govt 2306 state and local legislatures. this is the first of three sections designed to give an...
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This is the first of three sections designed to give an overview of the
three branches of Texas Government.
This section contains background information about the legislative
branch in general, as well as some description of the legislature at the
state level.
But the point here is to get used to what a legislature is all about, and what role in plays in the governing
system.
Special attention is given to the unique role that state legislatures
play in the federal system.
For an overall look at the legislature, you might want to click
through the Wikipedia entry on legislature. They also have a page
on the Texas Legislature, and if you look to the bottom of the page
you’ll notice separate links to each of the 82 sessions held by the
legislature.
The Texas Legislature entry in the Texas State Historical Association website provides a good historical
look at the development of the legislature overtime.
The Texas Senate also has a booklet available that briefly
explains how the Texas Legislature works.
There are many similar resources available, I’ll provide links here and
there.
You might also find this website worth looking through. The NCSL is an interest group that focuses on
issues important to state legislatures.
National Conference of State Legislatures
Legislatures also exist on the local level. Cities however are the only local government that has what
can be clearly defined as a legislature.
They are called City Councils.
Other local governments are headed by commissions and
boards that do not have a similar legislative function. They have limited powers defined by the
state.
Counties are headed by a locally elected commissioners court, and single purpose governments are
generally headed by elected boards.
Their functions are restricted by state law – more on this below.
Question:
How much power should a legislature have? Since the
legislature is specifically tied into the general population, this is also
a way to ask, how much power should the general population
have in governing?
A variety of states have legislatures that are designed to meet regularly between elections, pay legislators
full time salaries, and provide funds for large staffs to allow for
effective constituent service.
These are professional legislatures. Legislators are considered to be
full time employees.
They tend to be in states that have more of an activist orientation
towards the role of government.
Other states, including Texas, have legislatures that meet for short
periods of time and are paid small salaries.
These are used in state that want a more limited legislature.
These are amateur legislatures. The idea is that legislators should
work part-time and spend the majority of their time working their regular jobs in their home districts.
This is a simplistic analysis, but states have at least two different
ways to look at the role legislatures should play in the
governing process.
One quick point:
The legislature is the democratic branch of government. It is
specifically designed to represent the diverse interests that exist in
the state (or whatever unit of government it exists in).
While this is a simple point, the process for providing democratic representation can get complex
quickly.
As on the national level, legislatures are generally
composed of people (called legislators) elected from separate districts spread evenly across the
political unit in question.
Like the US Congress, state legislatures, with the exception of Nebraska, are bicameral. They
contain a House which is closely connected to the people and A Senate which is further
removed from it.
This reflects an ongoing conflict regarding the best way for a legislature to represent the
population. Should it be responsive to immediate shifts in public preferences, or
should there be some distance between the preferences of the population and actions of the
legislature?
Houses of Representatives are designed to be closely connected
to the general population.
Terms of office tend to be short, and each legislator represents a district with a small number of
people.
The 150 members of the Texas House each serve 2 years terms of office and represent approximately
150,000 people.
Senates are further removed further from the electorate.
Terms of office are longer and the districts are larger.
The 31 members of the Texas Senate represent about 800,000
people for four year terms.
The terms overlap, so roughly half of the members of the Senate face
the voters each election.
Notice that the districts in within each chamber are about the same
size in numbers. This is a consequence of a series of court that saw equal court districts as
being necessary in order to provide equal representation.
Unequal representation violates the unwritten principle of “one
person, one vote.”
This was established nationally in Baker v. Carr, and applied to the
states in Reynolds v Sims.
Key point: In a bicameral legislature, each chamber has the power to veto the decisions of the
others.
Laws can only proceed to the executive for a possible signature if it is accepted by majorities in both
chambers.
Many cities – especially larger ones – have city councils.
They tend to not be very large, and their specific function can vary
depending on the specific design of the government under the city
charter.
In an At-Large District the city council members represents the
entire city while in a Single-Member District they represent a specific district carved out within
the city.
At one point most districts at the city level were at-large, but this was demonstrated to allow for discrimination since minority
populations were unable to elect any members of their groups to
office.
By carving the city into smaller districts, these groups could be
drawn into a specific district and then they would be far more able
to represent one of their members to office.
The federal government, through the Voting Rights Act has required
cities in Texas – especially the larger ones: Dallas, Houston and
San Antonio – to use single member districts in its city
councils.
Most contain a mix of the two.
Houston has 5 members elected at large and 11 elected from single members districts. Alvin has 2 at
large members and 5 elected from single member districts.
An important obvious point needs to be made about districts:
They have to be drawn. This process is exceptionally
contentious. Every state has its own way of doing so, but
ultimately the process is up to the state legislature.
In Texas, this function has been delegated to the Texas Legislative Redistricting Board, and as with all other aspects of electoral laws in the state, their decisions have to
pre-cleared by federal judges in a process outlined in the Voting Rights Act.
This includes the redrawing of state and federal districts.
Some state have independent redistricting commissions which attempt to remove political
people from the process.
Ballotpedia has information on state-by-state redistricting procedures
.
After every census, the apportionment of members of
Congress to each state is changed in order to reflect population shifts. Each state is given the
power to determine what to do with these seats. All have opted to assign each member of Congress
to represent a single member district.
Since Texas has steadily grown over its history, the number of
seats apportioned to it has grown over time. The question for the
Texas Legislature has always been, where to allocate these districts in the state? What will their borders
look like? Who will be represented?
The same questions pertain to State House and Senate districts.
Drawing the borders of districts allows for manipulation. The name
give to this process is gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering can defeat the democratic nature of
representation by altering how different populations are
represented. Population centers can be carved in such a way that a group may be underrepresented.
They are especially effective ways for powerful interests, that are becoming minorities, to break
apart majorities so they can retain power.
Here are examples of techniques:
Cracking
Dividing up a sizeable group into several districts to deny it the
power to elect a representative to a legislature
Packing
Concentrating the voters of some group (racial, partisan or whatever)
in a single district in order to minimize the possible number of
districts those voters can dominate.
Gerrymandering – controversially – can also be used to boost minority
representation.
This can be problematic because if the minority in question is a racial minority,
taking race into consideration can violate the equal protection clause. Race is a suspect classification according to the
Supreme Court.
This means that they have special power over the collection of
revenue (the establishment of taxes), the level of spending, and
the treasury (the passage of appropriations bills).
It makes sense that the institution designed to be closest to the general population has the
greatest control the purse strings.
This process will be covered more fully in later sections.
Law MakingRepresentation
Constituent ServiceExecutive Oversight
Amend the Constitution
here’s a quick comment on each:
The most common description of the legislature is that it is the law
making branch of government.
The purpose of the legislature is to provide a venue where laws are proposed, considered and either
approved or disapproved.
That last point is very important because legislative institutions contain internal
procedures that actually make it difficult for laws to be passed. There are many
stages in the process where bills can be stopped.
We will discuss these procedures – the bill making process - more thoroughly later.
A small percentage of the bill introduced are passed into law.
Nationally, roughly 160,000 bills are introduced each year while only
25,000 pass. In 203, 5,592 bills were introduced into the Texas Legislature,
1,384 were passed into law.
Various types of bill that are considered. Here three basic
categories in Texas:
General, Special, Local
A general bill deals with a general matter of public policy and applies to everyone and everything in the state, a special or local bill deals
with the needs of a specific person or group, or in the case of local
bills, a specific defined geographical area.
In addition to bills, legislatures can also pass resolutions, which are
defined as a “formal expression of opinion or decision” by one or both houses of the legislature.
As the democratic branch, it is expected that the legislature will
provide the opportunity for all interests in society to have their
grievances heard.
The appropriate question to ask is whether this is in fact the case.
Let’s look at two ways to look at representation:
1 – socio-demographic2 - principal - agent
Socio-Demographic representation refers to whether the legislature contains within it the same socio-demographic breakdown one sees
in the general population.
This is rarely the case.
The breakdown of state legislators according to gender, race,
occupation and level of income rarely matches that of the overall
population.
While legislatures have become more diverse, they are still over-
represent males and Anglos.
And legislators are far more likely to not only be highly educated, they are far more likely to be
lawyers and/or business people.
Click here for membership statistics
for the Texas Legislatures 82nd Session.
Some of these differences – especially regarding lawyers and business people – are interesting
to note. They both tend to be more tapped into existing political networks that can channel them into politics and elected office.
But the greater point is that legislatures tend to not reflect the socio-demographic breakdown of
the general electorate.
So does this mean they fail in providing adequate
representation?
Some argue that it does, they will be more likely to focus on the
interests of the wealthy.
Those who have the ability to provide them the contributions
necessary to stay in office.
But others argue that legislators should be considered in the same way that we consider any other
hired professional, as people with unique skill sets that are hired to perform a function, and can be
retained or removed from office depending on whether they do a
satisfactory job.
In this case it might be beneficial to have people with legal backgrounds, as well as a
history in the legislature, in order to provide effective representation.
They are “agents” that provide a service to “principals” who evaluate their
performance in periodic elections and retain them if they approved of recent
performance.
“Constituent” is the term used to refer to the people who are
represented by a member of the legislature.
Most typically it refers to the people who live in the district the
member of the legislature is elected from.
You are the constituent of the person who holds the office in the State
House and Senate, and US House and Senate districts you live in.
If you don’t know who they are, you can find out here.
Click here for a list of the types of things a constituent of a member of
Congress might get for being a constituent.
The staff of members of Congress contain people who focus on
constituent service. Less money is available at the state level – especially
Texas – to do similar things.
Texas provides each member of the legislature about $10,000 a
month for staffing.
That ain’t much, so members have little ability to process requests for constituent service. This falls in line
with overall efforts to restrict governmental activity in the state.
Interesting link:
Here’s a website promoting software that helps legislative
staffs with demands for constituent service.
But “constituent” can have more narrow meanings as well.
Members of the legislatures are generally elected by being
members of a political party that promote a certain agenda that is
more likely to benefit certain groups over others.
Their constituency might then be better thought of as being those
people who provide electoral and financial support for the members.
It may be more likely that the legislator is more likely to
introduce and fight for legislation favored by them.
One of the factors that can explain whether a member of the legislature can effectively
represent their constituents is how much they know about the
legislative process, specifically, how much experience they have about how things are done in the
legislature.
Seniority
Senior members – those who have held office for a while – tend to be
more effective then junior members.
Click here for the seniority order of individual members of the Texas
Legislatures’ 81st Session.
This complicates efforts by some to impose term limits on members of
legislatures, because the less members serve, the less
experience they have in the process. They can be ineffective
legislators as a result.
The legislature has a special role to play in overseeing the actions of
the executive branch.
This is part of its broader responsibilities with the system of
checks and balances, and it also applies to the judicial branch as
well.
Legislative committees are established and have a direct connection with some of the specific agencies within the
executive branch.
We will cover committees in a future section, but think of a
committee as an official group of legislators charged with reviewing legislation over a specific subject
matter, and then with the ability to oversee how the executive agency
charged with implementing the law is doing so.
Here is a list of committees in the Texas House.
This gives you an idea of the range of subjects covered by these
committees.
Committees regularly conduct oversight hearings – and can do so
when the legislature is not in session. Any discoveries made
during these hearings can lead to future legislation focusing on those
discoveries.
This helps explain why the legislative process – and public policy formation in general – is
never ending.
In previous sections, we looked over the Texas Constitution and
discussed the restrictions it places on governing institutions.
We also looked at the fact that the constitution has been heavily
amended since its original ratification.
This has been done in order to allow government to do certain things it
would otherwise not be able to do as a consequence of constitutional limits.
Click here for a quick description of the process. If you are very ambitious click here for the TLC’s list of amendments
since 1876, as of March 2012.
Ballotpedia provides a description of the amendment process across
all states.
Proposals to amend the Texas Constitution begin with a 2/3rds
vote in each chamber of the legislature, and then must be
approved by a simple majority of the voters in a statewide election.
Note that the governor has no role to play in the process.
Here are a few words on the internal organizations of state
legislatures.
There will be more specific information about this in
upcoming sections.
Each chamber is headed by a presiding officer.
In the House of Representatives, the position is called the Speaker.
In the Senate – at least in Texas – the position is held by the
Lieutenant Governor.
When we discuss these positions more deeply, we will analyze the factors that make these positions
powerful, or not.
With very few exceptions, legislators are elected to office as
members of one of the two dominant parties in the nation – the Democrats and Republicans.
But while these two parties dominate the US Congress, they
tend not to dominate stet legislatures.
Nevertheless, members of each party tend to meet as members of party caucuses in order to develop strategies for pushing their goals.
As mentioned above, state legislatures have multiple
committees that focus on specific issues.
The individuals who head these committees, occupy positions of
power in the legislature.
Ballotpedia has a section devoted to elections in state legislatures.
Here’s their page focused on Texas elections in 2012.
Some background reading: The Emergence of Colonial Government
.
A little more history:
The evolving Texas Legislature
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