Bill Hobby on the "Dreaded Two-Thirds Rule"
[Editor's note: How Things Really Work: Lessons from a Life in Politics, by former Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby with Saralee Tiede, is being published this month by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas. In this excerpt — the first of three that the Tribune will run — Hobby writes about the Killer Bees and what he calls the "dreaded two-thirds rule" that froze the Texas Senate in 1979, 2003 and, almost, in 2009.
The biggest mistake I made as president of the Texas Senate was trying to circumvent the Senate’s two-thirds tradition in 1979 ...
Comments (2)
jimrtex
In the 2001 legislative session, the legislature failed to pass congressional or legislative redistricting. Under, the Texas Constitution, legislative redistricting went to the Legislative Redistricting Board which crafted a reasonable plan for the legislature which is the first to last a whole decade since the 1950s (before Bill Hobby, Jr. was Lt. Governor or for that matter could even vote)
Congressional redistricting first went to a state court which originally drew the most reasonable lines one could ever expect. Then-Speaker Pete Laney queered that plan which threw the case into federal court. The federal district court admitted that they were incompetent to make the types of decisions that a legislature properly could make, apologizing to Morris Overstreet, one of the plaintiffs, for failing to draw a second black-majority district in Houston. The court drew a make-do plan that fossilized boundaries from the 1990s-era districting. This is the plan that Hobby characterizes as "as ordered by law", which was used for the 2002 election.
In 2003, at the next regular session, the legislature reclaimed its redistricting prerogative. After failing to pass congressional redistricting in the regular session, a plan was adopted in a special session. As Bill Hobby notes, "the situation is different from that in regular sessions".
WUSRPH
As usual, Governor Hobby's arguments are strong and valid. However, at least in the small part of the book you present here---he did kind of "forget" how he, himself, got by the two-thirds rule in 1981 when it came to congressional redistricting....He did so by having a provision to a resolution establishing the procedures to be used for redistricting that allowed a bill redistricting The Congress to be brought to the Floor as a Special Order with only a majority vote, rather than having to suspend the Regular Order of Business (ROB) by a two-thirds vote. This was done without amending the Senate's regular Rules.
If the current Lt. Governor has one-third of Hobby's smarts, I suspect he will try to do the same this session. (The Republican leadership is perfectly willing to let the redistricting of the House and Senate go to the Legislative Redistricting Board (LRB) since all its members are GOPers, but the LRB can not deal with congressional redistricting. That has to be done by the Leg. itself unless it is willing to let the Federal courts do it for them.)