Ross Ramsey: A Weak Governor System, With a Strong Governor

The Texas Tribune writer points out that longevity and the cultivation of loyalists that he has placed throughout state government has given Perry far more power than is typical in the office. Its unlikely his successor will enjoy the same clout he developed, but he transformed the office while he held it:

Before Perry, half the stories about the doings in the state Capitol were either about the inherent weakness of the governor’s office or the ancient lore about how the lieutenant governor holds the state’s most powerful office.

The governor has no cabinet. He or she can appoint the people who populate the various boards and commissions, but only a third of them come up for appointment every two years, and the governor doesn’t have direct control over them once they’ve been posted. They can’t be fired — they can be made pretty uncomfortable, but that takes a lot of work — and they often behave as if they have their own brains and their own goals and ways of doing things.

That means that most of the people who head the executive branch of Texas government have never had full control over it. Other elected officials head some of the major agencies, and a powerful legislative branch can, with strong personalities in charge, control the agencies to some extent by controlling their budgets.

. . . After six years of Perry being in the governor’s office, virtually every appointee had him to thank for their post. And over his first decade in office, the governor seeded the executive branch with his former aides and their like-minded peers. They’re all over the place, with titles like executive director, general counsel, communications director and so on.

. . . Perry’s transformation of the office might be permanent. The agencies might naturally turn their ears to a governor for guidance after all these years out of habit.

It will take six years to replace all the appointees who owe their jobs to Perry, a third of the jobs turning over every two years. The people at the tops of all of those agency organization charts will linger until retirement — Perry’s legacy —and while they may be helpful to a new governor, they will not be indebted like they are to the old boss.

. . . Perry, because of his tenure and the methodical placement of former staffers throughout the government, changed all that, turning a weak office into a powerful one. It’s hard to remember how it used to be.