The Texas Legislature meets once every two years for one hundred and forty days. During this time period, they write laws/legislature that goes out to the people to be voted on. The Texas Legislature is made up of two components: The House of Representatives and the Senate. The House contains 150 members and the Senate has 31members. The characteristics of the Texas Legislature are "stale, pale, and male" meaning that the majority of the seat holders are white older men. Are these characteristics of the Texas Legislature capable of adequately representing the citizens of Texas? No.
Texas' population is very diverse and is not being correctly represented in the Texas legislature. There are a couple of things we can do to fix that. We need younger citizens, more women, and more people of different ethnicities to run for the Texas Senate or House. But, before we can have more diversity we need to fix an underlying problem: the salary of the seat holders in the legislature. Members of the legislature only make $7,200 while in session, plus a per diem pay of $168per day while in session and couple of other factors like money for staff and offices. The total comes out to be roughly $25,000 in total. This is nearly not enough money for an average citizen to be a member of the legislature. This allows for the pale/male/stale to run the Texas legislature.
How can we fix this? A simple amendment of the Texas Constitution. Why haven't we done it yet? Because Texas citizens are in denial that there is something wrong with the system or do not even know there is something wrong. An average citizen does not know what is going on in the Texas legislature or does not care.
Here is what you need to do to have more diverse seat holders in the Texas Legislature: first citizens need to be overall more informed of what is going on in Texas state and local government. Second, we need to amend the Texas constitution to allow for members of the Texas legislature to make more money, allowing more citizens to be able to run. Lastly, younger citizens, women, and more people with different ethnicity's need to take charge and campaign to be elected to the Texas legislature. Following these steps will allow for Texas' population to be more adequately represented.
Morgan Thatcher wrote a blog post about how Texas needs more diversity in the Legislature. I think her post was very comprehensive and convincing. Our Legislature is composed of mainly white, rich, educated, older, males. This causes a problem because people of this sociodemographics cant relate to people of another. This is a real problem because Texas is a very diverse state, made up of more than just pale, stale, males.
ReplyDeleteMorgan Thatcher also poses a solution which I also agree with. She suggests that Texas increases that salary for the Legislature because the current salary is not livable for normal citizens. To diversify the Legislature we need more women, ethnically diverse people, and people who aren't rich. Statistically these groups of people don't get paid as much as the old, white, males elite enough t only get paid a $25,000 salary.
Overall Morgan Thatcher's commentary was well written and argued.