Will Texas lawmakers tinker with one founding document, ignore another?
says senators voted Tuesday to jack with the U.S. Constitution instead of focusing on the state’s own problems.
AUSTIN — Our state Senate Tuesday moved our state closer to calling for a convention of the states to tinker with the U.S. Constitution.
What’s needed more, or course, is a convention of the state — our state — to deal with the Texas Constitution, a bloated guiding document that’s been patched almost 500 times. The patches were needed because the Texas Constitution is more a set of specific laws than a guiding document. And that means messing with the whole thing at once would mean opening a Pandora’s box of worms, to combine cliches for impact.
Vermont has the shortest state constitution at about 8,400 words. Alabama has the longest at 345,000. Texas’ has about 90,000.
“War and Peace” is how Sen. Craig Estes, R-Wichita Falls, summed up the size of the Texas Constitution when I chatted with him prior to Tuesday’s Senate debate on a convention of the states to amend the U.S. Constitution.
War and peace indeed. And few politicians are interested in disturbing the peace and going to political war, which is what it would be, over our Texas Constitution. By way of review, the current document, approved in 1876, is our fifth since we became a state.
Here’s some background from the Texas Legislative Council: “Over the years, 216 new sections have been added, while 66 of the original sections and 51 of the added sections have been removed, so that the Texas Constitution today has 388 sections.”
Since 1876, Texas legislators have proposed 670 constitutional amendments. A majority of voters thought 491 were good ideas. Some are significant. Others less so, like (invoking columnist’s privilege here for exaggeration) one allowing “a current or retired faculty member of a public college or university to receive compensation for service on the governing body of a water district.”
Wait a minute. Turns out I didn’t make that one up. It was Proposition 21 (of 22) on the 2003 ballot and 52.3 percent of voters approved it, which means 47.7 percent had reason to oppose allowing a current or retired faculty member of a public college or university to get paid for serving on a water district board. I hate haters.
The most recent (and perhaps last) attempt to put the Texas Constitution up on the rack for a major overhaul came in 1999 when then-Sen. Bill Ratliff, R-Mt. Pleasant, and then-Rep. Rob Junell, D-San Angelo, opted to bang their heads against the wall. Ratliff said at the time that “any document that you have to amend 20 times every other year is broke. It’s sort of a Texas tragedy, actually, that we can’t seem to come to grips with the fact that we need a new basic document going into the next century and the next millennium.”
Ratliff and Junell were highly respected lawmakers. But this ambitious idea of theirs wasn’t. It died in committee at the Capitol where some veteran lawmakers had bad memories of the mid1970s effort to rewrite the Texas Constitution.
During the Tuesday debate, Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, a legislator since 1973, recalled serving in the eight-month 1974 constitutional convention that produced nothing. Big ol’ mess, Whitmire said, recalling that the 1975 Legislature then put the whole thing, in eight separate pieces, on a statewide ballot where it was overwhelmingly shot down.
After that defeat, then-Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby proclaimed constitutional overhaul “dead for the foreseeable future.”
We’re still in that foreseeable future, it’s still dead and we’re still patching, most recently in 2015 when voters approved seven amendments, including one “recognizing the right of the people to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife.”
Instead of focusing on the state problem, senators Tuesday, by a 20-11 vote, advanced the resolution calling for a convention of the states to jack with the U.S. Constitution.
Texas legislators, heal thine own constitution.
Some of them, largely the Republican ones of them, are talking about amending the U.S. Constitution to limit Congress’ powers with the goal of getting outcomes they’ve not been able to get under the current Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of it.
It’s a debate on a warm-button issue that inevitably includes hotbutton topics such as states rights and Supreme Court supremacy. On the latter, sponsor Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, told colleagues Tuesday that the high court is “the court of last resort. It is not the last resort of the people.”
That’s what he and his ilk believe amending the a constitutional convention is all about.
Is this movement headed anywhere?
“We’ll spend more time on this debate than we’ll ever spend in a convention,” Whitmire scoffed as he walked passed the Senate press table as the debate reached the three-hour mark.
He’s probably right. And I’m as confident of that as I was about this time last year about the possibility of a Trump presidency.