Once again, it’s time to amend Texas’ peculiar constitution
Seven proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution are on the Nov. 3 ballot. You would think that being asked to change the state’s governing document would be a pretty big deal and would excite voters to turn out in droves, but you would think wrong. Amending the Texas Constitution is a civic duty that generates little public interest — its significance rendered timeworn by its frequency.
The Texas Constitution has been amended 484 times since its adoption in February 1876. Lawmakers propose amendments during the Legislature’s 140-day sessions that start in January of every odd-numbered year, and the proposed amendments are then usually placed on a statewide ballot in November of the same year to be adopted or rejected by voters. There’s no limit on how many amendments legislators can propose as long as each proposal receives two-thirds vote in the Texas House and Senate.
Just since 2001, Texans have been asked to vote on 99 proposed constitutional amendments: 20 in 2001, 22 in 2003, nine in 2005, 17 in 2007, 11 in 2009, 10 in 2011, nine in 2013 and one in 2014. (In 2013, lawmakers pushed a vote on a road-funding amendment to November 2014 rather than put it on the November 2013 ballot as they normally would have.) Voters have approved all but five of this century’s amendments. Back in the day, voters were more inclined to turn down proposed amendments, but contemporary voters rarely reject them.
At least those few voters who bother to cast a ballot rarely reject them. Turnout in constitutional elections is always low.
Early voting for this year’s elections started Monday. Through the first three days of early voting in Travis County, 5,531 of 644,934 registered voters cast a ballot either in person or by mail. That’s a whopping 0.86 percent early turnout. In Williamson County, 1.17 percent of registered voters have bothered to vote early so far.
Granted, it’s early, even for early voting. But turnout will remain anemic. In the constitutional amendment election of 2013, for example, the statewide turnout was 8.55 percent. Amazingly, turnout in Travis County in 2013 was 13.75 percent, which qualifies as heavy voting in a constitutional amendment election.
The Texas Constitution is the awkwardly written product of a revanchist response to Reconstruction as the old, pre-Civil War political order reasserted itself and regained power. State government is weak, curbed by the absence of a provision equivalent to the U.S. Constitution’s “necessary and proper” clause. While legislators occasionally use the government’s weakness as an excuse to punt decisions to voters that they should be making themselves, the Texas Constitution limits state government so severely that every other year voters are asked to consider matters so specific — some of them sometimes of concern only to a single county — that they should have no place in a state’s foundational legal document.
What might have worked for an agrarian society 140 years ago is wildly inadequate for a 21st-century urban, post-industrial and technological Texas, and calls for a constitutional rewrite are heard periodically. Change actually looked possible in the late 1960s and mid-1970s. Dozens of outdated provisions were repealed in 1969, and lawmakers gathered in 1974 to write a new constitution. They fell three votes short of their goal after 150 days of work, and an attempt to salvage some of their revisions the next year also failed. It would behoove us to try again, but we lack the political will and energy to be behooved.
Which, come to think of it, is probably just as well. Reactionary politics gave us our current constitution. One can only imagine what today’s equally reactionary politics would produce. Besides, the 1876 Constitution has been amended so many times by now it’s practically new anyway, however bloated and incoherent it might be.
So let the cumbersome mess endure. Let’s we engaged few amend away. Again.
Just since 2001, Texans have been asked to vote on 99 proposed constitutional amendments.