The prevailing image from last session in the Texas House was then-Speaker Tom Craddick claiming absolute authority. Now legislators hope new House rules will redress that imbalance and produce the member-run house that Speaker Joe Straus has promised. Authored by Rep. Burt Solomons, R-Carrollton, and adopted on a 147-1 vote, House Resolution 2 takes on a longstanding complaint – that extra committees had been created just so the speaker could hand out chairmanships to allies – and a dilemma reverberating from last session: how to replace the speaker.
There will be fewer committees than last session (35, down from 40), more members on those remaining committees, and more members will be able to apply on the basis of seniority rather than be allocated seats on the speaker’s whim. Solomons explained, “We’ve had some committees just sitting out there, and Speaker Straus and I both agreed there ought to be some reorganization.” As for boosting the number of seats, he said: “More members have more opportunities to ask for more substantive committees. You can’t have that when every committee has seven members.”
House Democratic Caucus Chair Jim Dunnam, D-Waco, supports the thrust of the change and says this is more like the House from before the divisive Craddick era: “When I first came in the Legislature, I found there were fewer committees and larger committees, and that gave more members input and more individual members influence.”
Some changes were obviously significant. The Regulated Industries Committee, often seen instead as a roadblock to effective regulation of the electricity and telecoms industries, has been dissolved. A new Technology, Economic Development, and Workforce Committee is intended to foster better relations between university researchers and business to produce more high tech and green-collar jobs. Other changes were more inside-baseball. (The sole nay vote to the rules, Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, opposed moving authority over the Texas Youth Commission, previously split between Corrections and his Juvenile Justice & Family Issues Committee, to solely under Corrections.)
The biggest argument concerned the powerful State Affairs Committee, which gains extra oversight over state agencies and institutions but also assumes authority over regulated industries. To reflect that new power, it will swell from nine members to 15, but the chair will not be able to serve on another substantive committee. Dunnam called it “a new supercommittee, or rather the old supercommittee come back … that seemed to work well in the Nineties.” Solomons was more cautious about making State Affairs too powerful, especially when it was assigned partial responsibility for handling the federal stimulus package. “That’s really an Appropriations issue,” he said. But with input from both the Senate and the governor on any spending, he said, “I think it’s probably going to be fine.”
The new rules also make the speaker more accountable to the members, including setting out formally how to remove the speaker from office. Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford, lost a brief fight to require a supermajority vote to remove, and the process will require a simple majority. Again, Dunnam argues this restores balance to the House. He noted: “What the speaker did last session was really a novel concept in saying that he didn’t have to recognize members. So we clarified what people thought was the rule before last May.”
Members from both parties must wait to see who fills the committees and whether Straus will fulfill his promise of an equitable division of posts – decisions the speaker’s office says will be announced in early to mid-February.
This article appears in February 6 • 2009.
