I have a lot of catching up to do. About the same time last week that I finally finished James Haley’s excellent biography of Sam Houston (buy it!), I finally got the backlog of magazines from Austin that I’d been waiting a little over a month for. Five issues of The Week, two issues of the Texas Observer and three issues of the New Yorker. My current schedule doesn’t leave me with much time for anything other than class and work (hence my sparse blogging as of late), so I have been kind of slow getting through them. So, this morning, on the metro, I was happily flipping through the latest Observer, catching up on all the lege news that I’d been out of the loop on, when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that the top of the next page bore of photo of a smiling state Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston).
My heart leapt at the promise of a witty, incisive hit piece on whatever ridiculous cause Patrick has gotten behind now (for the uninitiated, he is the Senator and former right-wing radio host from Houston who was behind SB 182, the odious bill that would have required women considering abortions to listen to the fetal heartbeat before the operation, and the motion to modify the traditional two-thirds rule so that SB 362, aka, the “voter id” bill, could clear the Senate (both bills later died in the House.) Dan Patrick, the little Rush Limbaugh from Houston, is a favorite target of scorn among left-leaning Texas Capitol staffers, and I spent many happy hours in the back of the tour guide office slandering him with my co-workers. So I was excited to see what the Observer would make of him.
Then I looked at the byline.
That’s right folks, Dan Patrick wrote an article that ran in the Texas Observer– my favorite bastion of Texas liberalism and the home of Molly Ivins, Ronnie Dugger and Jim Hightower.
What’s more, I agree with a lot of what he said.
Patrick’s main argument is for a full-time Texas legislature, or at least a less-part-time one. Currently, the 181 state lawmakers are constitutionally restricted to a scant 140 days in session every other year (barring a theoretically unlimited number of 30-day special sessions which are restricted to whatever the governor wants done.)
Patrick makes a pretty persuasive argument for changing this. And I quote:
Here’s the reality: By 2040, the state’s population will double to nearly 50 million. Our budget will likely be well over $500 billion. We’ll need hundreds of miles of new roads, 40,000 or more new teachers, more nurses, more schools, more hospitals.
In legislative time, under the system of meeting every two years, 2040 is only 15 sessions away. Since both chambers spend only about two months of every session actually voting on bills, this means that we have about 30 actual months to solve the problems, and take advantage of the opportunities, of what will likely be the state with the nation’s largest population, economy and budget.
Consider a few other data points. This session’s Legislative Council—a group of 50 state-employed lawyers who write all the legislation, amendments and resolutions—logged 100,000 hours of overtime. The workload increased in some areas by more than 150 percent over just the 2005 session. The council did an outstanding job, but this insane workload created errors that gave some House members the chance to kill important legislation based on minor mistakes.
We cannot continue to operate as we have, with 140-day sessions every other year, and serve the best interests of the people. The jobs of legislators will only grow more difficult as our population grows. Already, each state Senate district is larger than a congressional district in Texas. By 2040, each House member will have nearly 250,000 constituents.
Patrick makes a few suggestions to remedy the problem that he identifies. The first two are pretty straightforward: either the legislature should look towards adopting a full-time schedule, or it should look towards meeting 90 days every year. This would allow for the lege to respond to problems in the state in a more timely fashion, without having to wait for a gubernatorial mandate to convene. This would also cut down on the wait time for important bills that might not make it through the session, and don’t matter enough to the governor to devote special session time to. For instance, bills that would have cut taxes for disabled veterans, enacted long-needed reforms over TxDOT and the Department of Insurance, allowed the state to accept millions of dollars in stimulus money to boost our dwindling unemployment insurance fund, as well as all the renewable energy and energy efficiency legislation proposed this session, died because of Democratic stalling tactics used to keep the voter id bill from coming up for a vote in the House, and, as it stands, Texans will have to wait until 2011 for the next opportunity to deal with these problems. (It is worth noting, though, that plenty of undesirable legislation died in the Democratic “chubfest” as well- like Patrick’s abortion-sonogram bill, and one that would have allowed concealed handguns onto college campuses.)
There are a few Patrick proposals that I am wary of- placing a cap on the number of bills that legislators can propose, for instance, or “retool[ing] its [the House’s] rules so that no one person, or small group, can sabotage an entire session.” Even Patrick is aware of the perils of such an endeavor, and he says as much in the next sentence: “This is a tricky matter, since members must retain the right to stop a bill they feel is bad for their districts or for the state.” In short, ‘we need to retool the rules so that no one can sabotage the session- unless its for something I agree with.’
But Patrick exhibits astonishingly good thinking when he points out that:
Today, the people who can afford to serve are mostly lawyers and wealthy businesspeople. There is nothing wrong with these folks, but we do not have a true cross-section of the people. The average person cannot work for $600 a month and take six months off every other year from their job. I believe Texas would be better served if more citizens could run and hold office. Full-time members would need to be paid a reasonable salary, but in a state our size, that would be a small cost to do the job as it needs to be done.
See? Sometimes, even someone like Dan Patrick can have a few good ideas.
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