Texas Senator Pushing for Military Parents Protection

For Immediate Release: March 2, 2009

Sacramento, CA- Texas State Senator Jane Nelson is pushing Texas to join a list of other states amending the states' family law statutes to provide reasonable protection for military parents in child custody cases.

CAFC wants to sincerely thank and applaud Senator Nelson for her dedication to the issues facing deployed military parents and her willingness to stand up for reasonable judicial equity for them in our family law courts. We would also like the thank Travis Broussard, the Policy Analyst on the bill for Senator Nelson, for his thoroughness in handling the details of the bill.

This is not the first time Senator Nelson has taken on the issue. She had originally introduced legislation in 2007 in Senate Bill SB 43. This bill did make its way through the Texas Legislature passing out of all committees but died at the end due to other non related issues that the legislature was faced with, preventing many bills from the final floor vote.

The current bill, SB 279 was introduced in November 2008. As with the first bill, CAFC was contacted by Senator Nelson’s office seeking our assistance with research and witnesses to testify before committees.

CAFC is pleased to announce that the witnesses CAFC helped to provide for SB 43 did an outstanding job and that the bill passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with a unanimous vote in support of the bill by all committee members and appears to be on its way of eventually passing on the floor of the senate.

There is also a companion bill in the House, HB 63 that was introduced by House Member Aycock. HB 63 has been referred to the house judiciary committee and is awaiting a hearing date to be set.

While there are some differences in language between the two bills, we expect that the differences will be worked out in a conference committee for a final floor vote towards the end of their legislative session.

So far CAFC has assisted 8 other states with similar legislation after spearheading the first successful bill in the nation in, SB 1082 Morrow/Ducheny, in California in 2005. Additionally CAFC assisted US Rep. Mike Turner (Ohio) in his successful effort to amend the Service Members Civil Relief Act (SCRA) to add some limited family law protection for military parents in H.R. 4986 . Congressman Turner had introduced another bill in 2008 H.R. 6048 which passed out of the house but was never heard in the senate because of the housing and banking problems facing the country. We hope that Mr. Turner’s efforts in Washington continue.

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For more information contact: Michael Robinson @ 916-749-4033 or info@cafcusa.org