A penny for your thoughts

Talk about your law of unintended consequences (that the government’s actions have effects that are unanticipated or unintended), we have a new one for the record.   Texas lawmakers are considering how to reverse a law that accidentally made stealing a penny a crime. What you say? If I find a penny on the ground and pick it up and it’s not mine, I can be prosecuted?

That’s right.

Since 2011 when the Texas legislature passed a law aimed at stopping metal thieves who would sneak onto construction sites and steal metal piping (especially copper wire), stealing any kind of metal worth value can be considered a crime. Originally the law only applied to objects that had a 50% metal threshold – meaning that if the item was made of 50% more of metal it fell under the law to be considered a crime. During the markup session—the process where a committee reviews and debates amendments to a bill before reporting it out for debate before the full chamber—Sen. Royce West took out the 50% requirement which meant that anything with any metal could be eligible for a state jail felony. Pennies, you may not know, contain 2.5% copper. Good news is that the legislature will most likely amend the law to make is so that you have to steal metal valued at $500 or more.  That’s an awful lot of pennies.

And speaking of sharing your thoughts and trying to set a record, our U.S. Senators did that on Wednesday when they engaged in a 12-hour filibuster to stop the nomination of John Brennan to head the Central Intelligence Agency.  A filibuster is the endless talking that can go on when Senators try to “talk a bill to death.”  Under U.S. Senate rules, you must first vote to close off debate (vote of cloture) by 60 votes (or 3/5^th majority).  So even though you may have the 51% (majority) vote you need to pass legislation, take some action, or confirm a nominee, you can never get to that point if you do not have the supermajority (a number substantially greater than 51%) needed to stop the debate in the first place.  Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz joined Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in reading everything from Shakespeare’s Henry V and quotes from the movie “Patton”, to tweets which came in supporting the filibuster. The conservative Senators are unhappy about Brennan’s support for President Obama’s drone program which potentially allows unmanned flight vehicles to bomb U.S. citizens if the government has reason to believe a terrorist target is on U.S. soil.  The Senators finally ended their endless yap session about 1 a.m. with Rand Paul joking that he had wanted to break Senator Strom Thurmond’s previous record of 25 hours filibustering, but that the process had its limits (and “I am going to have to go take care of one of those here.”)

Guess sometimes nature just has to run its course.

Pushing forward and pulling out

The Texas legislature does not come back into session until January 2013, but the newly elected House and Senate members have already submitted over 250 bills for consideration. The bills range from prohibitions on texting while driving to regulations about where raw (unpasteurized) milk can be sold. The big issues, however, are clearly funding for education, crime, and health care—and these issues are likely to dominate the upcoming legislative session.

Our state’s founders were distrustful of government and the process for passing any legislation is arduous. Under the Texas Constitution, a bill requires three readings on the floor of each house. The first reading is after the bill’s introduction and assignment to a committee by the Speaker of the House or the Lieutenant Governor in the Senate. That committee then begins markup (the process of holding hearings and amending the legislation).  The second and third readings occur after the bill passes out of each chamber. While technically all three readings must occur on three separate days, this rule can be suspended by a super-majority (extraordinary voting requirement to ensure consensus on some issue) of four-fifths vote of members present.  To get the process moving in the short biennial session (the Texas legislature only meets for 140 days in odd-numbered years), legislators file bills in advance of the session so they can hit the ground running.

And speaking of running, both John Cornyn and newly elected Ted Cruz are advancing into key leadership positions in the U.S. Senate.   Cornyn has been elected as Senate minority whip (second in command to the minority leader), while Cruz was selected to be the vice-chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee-a committee which focuses on getting Republicans elected to the Senate.  Cruz’s position is interesting because typically such positions are reserved for persons who have more years of experience, but given Cruz’s growing reputation as a “conservative’s conservative”, his nomination is not such a shock.

One step forward, two steps back is what some people say about the recent spate of over 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for Texas to secede from the Union. Supporters of the petition argue that Texas, ranked as the 15^th largest economy in the world, should be allowed to pull away from the federal government.    The petitions were submitted on the White House through a crowdsourcing website (which allows citizens to express their concerns directly to the President). In essence those petitioning their government are asking for the state to be allowed to form its own “national” government. Even though there had been some speculation back in 2011 that Governor Perry supported secession,  this week Perry was quick to respond that he does not support such talk of pulling out because he “believes in the greatness of our Union and nothing should be done to change it.”

In response, at least one petition has requested President Obama strip the citizenship and peacefully deport those persons who support secession.  Another petition by people in Austin, which is thought to be a liberal stronghold, has requested that Austin be allowed to stay with the Union in case Texas does secede.

Welcome to the new post-election world. Moving on?