Seliger: Expand Senate to 37 members?
By Mike Ward, Austin American-Statesman
Source: http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/politics/entries/2011/11/29/seliger_expand_senate_to_37_me.html
From state Sen. Kel Seliger, a member of the smaller-government Republican Party and an architect of the Legislature’s redistricting maps that were nixed by federal judges last week, comes this:
Let’s consider expanding the Texas Senate from 31 to 37 members.
At a public forum at the University of Texas this afternoon, Seliger floated the idea “to start the discussion in public” — and said he has his staff researching a constitutional amendment that could come up for the debate in the 2013 legislative session.
“If you asked most people what they thought about having more legislators in Austin, they’d probably say, ‘Oh, great. That’s a horrible idea,’ ” Seliger acknowledged.
“But if you look at it from the standpoint of representation, state senators now represent around 800,000 people — and in some parts of the state that covers a whole lot of ground. It makes really representing those people very difficult, makes interaction with constituents very difficult.
“It’s an idea worth considering.”
The clubby Senate, which has touted itself as “the greatest deliberative body in the world,” partly because of its compact size compared to the 150-member House of Representatives — has had 31 members since 1876.
After Texas became a state in 1845, the state constitution allowed between 19 and 33 senators — though most sessions the total was 20. In a short-lived 1869 constitution, adopted during Reconstruction after the Civil War, the number of senators was fixed at 30.
Under new maps to be used next year, Seliger will represent 37 of Texas’ 254 counties, stretching all the way from Amarillo to remote areas in Loving County near El Paso in a district that covers 50,000 square miles. Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, will represent 51 counties, Seliger said.
Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio, currently has the largest geographical legislative district in the United States, representing 26 counties over more than 55,000 square miles — an area that spans two time zones and is larger than 24 states and 25 countries.
“To those people who would say this is a bad idea, I would say, ‘Suppose you’re in Glasscock County which has no incorporated city and no airport,” Seliger said, citing a county in his district. “Do you want to increase your chances that your voice will be heard in Austin or not?
“When I go out there, I fly my single-engine plane into a a crop-dusting strip. It’s way out there, but those people deserve representation the same as anyone else.”
Seliger said Texas senators will represent more people than members of the U.S. Congress. The last time the Senate’s district boundaries were redrawn, state senators each represented an average 672,000 people.
Seliger said the proposal first came up during last spring’s legislative session, as redistricting was being discussed. But it was never brought up for debate or public discussion.
“Thirty-seven is not a magic number — 35 may be better — but I think 37 is the absolute maximum you could have,” he said. “You can’t pack more than than into the Senate’s historic chamber.
“We’ll see what people think about this. It may be that they’d think we should have 31 U.S. senators and 150 members in the (U.S.) House, just like Texas.
“But I think it’s something that should be discussed.”