My friends in this line of work tease me for being too optimistic about the prospects of avoiding a Special Session of the Legislature. As the 86th Regular Session careens toward its finish, the consultants, political watchers, journalists, and members themselves wonder if they must cancel summer vacations.
Personally, I remain cautiously optimistic that the one bill that must pass (the budget) will; and that the major policy priorities on taxes and school finance will also be passed. It is, however, the season of doubt and fretting, so I thought it’d be interesting to go back in time and look at the history of special, or more correctly, “called,” sessions.
I set out wondering if there would be a pattern that would be instructive for figuring out what might happen this year. For example, I looked at whether called sessions are less common after a statewide gubernatorial election and more common before the Governor is up for reelection.
I concluded that, no, there really isn’t a pattern. Every Legislature is different and unpredictable. That said, the big issues—taxation, the budget, and public education—echo down through the decades and have clearly vexed every generation of Legislator in our fair state.
So, rather than for any grand insight and just for fun, let’s drill down a little bit into what prompted called sessions in our past. By the way, a very special thank you to the good folks at the Texas Legislative Reference Library for their patient compilation of this material. If you have not visited the library on the northside, second floor, it’s well-worth it. It’s a great place to get work done!
Including this one, there have been 86 Legislatures sworn in since the first convened on February 16, 1846. The Legislature operated somewhat differently for the first 30-years, but it is the 1876 Constitution that vested the Governor with the exclusive authority to both bring the Legislature back for “called” sessions and set the agenda.
There have been 121 Called Sessions since 1846. The first for which a Gubernatorial proclamation is available was in 1864, and it dealt with tweaks needed to the state budget resulting from changes in Confederate monetary policy.
The first called session in the “modern” era, meaning under our current constitution, was in 1879. It dealt with 91 topics, including school finance (natch), staff pay at the, “Agricultural and Mechanical College at Bryan,” measures necessary to keep Yellow Fever at bay, and revisions to the Penal Code to “embrace sheep as well as other stock.” Well alrighty, then.
In 1905, Governor Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham, a South Carolinian who settled in Weatherford after the Civil War (his portrait shows a distinguished silver fox with the best-groomed beard I’ve ever seen), called the Legislature back to address, ahem, property taxes.
In 1913, the Regular Session adjourned sine die without passing a budget, so the best-named Governor ever, Oscar Branch Colquitt, called them right back and set them to work.
The number of topics selected by the Governor has varied from one to several dozen. The record-holder is Governor William P. Hobby, who gave the Legislature 253 to-dos in 1919.
In 1923, Governor Pat Neff evidently got into a stand-off with the Legislature over the budget. He convened several one- and two-day special sessions that spring because the Legislature adjourned sine die without passing one. And we think things get strained among the branches of government now!
Jumping way up into history, I remember Governor Bill Clements’ very first called-session in July 1981, because we had to cancel a family vacation. Well, what I mainly remember is my mom’s reaction.
When Governor Clements came back in the mid-eighties, workers compensation was the big issue. He called the Legislature back repeatedly, including famously over the holidays (that’s pretty hard-ball). The Legislature met almost until Christmas in 1989. There’s a great photograph of a State Senator at his desk wearing a Santa hat and a frown.
Even Ann Richards called four sessions in 1991-1992. During the 72nd Regular Session, she and the Legislature agreed to put-off developing the budget until Comptroller John Sharp performed his “Texas Performance Review” to identify efficiencies in state government. Thus, they had to call a session for July 1991 to pass a budget in time. Plus, they needed a tax bill to make the numbers foot. That called session went down to the wire, with the tax vote in some doubt right up until the very end.
The 72nd Session was my first, and I worked in a branch of the Lieutenant Governor’s office. I was assigned to Senator John Montford’s office to help them with one of the Comptroller bills. I would go home whenever I could to snatch some sleep, and then get paged (remember pagers?) whenever the next iteration of the bill was ready to be analyzed for Governor Bullock and his staff. That could be 11:00PM or 3:00AM. That went on for the full 30 days, and I had it relatively easy compared to many others. This may well have been the most intense special session in recent history, with a lot of interlocking bills that all had to pass.
Funny enough, the longest period between Regular Sessions without any called sessions was between 1993 and 2002. I’m particularly grateful for this period of calm because I got married and started a family during those years.
In 2003, however, the time of relative peace ended. Aside from breaks during the 80th and 84th Legislatures, the interims have been marked by called sessions dealing with biggies such as redistricting, taxes, transportation, and various social issues. Fortunately, in our recent past, there has been only that one called session to pass a budget, so in that sense, the Legislature’s been taking care of business.
So, what can we conclude from this? Well, across the breadth of our history, called sessions are common. In fact, it could be said that they are the rule and not the exception.
Now, it would be tempting to read into this that 140 days every two years is not enough to get the “people’s” business done. Going further, it could suggest the necessity of going to a full-time legislature that meets year-round.
I’m not on that page. I would submit that even though our Legislators run out of time or choose to not address a priority of a Governor (checks and balances, after all), we still have the best concept. Our system contemplates Legislators who come to Austin every two years, focus on the biggest issues, compromise with one another on most issues, and then go home to their families, businesses, and constituents. There is less-time for mischief, overreach, and too many self-sustaining/serving activities. Even if they’ve had to come back (sometimes repeatedly), I believe we still do it the right way in Texas.
Just take a moment to consider how the alternative has worked in practice, and maybe you’ll agree with me!
