Former Speaker Rayford Price: Critical Of Craddick Brief To AG

By Vince Leibowitz on Jul 26, 2007 in 2009 Speaker's Race, 80th Legislature

As you will recall, yesterday we brought you additional developments in the continuing saga related to the request for an attorney general’s opinion concerning the removal of the House Speaker.

Now, via QR, we have learned that former House Speaker Rayford Price has filed a brief (here, .pdf). We wanted to bring an especially interesting portion of this to your attention:

The problem in relying only on impeachment for the removal of a Speaker is that two legal requirements would come into play which would be absurd when dealing with the removal of a Speaker.
First: If the House passes articles of impeachment against the Speaker, the matter goes to the Senate for trial. For the Speaker to be removed from office, two-thirds of the Senators voting would have to vote for removal. This could lead
to the absurd situation where a substantial majority of the members of the House have voted for impeachment but the Senate fails to get the two-thirds vote necessary for removal. The members of the House would have to continue serving
under a Speaker they had voted by a substantial majority to impeach. The House should not have to rely on the Senate to remove its Speaker.

Second: The provisions of Section 5, Article XV, Texas Constitution would come into play if a Speaker were impeached by the House.

Section 5, Article XV, Texas Constitution provides that:
All officers against whom articles of impeachment may be preferred shall be suspended from the exercise of the duties of their office, during the pendency of such impeachment. The Governor may make a provisional appointment to fill the vacancy occasioned by the suspension of an officer until the decision on the impeachment.

If articles of impeachment are preferred against a Speaker by the House, under this constitutional provision, the Speaker would be suspended from exercising his duties as Speaker and the Governor would have the authority to fill the vacancy until the decision on the impeachment is made by the Senate. This would be a flagrant violation of the separation of powers provisions of the Constitution to have the Governor appoint someone to act as Speaker.