Executive power trip
Gov. Rick Perry vetoed 37 pieces of legislation last week. Among them were bills with bipartisan support that would have made full-day pre-kindergarten instruction available for more at-risk children, placed a recycling mandate on television manufacturers and protected bicyclists on the road.
Perry vetoed fewer bills than he has in the past. In 2007, he vetoed 49, and in his first year as governor, 2001, he vetoed a record-breaking 83 bills.
However, Perry vetoed the bills in a manner that gave him entirely too much authority. At least a dozen of the vetoed bills were passed unanimously by the legislature, according to the Longview News-Journal. As our representative, Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, pointed out in his newsletter, “You work all year (or all biennium) on good legislation, building support and making revisions to reflect different viewpoints and answer various concerns, only to see the effort obliterated by one person’s objections.” Most importantly, “we don’t have the ability to come back into session and override his veto,” Watson wrote.
By vetoing the bills after the regular session ended, Perry took away the Legislature’s opportunity to override his vetoes, something it had the votes to do in many cases. The governor of Texas is widely considered to have very limited power. But in the past week Perry single-handedly overrode 181 elected representatives. The governor has proved that Texas needs a special veto session in order to check executive power.
Equal rights come to Texas
The Texas Lyceum Poll, released Tuesday, found 58 percent of Texans polled support the expansion of state rights for gay partnerships, showing a glimmer of hope for Texas’ gay and lesbian population.
UT government professor Daron Shaw, who helped conduct the poll, said the results show Texans are “not necessarily opposed to expanded legal rights for same-sex couples,” according to the Austin American-Statesman. Shaw was careful to not equate support for greater legal recognition in the state with support for gay marriage, which a majority of Texans still oppose.
In 2005, Texans voted overwhelmingly to amend the state constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, as the gay marriage ban garnered more than 74 percent of the vote. Travis County was the only part of the state that voted against the ban, and did so by a similarly large margin.
If this poll is any indicator, the political landscape seems to be changing quickly in the state, and we welcome the transformation. As gay rights achievements — and marriage in particular — continue to garner national headlines, we await the day Texas can join the list of states that value their gay and lesbian populations through equal rights.
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