01.05.07
What Will the Rules Be For The Speaker Election On Tuesday?
Craddick wants a roll call vote on the next speaker. Which brings up a few interesting points:
Members of Speaker Tom Craddick’s leadership team plan to file a resolution Saturday calling for a random roll-call vote Tuesday if there’s more than one candidate for the House’s top job.
One lawmaker immediately called the idea “crazy.”
“If you do it one at a time instead of everybody voting at once, the people at the end of the vote will decide who wins, or will throw their vote to whoever the leader is,” said Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth. “It’s just poorly thought out.”
Defending the idea in a letter to colleagues, Rep. Will Hartnett, R-Dallas, wrote, “I have heard some concerns today about requiring a public vote. To provide some rebuttal, enclosed are various newspaper editorials complaining about the secret election of Lieutenant Governor Bill Ratliff in 2000.”
Also listed as sponsors of the resolution are Reps. Jim Keffer of Eastland, Robert Puente of San Antonio and Sylvester Turner of Houston.
Craddick opponents — and groups that typically support open government — are calling for a secret ballot in the race because they say otherwise the chances for retribution from the incumbent are great.
Geren said he would like lawmakers to have a paper ballot with lawmakers writing whom they support. He said he would support having the results on how each member voted made public after the vote was counted.
“We all need to vote at one time. I don’t care if you know how I voted or not,” Geren said.
Hartnett asked his colleagues to call him on his cell phone “if you have any questions or wish to suggest changes. Since our families and friends will be with us this Tuesday, I would like to try to minimize the issues that we need to address on the floor.”
What are the chances?
In that light I thought I would add this from Rep. Scott Hochberg’s recent email newsletter:
Obviously, a House member has a lot to lose by challenging the Speaker. But it’s not only the challenger who is at risk, but every member who supports the challenger. A committee chair who ends up on the losing side of a Speaker’s race will not likely keep his/her gavel.
That’s because since the early 1970s, all votes for Speaker have been recorded votes. The winning candidate immediately knows who was disloyal. So, to some extent, members vote for who they think will win, instead of who they think is the best candidate, to try to avoid getting caught on the losing side.
It’s probably also no coincidence that Speakers have generally kept their position much longer since the House stopped using secret ballots in Speaker elections. It’s just not worth the risk to members to be on the wrong side of a challenge. Before the votes went public, secrecy was so important that the ballots were routinely ordered to be “completely destroyed by fire” after the votes were counted.
There’s no rule that says whether next Tuesday’s election of Speaker will be by secret ballot or by publicly recorded vote. In fact, there are no rules at all about how the election will be conducted. The rules for each Speaker’s election are adopted by the House shortly after the members are sworn in. There has been some talk about using a secret ballot this time to allow members to vote for their preferred candidate without fear of retribution.
In the past, the House has generally required a candidate to get more than half of the votes to win when more than two candidates were competing. If all candidates fall short on the first ballot, a runoff has been held between the top two. Again, while that’s the way it’s been done in the past, there is no requirement that it be done that way this time so the House could decide on a different process.
House members will be sworn in beginning at Noon on Tuesday, Jan. 9. The election of the Speaker is the first order of business once the members have been sworn. Until a Speaker is elected, the House is chaired by the Secretary of State.
That means there are no rules until the just sworn house members make them. And isn’t it fitting that Craddick is once again trying to bully his members into a vote.
Oh yeah, Ronnie Earle is being asked to investigate Craddick. You know, that whole “culture of corruption” thing.