What features of the Texas State legislature differentiate it from the US Congress?

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Every biennial session of the Texas Legislature has its own personality. For the session that begins Tuesday, that personality will be shaped by an extraordinary set of issues and a bizarre political environment.

COVID-19 has never been stronger. Vaccines are available, but supplies lag behind demand, and federal and state government distribution has been amateurish and ineffective. The state economy has been scrambled by a pandemic-induced recession. The political world is reeling from the riot in the U.S. Capitol and the uneasy transition from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

Add the items on the agenda for this particular session: A current two-year state budget with a recession-sized shortfall and a new one to write in the face of an uncertain economic outlook; government responses to the pandemic and the recession; police violence, funding and reforms in the wake of George Floyd’s killing while in Minneapolis police custody; the redrawing of political maps; and the assortment of state issues that come up whenever lawmakers are in town.

The strangeness of what’s ahead starts with the Texas Capitol itself. It has been open for only a week, after months of being barred to the public during the pandemic. That cautious opening was interrupted for a day, when the sanctuary of state government was shuttered while the U.S. Capitol was besieged by pro-Trump protesters who wanted to overturn the results of November’s general election.

The pandemic already has planners on pins and needles, restricting access to the House and Senate chambers, to committee rooms and to hallways. They’ll test people for infection at the only doors open to the public. They’ll have the familiar array of metal detectors, though lawfully carried guns are still allowed in the building. Masks will be required in public areas.

That’s just the physical stuff.

The political forecast is harder to sort out.

Partisan furies have been raging since the pro-Trump uprising in Washington, particularly with national and high-level state figures from Texas like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Cruz was in the center ring, advancing the president’s unfounded claims of a crooked election with his challenges to congressional certification of Electoral College votes. Paxton was one of the speakers, along with the president, encouraging people at a Trump rally in Washington to keep fighting — which is just what they did a short time later when they marched to the Capitol.

Trump has plenty of strong allies in Texas government, like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, and they’re the people — along with Gov. Greg Abbott — most likely to get pulled into a back-and-forth about national politics. But the Legislature here has historically been far less partisan than its federal counterpart. Republicans have been in the majority in both houses since 2003, and Democrats haven’t won a statewide election in Texas in a quarter of a century.

Congress’ winner-take-all system puts the majority party in control of every committee in the House and Senate. In Texas, Democrats chair some committees in both chambers, named to those posts by Republican lieutenant governors and speakers of the House.

The majorities are relatively small. Republicans will have an 83-67 margin in the House and an 18-13 edge in the Senate. There is plenty of spitting between members of the parties, however. One bit of evidence will take form this week, as the Senate considers whether to change a rule that effectively gives Republicans control over which legislation gets considered. The GOP lost one Senate seat in the 2020 election; without a rule change, it’ll need at least one Democrat’s approval to proceed with debate on any given bill.

The factions in the two major parties, evident in national politics, could color this legislative session in Texas. Republicans in the Legislature have been bickering internally for years over ideology and practice — a debate that mirrors national politics and its differences between Trumpers and “Never Trumpers,” between disrupters and the establishment, between moderates and conservatives.

Texas has its share of that, and you’ll see some of it during the session as lawmakers and other politicos mouth off — like they always do.

Except on the most partisan issues, however, they’ve been able to avoid the ways of lawmakers in Washington. At a time when the parallels are so strong between national issues and state issues, and between national politics and state politics, the Texas way of legislating is in for a stress test, starting Tuesday.

The nonsense now underway in Washington has me thinking how much better the Texas Legislature is than the Congress.

The Legislature has in place certain structural norms that make governing possible — in contrast to today's Washington. Here are three of the differences.

First, the Texas speaker of the House is the speaker of the whole house. In Washington, only members of the party that is in the majority vote to choose the powerful speaker.

That's why Speaker John Boehner in Washington caved to tea party Republicans in shutting down the government this week. It is widely agreed that if he allowed a floor vote on a bill that would provide continued government financing without restricting Obamacare it would pass with bipartisan support.

But Boehner appears to be afraid that if he did so he might be unseated as speaker by tea party and other ultra-conservative Republicans.

In Austin, the speaker is elected by the entire House — Republican and Democrat. Joe Straus, the Republican speaker from Alamo Heights, was elected to the position in 2009 when only 11 Republicans rebelled against the autocratic Speaker Tom Craddick and formed a coalition with Democrats to oust him.

Straus is reviled by some Republicans as a “moderate,” which means that he is not far enough to the right for their tastes. But while he likely could not win a statewide race in today's Republican primary, he is more representative of the beliefs of Texans as a whole.

The second structural difference between Congress and the Legislature concerns committee chairmanships. Chairmen are the gatekeepers to proposed legislation. Few bills get by chairmen who oppose them.

In Washington, if one party holds a majority by as few as a single member, 100 percent of the chairmen are selected by that party and from that party. In Austin, by long-standing tradition, both the speaker of the House and the lieutenant governor, who presides over the Senate, appoint substantial numbers of members of the minority party to chair committees.

At a recent debate of the four announced candidates for lieutenant governor, Sen. Dan Patrick, a tea party favorite, charged incumbent Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst with appointing too many Democrats to chairmanships.

Dewhurst has appointed between five and seven Democrats each session during his tenure, which is about a third of the chairmanships. The system has worked well, forcing Democrats and Republicans to work together. Remember that the Democratic chairmen always lead committees with a majority of Republicans.

The third difference between Congress and the Legislature has to do with the “aisle.” In Washington, both houses of Congress segregate Democrats and Republicans on either side of the chamber.

Many complain that members of Congress don't reach across the aisle as much as they used to.

In Austin, however, there is no reaching across the aisle for the simple reason that members of the Legislature aren't segregated. They choose their seats by seniority, and in the House they share two-person desks.

Familiarity can lead to legislative success. Two years ago journalist Patti Kilday Hart told the story of the friendship that grew between then-freshman Representative Barbara Nash, a white Republican from Arlington, and Alma Allen, a veteran African-American legislator from Houston.

Seated next to Allen, Nash found herself leaning on her for tips on how to be an effective legislator. And Allen won Nash's help in reviving a bill restricting corporal punishment in schools. Nash convinced her fellow Republicans that requiring parental permission for spanking was a matter of parental control.

The women didn't come to agree on every issue, but they became fast friends who worked well together — a dynamic that is rarely seen in Washington these days.

This column first appeared as the “Last Word” on KLRN's “Texas Week with Rick Casey.” The program appears Friday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 1 p.m.

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