Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

As lawmakers scramble to save dying bills, it is worth pausing a moment to recall that this entire misadventure began on the evening before the first day of the session in the Texas Senate.  That’s when most Senators discovered that Woodland Republican Tommy Williams was going to engineer an end run around the 2/3s rule to advance two partisan items that were otherwise dead for the session:  Voter ID and redistricting.  

The plan was to create a special order in the Senate Rules that would be adopted by a simple majority the next day.  The special order would exempt those two issues from the 2/3s rule.

Williams was ultimately persuaded to pull down the redistricting component since it was gratuitously partisan in a non-redistricting year.  But he all but served his rural Republican colleagues notice that he would seek the same rule in two years when one or more of them will be on the redistricting chopping block after the 2010 census.

So while it was Democrats that Williams sought to marginalize this session, it will be Democrats and rural Republicans in the next.

The truth is about half the Republicans were loathe to do anything to erode their power by circumventing the 2/3s rule.  But once the rule change was publicly linked to voter ID,  Williams put his colleagues in the bullseye of Republican primary voters.

Only one Republican, John Carona had the guts to argue that the rules change was wrong and vote NO.

It set the tone for the rest of the session in the Senate.  

But it was not until yesterday that it became clear that the Williams’ special order would jeopardize the entire session.

Very few serious people deny that voter ID will negatively impact Democratic turnout.  The only issue is by what order of magnitude.

Stripped of the rhetoric and prose on both sides, voter ID is about as many as seven or eight House seats in the pre-redistricting 2011 election.  For instance, a small decline in Democratic vote greatly enhances Linda Harper-Brown’s (R-Irving) survival prospects.

To hold their House majority and perhaps gain a few seats, Republicans must have Voter ID.   To have any chance of continuing their forward momentum in gaining seats, Democrats must kill it.  

Voter ID is not an intellectual exercise.  It is life and death.

House Minority Leader Jim Dunnam’s tactic of engineering the Local and Consent Calendar as a blocker bill does not invent new rules.  It uses existing rules as written.  This stands in contrast to the Williams special order that invented a procedure to compel consideration of legislation that directly threatened Democrats (and less obviously, rural Republicans)

So by torquing Senate rules and compelling the Legislature to take up voter id, Williams unwittingly put House Democrats in control of wholesale bill destruction.

Rules evolve over time and are intended to modulate passions with predictable procedures.  While not always successful, rules are intended to produce some equilibrium between competing and often fractious forces.  Sidestepping or openly abusing rules nearly always has unintended consequences.

Sadly, this is not the first time this decade Republicans have shot themselves in the foot by torquing rules.  The most notorious is obviously Tom DeLay who engineered a 2003 re-drawing of Congressional districts.  The net result was that Mr. DeLay lost his seat and Texas lost its Democratic seniority just as power shifted in Washington.  

DeLay’s ambitions relegated Texas to back bencher status for years, particularly unfortunate with Texas industry likely to be dramatically impacted by issues such as cap and trade and border security.

Former Speaker Tom Craddick torqued the rules to hold on to power long after his floor support had waned. He won the battle by refusing recognition for a Motion to Vacate the Chair but lost the battle by unifying Democrats in 2009 and losing enough Republican support to guarantee his demise.

This session, it was Tommy Williams who took up the torch and promises to do it again in two years.

At the beginning of next session, senators might consider adopting temporary rules as does the House.  Temporary rules would immediately incorporate the 2/3s rule for consideration of Williams’ style special orders. It might be the only way to sidestep another weapon of mass destruction in 2011.