For 2306 - a story that features a couple key terms in your book: blocking bill and lieutenant governor.
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Legislative majorities make the rules, and they almost always contend that the rules are there to protect legislative minorities.
Why is that surprising to anyone? Rules are written to allow the people in charge to get their way while maintaining a reasonable façade of fairness. Want to win? Get a majority. Want to keep your power without a majority? Good luck.
That brings us to the latest from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who suggested Thursday that a loss of Republican seats in the Texas Senate in 2020 would likely result in a change in the rule for how many votes it takes to bring legislation up for debate.
It’s both arcane and important. For a long time, the Texas Senate wouldn’t consider any legislation unless two-thirds of the senators in the room agreed to consider it.
That was a protection racket of sorts, and an effective one. Anything with a bare majority died in the dustbin. A slight majority is often the setting for a nasty and divisive debate — the kind of battle that leaves senators on all sides bruised, battered and open to dangerous voter scorn. And senators, who are allergic to voter scorn, set up the rules to freeze out legislation that less than two-thirds of them wanted to debate.
The upside of that, according to senators who defended it, was that it forced each senator to talk to colleagues to try to win their support — if not for the legislation itself, then at least for the debate over it. Senators are big on collaboration, especially when it keeps them out of trouble with voters and anyone else who’s paying attention.
It also gave them cover on issues they didn’t want to debate. Notably, that included proposed limitations on abortion rights. Most of the Democrats opposed new limitations, and a fair number of Republicans didn’t want to vote on it, stuck between GOP platforms that called for outlawing abortion and their more moderate voters who wanted the law left as it is.
