7.2: Membership in the Texas Legislature

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Drafters of the Texas Constitution envisioned a citizen legislature—a system in which ordinary citizens would gather in Austin for a limited time every other year, draft a budget for state government, make whatever changes in the law were absolutely necessary, and get out of town. Their views on politicians could have been summed up by Game of Thrones’ George R.R. Martin: “Politicians were mostly people who’d had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers.”⁵ In conjunction with this assessment, the Texas legislature is a “low professional” or part-time legislature (thirty-eighth out of the fifty states⁶), meaning most legislators do not make a living as a professional politician. These conclusions are based upon a number of measurements relating to the session frequency (annual or biennial), session length (full-time or part-time, number of session days, and the existence of special sessions), individual legislator pay, the percentage of open seats, the percentage of incumbents who face primary opponents and major party opposition, the number of legislative chamber committees, the amount of state-financed research, the existence and strictness of ethics laws, the existence of term limits, and the ideological spectrum of the legislature.⁷

Accordingly, requirements for holding office are slim.

Requirements for Texas House of Representatives

To be qualified to serve in the Texas House of Representatives, you must be:

a U.S. citizen;
a resident of Texas for two years;
a resident of their district for twelve months;
at least twenty-one years old.

Representatives are elected to a two-year term, with no term limits. Representative Tom Craddick, a Republican from Midland, was first elected in 1968, and was just reelected to his twenty-seventh term in the November 2020 election.

Requirements for Texas Senate

To be qualified to serve in the Texas Senate, you must be:

a U.S. citizen;
a resident of Texas for five years;
a resident of their district for twelve months;
at least twenty-six years old.

Texas senators serve four-year terms with no term limits. Senator John Whitmire was first elected to the Texas Senate in 1982, after serving five terms in the Texas House of Representatives.

With four-year terms, the Texas Senate is able to stagger its members’ terms so that- about half of the Senate membership is elected every two years. After senate districts are redrawn at the beginning each decade, the Senate is divided randomly into two classes, with one class having a re-election after two years and the other having a re-election after four years. This process ensures that at least half the Senate will generally have served at least one previous term. Compensation
Legislative pay in Texas is abysmally low. State legislators in Texas make $600 per month, or $7,200 per year, plus a per diem (per day) of $221 for expenses during the regular and any special session. The per diem is considered a compensation payment to legislators in consideration for all services rendered throughout their terms, regardless of how many days they actually attend the session. For the regular session (140 days), the per diem adds $30,940 to a legislator’s salary, with the total compensation amounting to $38,140. Legislators are expected to pay their expenses out of their per diem, however, and the cost of traveling to and from Austin and maintaining a residence there during legislative sessions can be expensive.

While the pay for serving in the Texas legislature is not great, the benefits are impressive. Legislators are entitled to the same health insurance coverage as any other state employee and can pay to add their spouse and family to their health insurance plan at a discounted
rate. Interestingly, many legislators with families write a check to the state each month for insurance coverage, as the cost of adding their families to their state insurance exceeds their legislative salary.

The retirement benefits of legislative service are substantial. Texas legislators who serve at least eight years qualify for a lifetime pension beginning at age sixty. Legislators who serve at least twelve years can begin receiving their pension at age fifty.

Perks and Protections

Texas legislators are given some specific constitutional protections to help allow a free and open debate on public policy issues. Article 3, Section 21 says bluntly: “No member shall be questioned in any other place for words spoken in debate in either House.”⁸ Additionally, Section 14 says “Senators and Representatives shall, except in cases of treason, felony, or breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during the session of the Legislature, and in going to and returning from the same.”⁹ State legislators have long been offered special license plates beginning with “S O” (state official), presumably to facilitate this privilege. While some legislators display these proudly, others have found the risk of a viral social media photo of an imperfect parking job a powerful disincentive.

The Composition of the Legislature

While the framers of the Texas Constitution designated low pay and limited time to encourage the legislature to be the home of part-time politicians and regular citizens, in actuality these limitations mean those elected to office are well-to-do and frequently either self-employed or retired people who can take time off to attend sessions. The statistics on age in Table 6.1, for example, reveal that membership in the current Texas legislature is largely over fifty, though incumbency statistics make it harder to determine just how old lawmakers were when they were first elected to office.

Description	House Members	Senate Members	Total
Gender
Male	111	21	132
Female	38	10	48
Total	149*	31	180
Party affiliation*
Democrat	67	13	80
Republican	82	18	100
Total	149*	31	180
Incumbency**
Incumbents	132**	27	159
Freshmen	16	4	20
Total	148**	31	179
Age***
Under 30	0	0	0
30-39	16	0	16
40-49	43	1	44
50-59	44	15	59
60-69	29	7	36
70 and over	17	8	25
No response	1	0	1

Table 7.1 Membership Statistics for the 87th Legislature (January 12, 2021 - May 31, 2021)

Gender, party affiliation, and age calculations are based on the membership as of the first day of session: 01/12/2021.

*House District 68 is TBD in a special runoff election on January 23, 2021. Governor's Proclamation, December 28, 2021.

** Incumbent totals include members who served the previous session. Freshman totals include members whose first terms began the first day of session: 01/12/2021.

Not included as incumbent or freshman: Mike Schofield (first served in 84th-85th sessions).

***Age calculations are based on the membership as of the first day of session: January 12, 2021.

SOURCE: texas.gov/sessions/sessionSnapshot.cfm?legSession=87-0.

Demographic Makeup Other statistics might be more relevant. Table 6.1 also shows membership is mostly male. It is also mostly White. Every two years when a new session of the Texas legislature convenes, the Texas Tribune posts an article analyzing the demographics of the latest class of lawmakers. Interestingly, the headline, “...white men are still overrepresented in the Texas Legislature,” never changes.¹⁰

In the 2021 legislative session, sixty-one percent of the members are White, compared to just forty one percent of the Texas population. Women hold just twenty-seven percent of House and Senate seats, though that number has increased by more than a third in the past four years. Of the 181 legislators, just forty-eight are women—most of them Democrats. The Tribune notes that the total number of Republican women in the House in 2021 is equal to the number of legislators named “John.”^₁₁

The racial profile of the legislature is similarly unbalanced. The 2021 Texas legislature is made of up four Asians, nineteen Blacks, forty-six Hispanics and 110 Whites. A representative slice of Texas by race would predict nine Asians, twenty-two Blacks, seventy-two Hispanics and seventy-four Whites.¹²

According to the Texas Tribune, “That’s largely a function of the Republican dominance of the Capitol and the dearth of diversity in the party’s ranks. All but five of the 100 Republicans in the Legislature are non-Hispanic White people.”¹³

Partisan Makeup For more than a century following the adoption of Texas’s current constitution in 1876, the Texas legislature was controlled by Democrats. The few Republican members—mostly from large cities and the German-immigrant heavy Hill Country—were useful to the mostly conservative Democratic leadership, which supported an arrangement of bipartisanship that has been a long-time tradition of the Texas legislature. As the Texas Democratic Party followed the national party’s shift to the left in the 1960s and 70s, the partisan balance of the legislature began to shift. Conservative Democrats like future governor Rick Perry began to switch parties, and traditionally Democratic conservative voters began to elect Republicans.

By 2002, the Texas House and Senate had Republican majorities. Republicans held ninety-nine House seats in 2010—one shy of two-thirds of the House membership. This was a significant number as the supermajority was two-thirds (that is, twenty-one of the thirty-one senators) before 2015. As large Texas cities have grown more populous and more Democratic, the partisan trend has begun to shift back, with Democrats’ share of the House rising from fifty-one in 2010 to sixty-seven in 2021. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, the Texas Senate reduced the supermajority required to bring a bill to the floor from two-thirds to three-fifths to five-ninths in 2021, reductions designed specifically to allow the eighteen Republican members of the Senate to bring up a bill without any votes from Democratic members.

In addition, the Texas Freedom Caucus, a nine-member group of conservative House members, has tried to push Republican House members away from the traditionally moderate, pro-business Republican politics of previous decades toward a more combative style of ideological policymaking, including legislative matters that stress cultural issues such as the “bathroom bill” mentioned earlier in the chapter.

5. George R.R. Martin, editor, Ace in the Hole, Wild Cards, vol. 6 (New York: Bantam Books, 1990).

6. Matthew Bangcaya, Thomas DiGiuseppe, Blake Dodd, Christopher Gruning, Rebecca Parma, and Johannah Roberson. Professionalization and Effectiveness in State Legislatures (Capstone Report: 2015), http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/187046.

7. Bancaya et al., Professionalization, http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/187046.

8. Texas Constitution, Art. III, § 21, https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/D....3/CN.3.21.htm

9. Texas Constitution, Art. III, § 14, https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/D....3/CN.3.14.htm.

10. Alexa Ura and Carla Astudillo, “In 2021, white men are still overrepresented in the Texas Legislature,” Texas Tribune, Jan. 11, 2021, Ura and Astudillo, “White men overrepresented,”
https://apps.texastribune.org/featur...epresentation/.
https://apps.texastribune.org/featur...epresentation/.

11. Alexa Ura and Darla Cameron, “In increasingly diverse Texas, the Legislature remains mostly white and male,” Texas Tribune, Jan. 10, 2019, https://apps.texastribune.org/featur...-demographics/.

12. Ura and Astudillo, “White men overrepresented,” https://apps.texastribune.org/featur...epresentation/.

13. “What does the Texas House of Representatives do?” Frequently Asked Questions, Texas House of Representatives, https://house.texas.gov/resources/fr...ked-questions/.