Constitutions
From the Chronicle: Voters to decide if Open Beaches Act will become part of the Texas Constitution
This is one of those funny bits of state politics that I find interesting. For all of Texas’ aversion to big brother and big government, we have declared by law that the State, and only the State, owns the beach. It’s free and open for the entire citizenry of Texas to make use of. This is great! We’ve culturally embraced the importance of preserving access to the coast for our decendents. Still, this is a little out-of-character for Texas.
Now people are considering upgrading the law that makes this so (the Open Beaches Act) to a State Constitutional Ammendment. This would make it much more difficult to ever be repealed in the future. I think our Open Beaches are great, and I don’t want to see that law threatened or repealed, so I have no complaint about an effort to make it an ammendment.
I do think, however, that the people of Texas have passed such a great number of ammendments and modifications to the constitution that I wonder if we really needed them all. For purposes of comparison, the US Constitution and all its ammendments are 21 pages long. The Texas Constitution is over 450 pages long.
To be fair, the Federal government has limited powers by design, and is supposed to defer most things to the State. That may not be the way things actually work, but in theory it would cause states to need more detailed constitutions than the Federal government does.
Still, the difference in size is enlightening. When the law becomes so complex and unwieldy that it takes an army of experts to decipher, our freedoms are in danger. It is easier to get away with corrupt action when you can hide it in a vast ocean of beaucratic and legal morass. The beauty of the Founding Father’s example for us is their embrace of the “less is more” philosophy.
Government works best when there’s less of it. Let’s just keep that in mind whenever the legislature is in session.
Categories: choose
Tags: Constitution, government, politics, small, Texas, USA
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Not to be too lawyerly about this, but the section of the beach that is engulfed by normal tides (like all public waterways) has been and always will be, held in trust by the state for the benefit of all citizens. It is based on the rather ancient legal principle of navigable waterways and the sovereign’s duty (in Texas’s case likely the King of Spain) to hold those waterways for the benefit and use of all citizens. It’s basically the same reason that Texas can’t sell, say, the land under the Gulf of Mexico (and hence the water above it) to a private company. It sounds somewhat ridicules but think how valuable something like that would be to a private shipping company.
This is really about public access to the beaches; basically easements across private land so the public can reach the public sections of the beach. It follows the same legal principle as an easement of necessity where a landlocked parcel of land has an implied easement across adjoining property so that the landlocked landowner can reach the public road and the county courthouse (that was the original justification I believe).
Alright – law nerd over. Anyway, I am glad it is on the statute book and (hopefully) will be within the state constitution. But I do agree with you that the Texas Constitution is a mess though. Sadly, I see it as a sign that we are continuing to turn away from our common law roots and becoming more and more like a civil law society (and the fact that the public is generally ignorant in regards to basic legal principles).