Grandma Wants To Eliminate Primary System

Evidently Grandma Strayhorn has not been reading the polls that show she is dropping fast. It looks like she still believes that she could finish as high as second in the November election, because she has now said she wants to do away with Texas primaries and let all candidates run in the general election. If no candidate gets 50% of the vote, she would then have a runoff election. Currently, the top vote-getter wins the election whether they get 50% of the vote or not.

Grandma's plan would put Democrats, Republicans, third-parties and independents all on the ballot together, possibly resulting in a double or triple-digit number of candidates for many offices, and ballots that are several pages long. I don't think she has thought this one through. It is hard enough to get people to the polls without a ballot that looks more like a book, and an amount of candidates that would rival the population of some smaller cities. Even political scientists think this plan would just create chaos.

Of course, Grandma is just trying to position herself as the reformer in the race. Her second idea for reform makes a lot more sense. She wants to ban lawmakers from accepting a lobbying job for four years after they leave office. This is a good idea, and I personally wouldn't mind if the ban was much longer than four years. Too bad for Grandma, that Bell and Kinky came out with this proposal weeks ago.

Grandma's third idea is to eliminate lobbyists giving gifts to lawmakers. [Currently, lobbyists can give gifts valued at less than $500 per year.] Fourth, she wants to make all state contracts open for public review. [Such as the contract to build the TTC, which has been declared secret and is not available for public perusal.]

The primary elimination is silly, but the other three proposal have merit, and should be considered no matter who gets elected. It just seems kind of weird to hear ethics proposals coming from grandma, who has had some ethics problems of her own. She has been accused of putting state employees to work on her campaign while they were on state time. Also, there is some question as to whether some tax refunds were tied to contributions to her campaign.

Her ethics reform package, however good some of the proposals are, are simply an effort to gloss over her own ethical challenges. Even if she could get elected, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for any of these proposals to become law.