie. “The Legislature needs to be involved.”

Bonnen assured Turner that lawmakers would be, though some Democrats are wary of Bonnen’s plan for creating a 10-member Board of Administration of Federal Funds to make such decisions.

In higher education, the House would join the Senate in providing TEXAS Grants, the state’s main financial aid program, to only about 56% of students from families with modest incomes who are eligible for an initial-year stipend, according to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

While there’s a reporting lag, this academic year, the state was projected to serve 87,556 students. Using an average award of $5,000 per recipient, both chambers’ budgets would fund about 87,000 students in the 2022-23 fiscal year.

Austin Democrat Donna Howard said that as the pandemic deepens economic hardship, lawmakers ought to turn on the federal spigot and fully fund financial aid at all levels of higher education.

“Despite our promise to students and their families,” she lamented, “we only serve 19% of eligible community college students and 30% of the technical and state college students.”

Howard, though, reluctantly sent her amendment, which would have spent about $655 million of American Rescue Plan Act funds to serve 100% of college students who are eligible for aid, to a section at the back of the budget bill known as “Article XI.” In more common vernacular, it’s a wish list where some of lawmakers’ favorite proposals generally die.