A bill by State Rep. Mark Homer (D-Paris) would, upon passage of a constitutional amendment by voters, remove the state’s Attorney General from the Legislative Redistricting Board and replace him with the Commissioner of Agriculture.
The bill, HJR 53, is a logical move given that the Attorney General’s Office has a myriad of potential conflicts from serving on the LRB, chief among which is the fact that his office has to defend any eventual LRB maps against lawsuits.
Another good reason for the bill is the brouhaha that erupted in 2001 when then acting Lt. Governor Bill Ratliff (R-Mt. Pleasant) asked then-AG John Cornyn, who sat on the LRB, whether or not, as acting Lt. Governor, he was legally sitting on the LRB.
As I believe it was noted at the time by a number of sources, it wasn’t exactly as if the AG, who was one of the far-right Republicans who Republicans were hoping would help craft a map to give the GOP significant gains, was coming to the debate with clean hands. Clearly, he had political reasons to rule that Ratliff shouldn’t be on the LRB had he done so.
Of course, removing the AG fom the LRB won’t remove the political element from an AG’s ruling if a Ratliff situation were to ever develop again, but it would remove the conflict of interest.
There is no word on what current Ag Commissioner Todd Staples thinks about this.
February 20, 2009 at 9:42 am
[...] Texas, State Rep. Mark Homer, a Democrat, is proposing a major change to the composition of the board that helps to oversee the legislative redistricting [...]