Texas Constitution

In this chapter, we learned that the Texas Constitution places serious limits on state
government. Some of those restrictions are shared with the US Constitution but many go
beyond it to make governing in Texas extremely challenging.
We first examined some of the similarities. One of the similarities that the Texas
Constitution shares with the US Constitution is the belief that political power is derived from
the people. Both the Texas Constitution and the US Constitution state that a conscious act of
“the people” is involved in creating their state governments (43). We also saw that both
constitutions are committed to separation of powers, “the division of governmental power
among several institutions that must cooperate in decision making,” (43) meaning that we
found that there are three different branches of government, the legislature, the executive, and
the judiciary in Texas and the US. We also saw that checks and balances, the “constitutional
idea that overlapping power is given to different branches of government to limit the
concentration of power in any one branch” (43), is a feature of both constitutions intended to
prevent the abuse of power. Finally, we see that both constitutions limit the power of the
government by prohibiting it from violating particular rights such as speech and assembly.
We next turned to an analysis of the differences between the two documents. The US
Constitution is both brief and flexible (59), characteristics not shared by the Texas Constitution.
The US Constitution’s seven articles contrasts favorably with the 16 articles in the Texas
Constitution. These differences in length can be attributed to the differences in tone between
the two documents. The writers of the Texas Constitution wanted to ensure the principle of
limited government was paramount and therefore wrote a document that severely restricts
state government (59). These differences in length and tone reflect the differences in the

circumstances surrounding the writing of the two constitutions. The US Constitution was a
reaction to the problems of the Articles of Confederation and the Texas Constitution was a
reaction to centralizing state political power in the post-Civil War reconstruction government
and the state constitution of 1869.
Constitutions are written as a reaction to political circumstances and reflect the political
context when they are written. Both the US and Texas constitutions attempt to limit the
exercise of political power, however, because of the different times when they were written,
they go about doing that in very different ways.
Instructor Comments:
The student here does a good job answering the majority of the writing assignment prompt. The chapter
conclusion is well organized and written, and the student provides internal documentation from our
current text for support. However, the student does not address whether or not the current Texas
constitution works for the growing diversity of the state which was the final part of the assignment
prompt. This would be an A-/B+ assignment.