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A procedural test


Tomorrow in the House, Speaker Tom Craddick will hold a vote to suspend a Constitutional prohibition against bringing non-emergency legislation to the floor in the first 60 days of the session. Though this is normally a formality, it won’t be this time.

It would take four-fifths of the House’s 150 members to suspend the rules. Craddick reminded members Thursday that the rule had been suspended every legislative session but one.

But Tuesday’s vote might be more difficult because as few as 31 members can kill it.

Dunnam said he sees no reason to give Craddick, criticized for being autocratic, a “blank check” to speed any legislation he choses with very little committee input.

Dunnam said Craddick used the rule suspension in 2003 to ram his pro-business agenda, including curbing the ability of people to sue companies.

Instead, given the level of distrust in the House, Dunnam said the members should suspend the rules for specific legislation instead of giving the speaker control over the early agenda.

Right now, as I type this, the House Democratic caucus is meeting to discuss their options for this vote tomorrow. Here are the pros and cons for them, as I see it:

The argument against suspending the rules:

1. Bills brought to the floor in early days will not have had full committee hearings, which means more opportunities to hide distasteful items, and fewer opportunities for the minority party to exercise any influence over them. It’s likely that nothing that will be brought to the floor early on is going to be something the Democrats would favor, so making it harder to do this is a win for them.

2. The motion will be for a blanket suspension of the rules for all legislation. As noted by Rep. Dunnam, Craddick can still seek a vote to suspend for any individual piece of legislation, which would be subject to the same 4/5ths requirement. Again, this would be a powerful brake on suspect bills, so it would be desireable for the Dems.

3. The point of this exercise is an acknowledgement that 140 days is not a lot of time to get stuff done, so in the interest of considering as many bills as possible, use all the time allotted. Without lifting this requirement, many bills might die just because there isn’t the time to vote on them.

Under normal circumstances, this would be almost as bad for the Dems as it would be for the GOP, since they’d risk losing stuff they want to pass. Given the autocratic rule of Speaker Craddick and his ability to disappear any legislation he doesn’t like, however, it’s a much smaller risk because most of what the Dems would want to pass would never see the light of day anyway. In this scenario, most of the collateral damage would be stuff they’d want to kill anyway.

The argument for suspending the rules:

1. In a word, tradition. The last time this happened was over 20 years ago. It’s just not normally done. The main complaint of all the anti-Craddick members, of both parties, is that Craddick has completely changed the House culture for the worse, and that he’s done it by running roughshod over well-established traditions of comity and bipartisanship. Voting down this motion would not only be a big slap to Craddick, it would be a violation of House tradition, which might cede some of the moral high ground to Craddick and his forces.

Along the same lines, if the Dems succeed in gaining a majority next year, or at least enough new members to vote in a different Speaker, Craddick’s loyalists can return the favor, as the 31-vote margin to kill the rule exception is a very low bar to clear. The question is whether the risk of this happening is substantively greater if Craddick loses this vote; his followers may take a hard line no matter how they’re ousted, and again it only take a small number of them to exact revenge in this fashion.

2. While committee assignments are out, there is still the prospect of vengeance by Craddick on anyone who crosses him here. He controls the agenda, and can do any number of things, from killing bills to altering budget appropriations to funding a primary challenger, to express his pique. Given that 27 members already voted No to Craddick as Speaker when he had no opponent left, and that at least two Republicans (Jim Pitts and Robert Talton) have axes to grind, it’s again an open question how much more some members think they have to lose. For the most part, the risk would seem minimal.

3. As noted by a commenter here, the Governor can moot a lot of this by declaring more things emergencies. Anyone who watched Rick Perry in action during the redistricting saga knows better than to underestimate his willingness to do things for partisan purposes, so this is indeed a risk. On the other hand, it would seem that being in this position leaves the Dems no worse off than they’d have been if the rule had been suspended.

My personal take is that the rewards outweigh the risks. Whatever the Dems decide, we ought to see more excitement than usual for an otherwise perfunctory vote tomorrow. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Former State Rep. Glen Maxey has more.

UPDATE: Paul Burka weighs in.

Categories: The Lege
Charles Kuffner

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