As Texas Goes... Read Online Free PDF Page B

looking at things from the Texas side now.) Then after the Civil War, outsiders representing the federal government rigged elections, restricted freedom of the press, and deprived former Confederate soldiers of the right to vote. So, like the other former rebels, Texas returned to the Union with a near-paranoia about the dangers of Washington overreach. (On the other hand, once the outsiders were gone, the white Texans rigged elections, imposed vicious segregation laws, and deprived African Americans of their vote with a vengeance, just as an earlier generation of newly independent Texans had thumped down on the peaceful Mexican American settlers in their midst.)
    To this day, the state is organized so that no one in government will have much power and no one in private business will be under much control. The state house and senate meet once every two years, for 140 days, unless the governor decides to call an emergency session. Given the specificity of the constitution, it’s impossible to do much of anything without the cumbersome process of amending it. ( The Texas constitution is now the second longest in the country. At last count it had been amended 467 times.) The legislators receive $7,200 a year for their service. This, too, is in the constitution , along with the proper method of purchasing stationery and the rule that atheists cannot hold elective office.
    The legislators’ salary is not the lowest rate in the nation—Alabama only pays its representatives $10 a day, which is certainly a model to look toward if your goal is turning your state into another Alabama. But no other large state has such a low salary. And given the amount of travel involved, and the fact that state legislators really do spend a great deal of time working on constituents’ problems, responding to calls for emergency special sessions, and running for reelection, it hardly seems like a job for an average middle-class citizen. “The Lege,” says Professor Christopher King of the University of Texas at Austin, using the familiar Texas nickname. “We pay these guys the princely sum of $7,200 a year. The lobbyists write the bills. It really is driven by ‘bidness,’ as we say.” (The lobbyists far outnumber the legislators , and at way better salaries. Texans for Public Justice, a nonprofit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying expenditures, said that in the legislative year of 2009, special interests spent $344 million on lobbying contracts. Given that the legislature has thirty-one senators and 150 representatives, that averages out to nearly $2 million per lawmaker.)
    The Texas governor has historically been weak as well. Many people give Rick Perry—who has been governor since 2000—credit for creating a new model of a powerful chief executive, which seems to be built around the principle of never going away. Yet Perry does not appear to be feeling empowered, because he is so overwhelmed by the oppressive forces of Washington. “ Texans know how to run Texas,” he told the crowd at that Tea Party rally. “States’ rights! States’ rights! States’ rights!” (Perry has a habit of saying the same thing over and over in a loud voice. Perhaps it comes from his days as a yell leader at Texas A & M.)
    All the top Texas politicians, including Perry, are stupendously proud of Texas’s population boom and job growth, but it’s important to note—although almost nobody ever does so—that the state would probably still be a mainly poor, rural economy if it weren’t for massive federal aid. No one who has read Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson can forget the description of the farmers in the Texas hill country during the New Deal setting out the best food their families could afford for the workers who were going to “bring the lights”—and the sense of amazement and euphoria when the lights actually went on. For Texas to become something more than an underdeveloped supplier of raw materials to the rest of the