How Things Really Work

The nation is deadlocked politically.

The Presidential race is too close to call. The new Senate will be divided 50-50.

What’s needed is a compromise that lets the new President take office with broad support and provides the divided leadership the country wants.

Here it is:

Bush and Gore ask Congress not to count the tainted Florida electoral votes. There is no electoral majority. Congress elects the next President and Vice President.

The House of Representatives, voting by state, elects Bush President.

The Senate, voting individually for Vice President, casts 50 votes for Lieberman and 50 votes for Cheney. Vice President Gore breaks the tie and Lieberman is elected, 51-50.

(Bill Hobby, a former Lieutenant Governor of Texas, teaches political science at Rice University.)

The next President and Vice President of the United States have not yet been elected, nor will they be elected when the votes in Florida and Oregon have been counted, nor will they be elected when the electors meet in the state capitols December 18 and cast their votes. They will not be elected until a joint session of Congress canvasses the electoral votes next January 6.

Vice President Gore will preside over that joint session, usually a ceremonial occasion—but who knows about this time? As President of the Senate, Vice President Gore rules on points of order. Electors vote separately for President and Vice President, “one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves”. Suppose member of Congress rose to a point of order against the 32 votes cast by Texas’ electors on the grounds that both Governor Bush and Secretary Cheney were both inhabitants of Texas? Suppose a point of order were raised that Florida’s 25 electoral votes were cast improperly on account of an alleged irregularity in the popular vote count. The first point of order would be particularly sensitive because Vice President Gore and Governor George W. Bush would be parties at interest. The latter point of order would be particularly sensitive because Vice President Gore and Governor Jeb Bush would be parties at interest.

The difference between the Gore-Bush totals will doubtless be less than 25 (or 32). In either case, Vice President Gore would be put in the position of ruling on his own future. What might he do? Almost certainly he would vacate the chair, probably in favor the President Pro Tempore—with the understanding that the Pro Tem would overrule. (As you recall, the Vice President in a Presidential impeachment trial vacates the chair in favor the Chief Justice.)

Rulings of the chair can be appealed, but how? Legislative bodies often have rules for voting on appeals from the chair, sometimes requiring multiple seconds and extraordinary majorities. But here we are talking about a Joint Session, governed by Joint Rules, if any. Would an appeal from the chair require a majority of both houses to prevail? If so, how might the vote be taken? Does each Senator have one vote (as when the Senate elects a Vice President of the United States)? Does each House member have one vote or does each State have one vote (as it does when the House elects a President of the United States)? Joint Sessions are usually for ceremonial purposes and rarely conduct meaningful business. Such rules are unlikely to exist. I’ll bet the Congressional Parliamentarians are researching precedents as we speak.

What role would the Supreme Court play? Probably none. The Supreme Court has decided twice in recent years to stay out of Congress’s business in internal matters like apportionment. A ruling of the chair on a Congressional function such as canvassing is pretty internal. The governing principle here is comity: You mind your business and I’ll mind mine.

The late Governor Mel Carnahan of Missouri opposed Senator John Ashworth for re-election to the U.S. Senate. Carnahan got 51% of the votes two weeks after he died in a plane crash. Was Carnahan elected? The Constitution says, “No person shall be a Senator… who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state for which he shall be chosen”. Will a vacancy exist when Senator Ashworth’s term expires in January? If so, can the Governor Carnahan’s successor appoint Mrs. Carnahan to the vacant seat? If the governor appoints her, will she be seated? The Constitution says “Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members…”. Senator Ashworth, properly concerned with legitimacy, will not contest the election, so the issue is moot, but nonetheless interesting.

There are even some Texas Constitutional issues. When Governor Bush vacates the Governor’s office Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry will become Governor and vacate the Lieutenant Governor’s office. This will be the first the Lieutenant Governor’s office has been vacant since the passage of two constitutional amendments affecting that event. The President Pro Tempore of the Texas Senate, Senator Rodney Ellis (D-Houston), will convene the Texas Senate within thirty days of the vacancy to elect a new presiding officer. Does that election require a two-thirds vote (as much Senate business does) or a simple majority? Will Senators vote by secret ballot or by roll call? As with the federal constitutional issues, new precedents will be set.

What about the Electoral College?

Is a victory “legitimate” if the electoral vote (EV) winner got a few less popular votes (PV) than the opponent? Sure. Neither popular nor electoral vote counts are perfect. Voting machines break down. Ballot boxes are lost. Polling places open or close early or late. Electoral vote counts aren’t perfect either. See next paragraph.

What about “faithless electors”? Occasionally electors do not vote for the nominee of the party that elected them, or for anybody who is even on the ballot. An elector voted for Ronald Reagan in a year that Reagan was not the ballot. An elector voted for Lloyd Bentsen for President when he was a candidate for Vice President. Normally that makes no difference, but this is the closest election in history. Some states attempt to bind electors to vote for their party’s candidate, but electors are elected officials just like members of Congress. A state can hardly bind a member of Congress to vote in a certain way. Certainly the authors of the Constitution, who abhorred the concept of political parties (“faction”), would have been horrified at any such idea. Electors in some states vote by secret ballot. Such electors may be “faithless” to they voters in the primary, but are doing what the Founding Fathers intended by voting their convictions.

A look into the future: Governor Bush’s electoral majority would be greater if he carried the same states in 2004 as he did this year. He carried every state that will gain Congressional seats and electoral votes in the next apportionment.

History repeats itself but never exactly. Tuesday’s election will be one we will never forget.

(Bill Hobby, a former Lieutenant Governor of Texas, teaches political science at Rice University. ([email protected]).

Yes, I have decided to run for President.

You may think it’s too late now that the primaries are nearly over. Not to worry. Certainly Governor George W. Bush will try to keep me off the ballot, but he’s not very good at that. And besides, I’m not nearly as crazy as Ross Perot and he was on the ballot in every state!

My platform has two parts.

First are the things I will NOT do.

I will never raise your taxes. Or lower them either. Presidents can’t do that. Only Congress can pass a tax bill or an appropriations bill. Any candidate who says differently hasn’t read the Constitution. Nor will I insult your intelligence by telling you that I would eliminate the deficit and spend more on defense and education or by telling you we have a “surplus” when we owe $2,500,000,000,000.

I will not go to war in a country unless I’ve heard of it before.

I will not be you spiritual leader. I will not tell you what church I go to, if any. For three reasons: 1. It’s against the law—or at least the spirit of the law. Congress won’t let an employer ask an employee about religion and I want to be your employee. 2. It’s bad manners to flaunt your religion. 3. It’s none of your business. I will tell you now some things I won’t be able to tell you when the campaign begins. I am a minority candidate. I am a 68-year-old white male. If you vote for anybody younger, I will sue you for age discrimination.)

I will not be your nanny. I will not tell you to stop smoking by putting a label on the pack you have already bought. I won’t tell you to fasten your seat belt. If you are smart enough to vote for me, you can figure those things out. If not, well—I guess we need to improve the gene pool some more. I will not put pills in bottles nobody can open. I will stop putting airbags that may kill you in your car. I will not let the government search you every time you get on an airplane.

I will not reform anything. When somebody tells you they want to reform something, put your hand firmly on your wallet or purse. They just want to shift power and money from somebody else to themselves.

I will not tell states what flag to fly over their capitols. If the folks in South Carolina are so boorish as to fly a Confederate flag to deliberately infuriate African-Americans, that’s none of the President’s (or Congress’s) concern.

Speaking of the Civil War, I will not tell Russians how to handle their civil war in Chechnya, even though we handled our own civil war so well. I will not even tell other countries whom to elect as their president. That’s their business. For that matter, I won’t even tell you whom to vote for any other office. If you’re smart enough to vote for me, you’re smart enough to make up your own mind.

I will not take contributions from greedy special interests. Greedy special interests contribute to my opponents. My campaign contributors–even if they are Oriental monks—clearly have the public interest at heart. Contributions to my campaign will be tax deductible. Send checks to the Houston Music Hall Foundation, 811 Rusk, #1730, Houston, TX 77002.

I will not let people call you at dinner to sell you something over the phone nor let companies play music when they put you on hold. Press #8 and they will be fined $5,000.

But enough of negative things. Here’s what I WILL do.

I will declare victory in the war on drugs. We have put more of our citizens in prison than such democracies as Russia and South Africa, so we must have won. After all, Prohibition worked. Right?

I will make anybody who sues you unsuccessfully pay you whatever amount he was trying to extort from you. That will clear up the backlog in the courts so I won’t have to appoint any more judges. Since I won’t appoint any more judges, the U.S. Senate won’t be able to embarrass itself further by listening to idiots like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms.

Most important of all, I WILL do a superb job or running the executive branch of the federal government. After all, that’s what the U.S. Constitution says the President is supposed to do.

(This essay is at www.swt.edu/hobby. Hobby can be reached at [email protected] or PO326, Houston, TX 77006-0326.)

A census seems pretty simple. Just count the people. Then decide how many votes each state gets in Congress and for President. Then divvy up a few hundred million dollars and go on about your business.

But often in history, it seems to be more complicated than that. Jesus was born during a census in Bethlehem and crazy King Herod tried to murder all the boy babies born that day. President George Washington’s first veto (1790) was of a bill apportioning Congressional seats among the thirteen states.

Congress apparently has just discovered that the Census Bureau will soon count us for the fifty-first time. So Congress has declared the census an emergency, to be paid for off budget (with funny money). Veterans’ Hospitals are another such unforeseen emergency.

Wisconsin may have exported a Congressman because it has exported 3,700 (soon to be 10,000) inmates to other states. So Governor Thomas Thompson has had a bill introduced in Congress to count the inmates as if they were still in Wisconsin. Governor Thompson has not said which of the inmates is the mystery Congressman.

Should Americans living overseas be counted? If so, how and where, and for what purpose?

Such are a few of the issues surrounding the 2000 census.

All these issues are analyzed in “Who Counts?”, a book invaluable to anyone interested in the politics of the census, reapportionment, and redistricting. Those issues will be in the courts throughout the next decade. The redistricting lawsuits will challenge district lines from Congressional seats to commissioner court precincts. (Margo Anderson’s earlier book on the census was cited in Supreme Court opinions on both sides of the issue earlier this year.)

The most contentious census issue before Congress is the use of a sampling technique for apportionment purposes. The issue burst into the national news in the summer of 1947 when Republicans in the U.S House of Representatives amended a bill providing flood relief in the Dakotas to prevent sampling. President Clinton vetoed the bill.

Advocates of sampling argue that it will reduce the undercount of minorities, an increasingly pernicious legal problem because of its implications for civil rights and federal aid. Congress has authorized sampling for the distribution of federal aid to the states but not for apportionment.

Opponents of sampling argue that is an unscientific technique that it will allow the Census Bureau discretion to manipulate the numbers in favor of Democrats. (One of the authors’ best contributions to the debate is a list of myths put forward by sampling opponents.)

So there may be two sets of numbers– one for reapportionment, another for federal aid and perhaps for redistricting.

Reapportionment is one thing. Redistricting is another. Congress reapportions. Legislatures redistrict. Which figures will legislatures use to redistrict? The Census Bureau sensibly wants to produce a single set of numbers, and that is the recommendation of Anderson and Fienberg.

Census issues have been much litigated during the past decade. The result is a superb legal and historical record of the various disputes and the arguments put forth by each side and the actions taken by the various players: President Clinton, members of Congress, the Secretary of Commerce, Census Bureau officials, state and local government officials, and federal judges.

“Who Counts?” makes that record readily accessible. It will become the handbook for those issues.

(A more fully sourced version is at www.swt.edu/hobby. Hobby can be reached at [email protected] or PO326, Houston, TX 77006-0326.)

The Austin Independent School District has been rated “unacceptable” by the Texas Education Agency—too many dropouts and too many low-performing schools.

Among the state’s nine largest school districts, which educate 21 percent of its students, there were 42 low-performing schools. One hundred and six of the state’s 6,803 public schools were low-rated, 47 more than last year.

In other words, many children are not getting their tax-paying parents’ money’s worth. Texas’ greatest need now is better education. This was Texas’ greatest need 100 years ago, 50 years ago, and 10 years ago, and it will likely be the greatest need 10, 20, 100 years from now.

Unfortunately, education hasn’t been an historical priority in Texas and it isn’t one today.

That’s easy to understand, given the state’s history and geography. In the east is the end of the great Southern forests and the fertile soil of the cotton belt. In the south, the brush country plains that supported the wild longhorn cattle that became the base of the greatest cattle industry in the world. In the southwest, the Chihuahuan desert crosses the Mexican border to define the landscape, and in the Permian basin covers some of the world’s richest petroleum deposits. To the northwest, the High Plains sprawl down the Cap Rock and end in the rolling plains, providing vast expanses for growing grain and cotton.

It didn’t require a great education to grow cotton, corn or cows. A college degree didn’t help cut the East Texas timber, and the wildcatters who brought in the first big oilfields didn’t learn how to do that in school.

Texans, like other Americans, have always paid lip service to education. One of the complaints cited in the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836 was that Mexico had failed to establish a system of public education. The Texas Constitution of 1836 declared that “It shall be the duty of Congress, as soon as circumstances permit, to provide, by law, a general system of education.”

Circumstances didn’t permit for awhile. Texans didn’t really think education was any more important than the Mexicans did. Some still don’t.

Texas continues to under invest in education and under produce educated people. Texas ranks 39th in percentage of high school graduates and 33rd in percentage of college graduates.

This is true even though nearly every candidate for public office, from school board to governor, promises to do something about the sorry state of public education, usually by cutting taxes.

But some things really are better. We now grade our schools from “low-performing” to “exemplary”. The Texas Assessment of Basic Skills tests that ensures a basic body of knowledge is covered. The no pass-no play rule says academics are more important than football. Increases in the state budget for public help.

But we also confuse tinkering and meddling with progress, we focus on reform rather than improvement, and we demand better management while we shortchange teachers and children.

For the past 50 years at least, two issues have consumed most of the hours spent by the Legislature on education—governance and school finance.

In its history, public education in Texas has been governed in just about any way imaginable. The state governing body has sometimes been constitutional, sometimes statutory. It has varied in size from three to 24 members. It has been appointed. It has been elected. It has had considerable authority. It has had limited authority. Most recently, the Legislature had to rule on how many meetings are year were required for the State Board of Education, with a strong preference for as few as possible.

Local control has always been important to Texans, and that fit right in with the move toward site-based management in the late 1980s. The Legislature in 1991 decided that a committee of parents and teachers should run each campus. Fortunately, the language in the law books has little to do with what goes on in a classroom.

School finance reform was a classic example of why, when someone wants to “reform” a system, you should put your hand firmly on your wallet. What that someone wants is to transfer money and power from one group to another. In the case of school districts, it was from the property owners in the richer districts to the school children in the poorer districts. Needless to say, this idea wasn’t popular. Most people locate themselves nearest the best schools they can afford. They take poorly to the idea of having their property tax dollars subsidize a child in, say, South San Antonio.

From the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Rodriguez v. San Antonio ISD in 1973 to the 1995 Texas Supreme Court ruling that the finance system passed constitutional muster, efforts have been made to arrive at some equity in the amount available to educate each student. The system isn’t perfect, partly because it will eventually result in most larger districts being ineligible for state assistance, but it satisfies the courts for the moment.

In a century and a half of history, Texans have demonstrated that they are willing to do almost anything for public education except pay for it.

Despite biennial increases in state education appropriations, local taxpayers still pay more than half of the cost of education. Look at teachers’ salaries, which average $38,857 this year because of a well-deserved $3000 state-mandated pay raise. Not likely to attract the best and brightest to the classroom. If $38,857 sounds ok to you, understand that a Texas family of four with an income of $33,000 is eligible for free health insurance for their children.

The amount spent per student in Texas is about $5,000, 31st in the nation and 12th among the 15 biggest states. Not coincidentally, many of those 30 states that care more about education have higher SAT scores. (Texas’ students taking the SAT dropped two points on the math test this year, from an average of 501 to 499—the national average is 511.)

It’s been most fashionable in recent years to advocate for vouchers as a way of upgrading education without spending more money on it. Ironically, Texas had a sort of voucher system, and not a very generous one, in the days of the Republic. In 1854, the Republic of Texas provided an allotment per student of 62 cents per year to private and denominational schools. There is no evidence that it worked well then and there is none that it would now.

Steve Murdock’s recent demographic study, “Texas Challenged”, shows the minority population increasing while the state’s population ages. Some years ahead, we will have a minority population of old Anglos being taken care of by younger African-American and Hispanic minorities. These younger minority citizens, Murdock says, will be caregivers in nursing homes and hospitals, and they will be the taxpayers who support Medicare and Medicaid.

Look ahead, and you will see an unskilled, uneducated labor force, a larger prison population and growing welfare rolls—a greater gap between haves and have-nots.

Education has always been the great closer of gaps. It’s been doing the job for years. As I wrote some years ago, the path from good intentions to good education is paved with difficult choices and hard cash.

The problem is that we have ducked the difficult choices and held onto the cash. We have chosen to criticize, audit, howl for reform, change management, castigate, carp and opt for the easy solution. Tax cuts are more popular that teachers’ pay raises. No wonder that school superintendents’ salaries have gotten bigger as beleaguered school districts try to find someone willing to take on a thankless job with too big a task and too small a budget.

We get what we pay for. Houses, cars, c.d.’s, and groceries cost more today. So do private schools and private universities. Do we really think we can get the same public school education without spending more?

(This essay is posted at http://www.swt.edu/hobby/ . Hobby can be reached at [email protected] or PO326, Houston, TX 77006-0326.)

The State of Texas has lost about $1,000,000,000 of federal aid in the last decade because the Census Bureau failed to count 483,000 Texans in the 1990 census. That’s $200,000,000 a biennium—enough for a teacher pay raise or whatever is dearest to your heart among the services provided by state government. Hardly chump change.

The 1990 census undercounted about 8.4 million people. The 2000 census may undercount even more, and Texans may lose even more of their own money. And that’s the way Governor Bush and the two Texas Senators–Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchinson–want it.

All of them are, of course, Republican. The question is: Are they more Republican than Texan?

The controversy is about sampling.

Americans get harder to count with every census. The reasons for the undercount are familiar: increased mobility, households with two people working, limited English skills, distrust of government.

The Census Bureau wants to account for the last ten percent of the people—those who cannot be reached by mail or in person—by sampling. Sampling is authorized by Congress for many purposes but not apportionment.

The original purpose of the census was to apportion each state’s electoral votes and seats in Congress. More recently the data has been used to allocate about $180 billion a year in federal aid among state and local governments and to shape state and local political districts.

Census paranoia on the part of Congressional Republicans is nothing new in our history. Twice in the past–before the censuses of 1870 and 1920–it has led to ludicrous results and shameful chapters in our history. Then and now the Republican concern has been not so much that the census would count more people as that it would count those OTHER people who are out there but have been not been counted before – blacks (1870), immigrants and city dwellers (1920, 2000), and people who just don’t want the government to know they exist (1790-2000).

The irony is that a lot of those OTHER people, who certainly are not voters, live in Texas, Florida, and California—states that vote Republican in recent presidential elections. Republicans should want an accurate census count and more electoral votes for those states.

The Republicans feared that the newly freed slaves to be counted in the 1870 census would give defeated Southerners more electoral votes and seats in Congress. In 1920, the census showed that cities (and states with lots of them) had grown so much that the Republican Congress did not reapportion the House of Representatives as the Constitution requires. So much for Republican concerns about the Constitution.

The parallels (Then and Now) with the past fiascoes are instructive. THE 1870 FIASCO

(Then: A Republican majority in Congress had tried but failed to remove a President. The Republicans feared the results of the 1870 census because previously uncounted people–former slaves–were counted for the first time.

(Now: A Republican majority in Congress had tried but failed to remove a President. The Republicans fear the results of the 2000 census because previously uncounted people may be counted for the first time.)

The end of the Civil War left an extraordinarily vicious Republican majority in Congress with two unexpected problems: a Southern President and the prospect that the southern states might have a lot more members in the House of Representatives than they did before the war.

The Republicans tried to deal with the first problem by telling President Andrew Johnson from Tennessee that he couldn’t fire his own cabinet members and then impeaching him for doing so. The impeachment of Johnson by the House was a sorry chapter, with which the 1999 Republican impeachment fiasco has made us all too familiar.

The U.S. Constitution provided that three-fifths of the slaves be counted for apportionment purposes. When slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment ALL the former slaves were to be so counted. (The actual undercount was probably greater. Until 1880, U.S. Marshals did the counting.)

It was one thing to free the slaves. But allowing them to be represented in Congress might put more Democrats in Congress! Abolition of slavery (13th Amendment) would give the former Confederate States sixteen new seats in Congress unless the U.S. Constitution was further amended to base representation on voters rather than people. Sixteen new Southern electoral votes and seats in Congress certainly were not what the Republicans had in mind.

After all, the North won the war, right?

So the Republican Congress passed–and then ignored–the 14th Amendment to base representation on voters rather than people. They ignored the amendment they had just passed because somebody figured out that if representation were based on voters, women and immigrants would not be counted. To be sure there were more newly freed slaves (blacks) in the South than in the North, but there were more women and immigrants in the North than the South. Oops!

There was talk even then of letting women vote, but the Republicans wouldn’t go THAT far for another fifty-two years!

As it turned out, the Republicans need not have worried. The former Confederate States did not, in fact, increase their share of seats in the United States Congress. The 1870 census showed that the count of freed slaves increased the population of the former Confederate States by only 14 percent, less than the national increase of about 25 percent. Also, later figures showed that the South had probably been undercounted by 1.26 million, about 3 percent.

Western states (California, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon) had grown more than 50 percent. (The Homestead Act had been passed in 1862.) Eastern States lost relative population but not seats in Congress, because the size of the House of Representatives was increased from 243 to 292.

THE 1920 FIASCO

(Then: It is the second year of the second and last term of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. The Republicans feared the results of the 1920 census because it showed that a lot more people live in cities than had before.

(Now: It is the second year of the second and last term of Democratic President Bill Clinton. The Republicans fear the results of the 2000 census because it may count a lot of people who were not counted before.)

The 1920 census showed that population grown by 14 million in the decade. The Republicans’ problem was that 19 million of that growth was in the cities. The rural population had dropped 5 million. Newspapers wondered if there would be enough farmers to feed the nation.

Many of the new city dwellers were European immigrants. The nativist Republicans feared that Irish and German immigrants would somehow subvert American politics. Then, as now, racism played its part. Congress changed the immigration laws to favor the northern and western European immigrants at the expense of the “newer” OTHER immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.

The 2000 Fiasco

Let’s hope there wont be one, but the Republican leadership in Congress has already shown its willingness to shut down the government over the census issue.

Dear Legislator:

Congratulations on your recent election! The easy part is over!

Between now and the end of May, you will set the state’s priorities for the next two years. You will consider thousands and pass hundreds of bills. The bill that really counts is the general appropriations bill. In that one bill you will decide how well Texans will be educated, regulated, imprisoned, and medicated for the next two years.

Spend every nickel you can on education. Every nickel you don’t spend now, will cost dollars in the future for welfare and prisons.

Then go home. Please don’t pass any more laws.

Specifically:

Anybody who wants to “amend the Penal Code by adding a new section to read as follows…”, probably thinks they are “getting tough on crime” by creating another one. People have been passing laws for about 5,000 years now—ever since the Code of Hammurabi. If we could eliminate, or even reduce, crime by passing laws, we wouldn’t have built new prisons in years. New laws in the Penal Code create new crimes and new criminals. We have enough criminals already, so JUST VOTE NO.

Don’t try to tell people what it is you don’t want them to put into their minds or bodies. (See above.) Ungrateful louts that they are, they won’t appreciate your advice, or even pay attention, so JUST VOTE NO.

Whenever somebody wants to “reform” something, hold on to your purse or wallet tightly. What they really want to do is transfer money or power from some other group to their own group. Maybe that’s all right. In fact, that’s why legislatures meet every year or so—to change power and money relationships to fit the political realities of the day. But when somebody tells you they want to “reform” something, they are saying “Trust me”. Just don’t think the world is going to be a better place after it’s “reformed”—or be disappointed when it isn’t, so JUST VOTE NO.

Somebody will probably want to “reform public schools” by “amending the Education Code by adding a new section to read as follows…” Nothing in the Education Code makes any difference in the classroom anyway, so give it a rest and JUST VOTE NO.

Don’t react to a tragedy by passing a law. Don’t vote (as Congress did) to give the cops more power because a right-wing nut blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Don’t vote to create “hate crimes”, however heinous the deed. Such crimes are already first-degree offenses (murder, etc.) and carry the heaviest penalties available, so JUST VOTE NO.

Don’t be silly. Don’t decide how much water will flush a toilet, as Congress did a few years ago. Don’t decide that the circumference of a circle is three times the diameter, as a legislature in the last century did. Don’t decide that the earth is only 4,000 years old, as legislatures have when they made monkeys of themselves by passing evolution laws. In short, don’t make a fool of yourself, so JUST VOTE NO.

And, speaking of people making fools of themselves, please repeal the law against libeling cows. The Panhandle ranchers must have caught the Mad Cow disease just before they sued Oprah Winfrey, and legislators who passed the law certainly need a check-up.

RESOLUTIONS. Vote against the little stuff, too. Seemingly harmless resolutions can be as bad as bills.

Nobody can sue the State of Texas in state court unless you vote to let them by passing a “resolution to sue the State”. Anybody who does business with the State knows that. These resolutions cost the State millions of dollars a year in needless legal costs and judgments. When you pass these resolutions, you are giving away the state’s money. Would you waive your own immunity (statute of limitations, say) to let somebody sue you personally? You wouldn’t give your own money away that way, so JUST VOTE NO.

Legislators are forever introducing “memorial resolutions”. These are not in honor of departed constituents but are resolutions “memorializing” Congress to do something or other. Nobody in Congress ever reads these things, nor is there any reason why they should. Somebody is trying to make you vote on some issue that is not before the legislature. You can vote “Present not voting” or JUST VOTE NO.

Legislative rules are set by resolution early in the session. The rules authorize the Lieutenant Governor and the Speaker to appoint legislators to committee chairmanships and other important positions on the basis of the legislator’s effectiveness and experience, not on the basis of partisanship. Neither party has a patent on statesmanship or leadership. If somebody tries to amend the rules resolution to make the Legislature more partisan, to make the Legislature look more like Congress, JUST VOTE NO.

The problem is that it just plain feels good to get tough on crime, reform all sorts of things, mess around with the schools yet again, fight the war on drugs, and so on. Especially if you borrow the money and don’t have to pay for it. Maybe the best rule is: If it feels good, JUST VOTE NO.

But don’t vote “No” on everything! Here are a few ideas that will reduce the size of state government and might save some money, too:

You have lightened the Attorney-General’s workload by not letting people sue the State. Why not save even more money by privatizing the office? There are able lawyers in the Attorney-General’s office but the turnover rate is high. A lot of time is wasted because of the lack of continuity. Many agencies, particularly those outside Austin, will be better served by private counsel. Appropriate money to each state agency for its legal expenses and let the agency decide whether to use the Attorney-General’s office or a private law firm. Reduce the Attorney-General’s appropriation accordingly. (How would you feel if you couldn’t select your own lawyer for your own business?)

Make the loser pay all court costs and attorney fees, plus an insult charge to a successful defendant. Reduce judicial appropriations accordingly. Why should you and I foot the bill every time somebody goes to court to whine that it was somebody else’s fault?

Remove the requirement that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board approve every course offered by every state university and community college. Universities get paid by the number of students that take a course, so they don’t teach courses that nobody wants. Hundreds of people, both at the Coordinating Board and the schools, now do this busy-work that the law requires. And you are for local control, aren’t you?

Abolish the State Securities Board. The Federal government (Securities and Exchange Commission) regulates the securities business. We don’t need two nannies.

Sincerely,

Bill Hobby

(Hobby was Lieutenant Governor of Texas from 1973 to 1991.)

The U.S. House of Representatives seems to be thinking about censuring President Clinton. It has ample precedent for so doing.

Just 166 years ago, the House of Representatives censured (reprimanded) another former Southern governor, soon to be a President. That former governor had abandoned his office, had well-publicized marital problems, and was accused of using Presidential favoritism to get a government contract to provide rations for Indians. He was convicted by the House of violating the U.S. Constitution by attacking a Congressman, but acquitted of the charge relating to the contract. The President of the United States tried to keep the trial in the House of Representatives from happening. A famous lawyer represented the once-and-future governor.

The defendant was Sam Houston. The President was Andrew Jackson. The lawyer was Francis Scott Key.

The episode began on March 31, 1832, when Congressman William Stanbery of Ohio asked on the floor of the House “Was not the late Secretary of War removed because of his attempt fraudulently to give Governor Houston the contract for Indian rations?”

On the evening of April 13 Houston beat Stanbery with a hickory cane on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Stanbery drew his pistol and tried to shoot Houston. The pistol misfired. Had Stanbery known how to use a gun we might be living in northern Coahuila.

The next day Stanbery complained to House Speaker Andrew Stevenson that he (Stanbery) had been “attacked, knocked down by bludgeon, severely bruised and wounded by Samuel Houston, late of Tennessee, for words spoken in my place in the House of Representatives.” And so he had.

The U.S. Constitution says that a member of Congress shall not be held accountable elsewhere for what he says on the floor of Congress. The best Key could say in Houston’s defense was that Houston had beaten Stanbery, not for words said on the floor of the House, but for words attributed to him in a newspaper. The words were the same.

The trial at the bar of the House began April 19, 1832. Like the current Clinton hearings, the trial lasted a month and was the center of attention in Washington. “Everything else in the current news was eclipsed,” wrote Houston biographer Marquis James. Niles’ Register, a Baltimore paper that covered Congress fully, fell days behind its coverage of regular Congressional proceedings because it devoted so much space to the Houston trial.

Senator Buckner of Missouri testified that when Houston had almost finished caning Stanbery he lifted the Congressman’s feet into the air and “struck him elsewhere”. The witness, so phrased his testimony because ladies were present at the trial. (Compare the references to body parts in the Starr report.)

Nevertheless, the Register deprecated “a public taste so thirsty for details of this raffish proceeding.”

The House found Houston guilty, 106-89, and sentenced him to be reprimanded by the Speaker, who carried out the sentence on May 14, 1832.

Stanbery, showing more fight than ever he did on Pennsylvania Avenue, then charged Houston with assault. Houston paid a $500 fine. A House committee, even though chaired by a hostile Stanbery, investigated the Indian ration contract for six weeks and decided that “(former Secretary of War) John H. Eaton and Samuel Houston do hereby stand entirely acquitted of any imputation of fraud.”

Speaking of the Stanbery affair later, Houston said “I was dying out and had they taken me before a justice of the peace and fined me ten dollars it would have killed me; but they gave me a national tribunal for a theatre, and that set me up again.”

Houston had been a Congressman from Tennessee, then its Governor. He left Tennessee and its Governor’s office because of problems in his eleven-week-old marriage to Eliza Allen.. The problems, apparently sexual, have never been fully identified. Nor are they anybody’s business, any more than are the marital problems of the current President and former Southern governor.

Prurient interest in Clinton’s case has been high, so I shall attempt to satisfy prurient interest in Houston’s case by noting that his marriage apparently failed because Eliza Allen was repelled by a suppurating arrow wound in his groin. Houston had suffered the wound March 27, 1814, at the battle of Horseshoe in Alabama. (In 1836, Eliza Allen later decided that the wound was no longer so disgusting and wanted a reconciliation with Houston. Houston refused.)

In his letter of resignation from the Tennessee governorship (April, 16,1829) Houston referred to “private afflictions however deep or incurable” and described himself as “delicately circumstances…& by own misfortunes more than by the fault or contrivance of anyone, overwhelmed by sudden calamities.” He concealed his afflictions throughout his life, whatever the occasion, whatever the cost.

The now-forgotten Stanbery affair shaped Texas history. James write that the episode made Houston decide to “do something grand. He would capture an empire and lay it at his old Chieftain’s (Jackson’s) feet–Texas, or the New Estremadura, as Houston used to say when his poetic fancy was on the wing.”

Houston, of course, became President of the Republic of Texas. When Texas became a state (thanks to the efforts of Jackson and Houston) Houston became one its first two U.S. Senators, then Governor. For more about Sam Houston, see The Raven, by Marquis James.

(Bill Hobby was Lieutenant Governor of Texas, 1973-91.)

Note to editors (more for amusement than publication): E-mail exchange between me and Frank Vandiver—

Hobby to Vandiver:

Would Francis Scott Key, after defending Houston against Stanbery’s charges, have written the Starr-Spangled Banner?

Vandiver reply to Hobby:

No, but Francis’ brother Lewins might have.

Get out of my face!

It’s finally happened. They are warning us against the expensive safety devices with which they have cluttered up our lives. The new cars have warnings on the sun visors that the air bags that the feds require to protect us can hurt us or kill us by literally getting in our faces.

Get out of my face!

“Anti-theft devices” don’t give car thieves much of a problem, but they sure make trouble for car owners and money for mechanics. I have had to get road service three times in the past two years because these devices wouldn’t let me start my own car. That’s at about $60 a pop because expensive stuff that I didn’t want in the first place didn’t work.

That $180 is, of course, in addition to what, I paid extra when I first got the car to disconnect the alarm system that sets off the horn whenever somebody touches the car—like somebody trying to get into their own car in the next parking place. The blaring, warbling horn is a public nuisance.

Get out of my face!

General Motors has decided he knows best when to lock the car. The automatic locking systems could easily lock a child in a car when the driver has accidentally left the keys in the car. The “child security lock” unaccountably locks the rear doors from time to time. Both systems are irritating and potentially dangerous. Thank you, General, but I’ve been driving for about fifty years. Please let me decide when to lock the car–and when not to–all by myself, thank you.

Get out of my face!

General Motors has decided he knows best when to turn on the headlights. Thank you, General, but I’ve been driving for about fifty years. Please let me decide when to turn on the headlights–and when not to–all by myself, thank you.

Get out of my face!

When they have finished protecting us in our cars, they start protecting us in airports. When we get to the airport, a recorded voice tells us repeatedly that we don’t have to give money to the nuts who beg in airports. We know we don’t have to shell out money to street beggars (though we can if we want to). Don’t they think we have enough sense to know we don’t have to shell out to the airport beggars?

Get out of my face!

Then they run us and our purses, briefcases, or whatever, through an x-ray machine. The x-ray machine is very good at detecting car keys, calculators, and laptop computers.

Beginning recently they hand-search as many of our bags as they can, whether or not the x-ray showed anything suspicious.

Do you feel safer now?

After we and our carrry-ons have been x-rayed, we are asked if the baggage that has just been x-rayed has been out of our control or given to us by somebody else. What does that matter if the baggage has just passed the electronic sniff test?

Then we are asked for our photo ID cards. That certainly helps. Does your driver’s license photo look like you? If not, should you be told you can’t get on the airplane? And isn’t that requirement putting a pretty heavy load on the airline gate agent, who, after all, is not a policeman.

Get out of my face!

When we get on the airplane, the feds nag us some more. The incessant prattling about seatbelts being securely fastened is fedspeak. What would happen if we insecurely fastened our seatbelts? How could we do that? My favorite is the warning from Uncle Sam that “packages may have shifted in flight”. In fairness, the airlines contribute their share of the pointless babble: “Let us be the first to welcome you to Dallas….”. “On behalf of the Houston ground crew…”

Get out of my face!

Last year President Clinton decided to protect children from being shot by enclosing with every gun purchased a card urging the new gun owner not to shoot children.

Get out of my face!

(How many more of these are there out there? Please send examples to Get out of my face! c/o Bill Hobby, PO Box 326, Houston, TX 77001-0326 or [email protected])

(Bill Hobby is the Radoslav Tsanoff professor of public affairs at Rice University.)

There is a familiar Irish revolutionary song titled, “It’s Off to Dublin in the Green, in the Green.” Until recently, any story about the Irish economy could be titled, “It’s Off to Dublin in the Red, in the Red.”

Not anymore. The Irish economy is so robust that the Irish refer to their country as the “Celtic Tiger” – after the former five Asian tigers, now economic kittens.

The whole country looks as though it had a fresh coat of paint. Shops are full of merchandise and customers. Construction is evident on city outskirts.

The sad truth is that much of what made Ireland quaint and attractive to tourists-the narrow little country roads, the tiny, rockbound fields, and the donkey carts were symptoms of the poverty that resulted from a small island country unable to build an industrial base with its limited market.

That’s in the past. Today, Ireland has become a center for electronics, software and telemarketing. Companies like Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, American Airlines, Motorola and the Texas-based Compaq and Dell have located in Ireland and are creating jobs there. One study estimates that jobs in software will grow from 15,000 now to 25,000 by the end of 1999.

The high-tech companies are running “help wanted” ads aimed at Irish people with computer skills who have immigrated to the United States. There are now something like 50 call centers in Ireland, doing telemarketing all over Europe.

Compaq, which operates a customer service center in Dublin, is recruiting people who speak Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, and the Scandinavian languages. Dell is looking for marketers and telephone technical support personnel for its Sales and Support Center in Bray and its computer manufacturing facility in Limerick. Motorola, with its European Software Development and Support Center located in Cork, is looking for people with degrees in computer and electronic science.

The salaries being offered are comparable with the US salaries, but taxes and living costs are higher in Ireland than here.

There are two reasons for the Irish boom: Ireland’s fine system of education and generous aid from the European Union. As the best-selling memoir, “Angela’s Ashes” illustrates, Ireland did a good job of educating its citizens even when they were destitute and miserable. Many of them took that education overseas and used it to great advantage. Now, the high rate of literacy and numeracy has created the kind of workforce technical companies need.

Institutions of higher education like the innovative University of Limerick contribute by creating curricula that produce the technically skilled people the computer manufacturers need. As for the European Union, it has done for most of Europe what was envisioned: create a large market for the products produced so that industry can grow and people prosper.

But for poorer nations such as Ireland, the benefits are even more tangible.

European aid is work everywhere, building roads and other infrastructure, supporting farm production and jumpstarting economic activity.

Blue signs with the constellation of the EU identify projects chosen for assistance, and they vary from uncovering Romanesque frescos in Cormac’s Chapel at the Rock of Cashel to rebuilding an 1840’s telescope at Birr Castle.

The telescope project is fascinating. Originally constructed by the Scientifically inclined Third Earl of Rosse, it is six feet in diameter, the largest in the world until 1917. It is fitted with intricate pulleys and weights that enable it to move vertically. The telescope was reconstructed from photographs taken by Mary, Countess of Rosse in 1862.

When the Historic Science Center project at Birr is complete, it will celebrate some of the scientific achievements of a country much better known for music, dance and literature.

From farm gates to four-lane highways, European aid is changing the Irish countryside, and creating an economic success story.