Chupacabra Report

Early voting started Monday for the November Third Election. Houston has three or four viable candidates competing to be the next mayor, and so; our ballots will decide the fate of eleven proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution, because our turnout will be less dismal than that of the rest of the state.

As usual, I will be voting against most of these amendments on the principle that having to amend the constitution every time we need something done is no way to run a railroad. The Texas Constitution of 1876 has already been amended 456 times, with another 176 amendments passed by the legislature but then killed by the voters. At least we don’t have a crazy iniative and referendum process to allow citizens to put half baked ideas before the voters, or worse, to let moneyed special interests hoodwink the TV-watching public into passing on their pet projects. This is what has recently put the state of California into the ditch.

The Legislature actually convened 35 years ago to write a new constitution, but never produced a draft to put before the public, so we hobble along with this hash job cobbled together out of Napoleonic Law by way of the Louisiana Constitution.

Nevertheless, there are a few propositions that I support..

Prop. 4 would establish a “national research university fund” to aid seven Texas universities, including The University of Houston and U.T. San Antonio in becoming Tier 1 Research institutions. I think that this would be a good move for our state, which is coming close to spending more on incarceration than we do on education.

Prop 9 would put the Texas Open Beaches Act into the state Constitution, where it would be safe from assaults such as the pending lawsuit brought by California’s Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of a California woman who lost two Galveston beach houses to Hurricane Ike.

And Prop 11 would protect property owners from losing their land through the power of eminent domain because the state decided that some private developer could use it better. This could come in handy should Rick Perry someday decide to spend some of his Enterprise Fund money to build a Starbucks where your house is.

And that’s all folks. The other issues are warm and fuzzy sounding measures concerning military bases and veterans benefits that are properly the responsibility of the Federal Government; or else further rearranging of the deck chairs on our sinking state tax system. The hacks and shills in our state legislature ought to do better than that lot. The heck with ‘em.