Austin offers plenty of fun activities for out-of-towners during the summer. However, if the guests you are entertaining are not into the whole “having fun” thing, there is a special legislative session coming up at the Capitol that you may be able to catch.
Just as he did in the spring of 2006, Gov. Perry has felt the need to convene with the Texas Legislature outside of the regular, constitutionally specified 140 day-long, odd-year legislative session.
This should come as no surprise, as the legislative time frame is just one of the many things wrong with the current Texas Constitution. The 90,000 word document is way too long and unnecessarily detailed, not to mention filled with misspellings and grammatical errors. In fact, it is the second-longest constitution in the nation, according to the book “We the People: An Introduction to American Politics.” While the U.S. Constitution fits comfortably in the appendix of your fourth-grade social studies textbook, Texas’ needs its own binding to stay together.
The Texas Constitution also gives too many limitations to municipal and county governments. Does it make any sense for the state’s largest county, Harris County, to function the same way as any of the many counties with less than 1,000 residents?
As students at a state-run institution, we know first-hand how poorly our state government functions. However, the majority of the population seems to have an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” type of attitude toward reforming arguably the most important document in the state. There have been many attempts to rewrite the Constitution over the past 30 years. All of them have failed.
The most recent attempt to right the wrongs of Texas’ Constitution was inspiring. In 1998, then State Sen. Bill Ratliff, R-Mt. Pleasant, and Rep. Rob Junell, D-San Angelo, led a bipartisan effort to produce an entirely different — and theoretically better — version of the state constitution. The proposed constitution was written in large part by students from Angelo State University.
Even though the new student-written state constitution never made it past committee, this relatively recent event in history sets a precedent for what could, and should, be done by students at UT. Our government department has at least seven tenured professors who received Ph.D.s from Ivy League schools, while others received theirs from such prestigious universities as the University of Chicago, MIT and Stanford. UT government students have the resources to at least try to pull off this endeavor.
With a gubernatorial election looming, now would be the perfect time for UT students to take up this task with the tools provided by the government department. Raising awareness of the issue is key, and interest in state affairs will not be higher at any other time than during the race for governor. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Kinky Friedman can only claim so many headlines.
The issue has been revisited plenty of times since the Constitution’s last major rewrite in 1876, but it is one that is too important to go away until it is fixed. At the flagship university of the state, students and professors have an obligation to make this state a better place in the time that we spend at UT.
Before Walter Cronkite narrated those commercials that make you scream with pride at Longhorn football games, UT’s only motto was “Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis,” a Latin translation of the famous quotation from Mirabeau B. Lamar, “Cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy,” according to the UT System Web site.
There is no better way for the state’s best minds to guard the state than to fix its functional and systemic problems.
Avelar is a government and premed senior
Yikes! Decry the grammar of the Texas Constitution if you must, but hire an editor to check your own: If your noun ("residents") can be counted, use "fewer," not "less."