The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act is a United States federal law passed by the 47th United States Congress and signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur on January 16, 1883. The act mandates that most positions within the federal government should be awarded on the basis of merit instead of political patronage.
John Nance Garner III, known among his contemporaries as "Cactus Jack", was an American Democratic politician and lawyer from Texas. He was the 32nd vice president, serving under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941. He was also the 39th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1931 to 1933. Garner and Schuyler Colfax are the only politicians to serve as presiding officer of both houses of Congress.
James Claude Wright Jr. was an American politician who served as the 48th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1987 to 1989. He represented Texas's 12th congressional district as a Democrat from 1955 to 1989.
Sheila Jackson Lee is an American lawyer and politician who is the U.S. representative for Texas's 18th congressional district, having served since 1995. The district includes most of central Houston. She is a member of the Democratic Party.
Political polarization is the extent to which opinions on an issue are opposed, and the process by which this opposition increases over time.
John William Wright Patman was an American politician. First elected in 1928, Patman served 24 consecutive terms in the United States House of Representatives for Texas's 1st congressional district from 1929 to 1976. He was a member of the Democratic Party. From 1973 to 1976, he was Dean of the United States House of Representatives.
Lloyd Alton Doggett II is an American attorney and politician who is a U.S. representative from Texas. A member of the Democratic Party, he has represented a district based in Austin since 1995, currently numbered as Texas's 35th congressional district. Doggett is the only Democrat to represent any part of Austin in Congress.
Jack Bascom Brooks was an American Democratic Party politician from the state of Texas who served 42 years in the United States House of Representatives, initially representing Texas's 2nd congressional district from 1953 through 1967, and then, after district boundaries were redrawn in 1966, the 9th district from 1967 to 1995. He had strong political ties to prominent Texas Democrats including Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and President Lyndon B. Johnson. For over fifteen years, he was the dean of the Texas congressional delegation. Brooks was part of two seminal moments in 20th century American history during his congressional career: the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the impeachment process against Richard Nixon.
Robert Charles Krueger is an American diplomat, politician, and former U.S. Representative and U.S. Senator from Texas, a former U.S. Ambassador, and a member of the Democratic Party. As of 2022, he is the last Democrat to serve as a United States Senator from Texas.
Michael Thomas McCaul Sr. is an American attorney and politician serving as the U.S. representative for Texas's 10th congressional district since 2005. A member of the Republican Party, he chaired the House Committee on Homeland Security during the 113th, 114th, and 115th Congresses. His district stretches from Austin to Houston. As of 2018, he was the fifth-wealthiest member of Congress.
The Salary Grab Act, officially known as the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Expenses Appropriation Act, was passed by the United States Congress on March 3, 1873 and sparked a firestorm of controversy among members of the government, the general public, and the press. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act the day before his inauguration for a second term to double the salary of the president and those of Supreme Court Justices. The proposal for a salary increase was fueled by what was considered low pay for members in government, while the salary for the president was the same as it had been for George Washington. The bill subsequently included a 50 percent salary increase for the president and for members of Congress, retroactive to the beginning of their term, which was the most highly contested provision in the bill. Public outcry led Congress to rescind the congressional salary increase. As a protest against the act, Ohio ratified what later became the Twenty-seventh Amendment. The controversy surrounding the bill resulted in Republicans losing many seats, resulting in a Democratic majority in the House which began one of the most competitive two-party periods in American history.
John Roger Williams is an American businessman and politician who has been the U.S. representative for Texas's 25th congressional district since 2013. A member of the Republican Party, he served under Governor Rick Perry as Secretary of State of Texas from 2004 to 2007.
Richard Wilson Austin was an American politician, attorney and diplomat. A Republican, he served in the United States House of Representatives from 1909 to 1919, representing Tennessee's 2nd district. Prior to his congressional tenure, he worked as a United States Marshal from 1897 to 1906, and served as the U.S. consul to Glasgow, Scotland, from 1906 to 1907.
Jack English Hightower was a former Democratic U.S. representative from Texas' 13th congressional district.
Aloysius Patrick Martinich, usually cited as A. P. Martinich, is an American analytic philosopher. He is the Roy Allison Vaughan Centennial Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at University of Texas at Austin. His area of interest is the nature and practice of interpretation; history of modern philosophy; the philosophy of language ; the history of political thinking and Thomas Hobbes.
NOMINATE is a multidimensional scaling application developed by political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal in the early 1980s to analyze preferential and choice data, such as legislative roll-call voting behavior. As computing capabilities grew, Poole and Rosenthal developed multiple iterations of their NOMINATE procedure: the original D-NOMINATE method, W-NOMINATE, and most recently DW-NOMINATE. In 2009, Poole and Rosenthal were named the first recipients of the Society for Political Methodology's Best Statistical Software Award for their development of NOMINATE, a recognition conferred to "individual(s) for developing statistical software that makes a significant research contribution". In 2016, Keith T. Poole was awarded the Society for Political Methodology's Career Achievement Award. The citation for this award reads, in part, "One can say perfectly correctly, and without any hyperbole: the modern study of the U.S. Congress would be simply unthinkable without NOMINATE legislative roll call voting scores. NOMINATE has produced data that entire bodies of our discipline—and many in the press—have relied on to understand the U.S. Congress."
Daniel Paul Franklin is an American political scientist and Associate Professor of political science at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Frances E. Lee, an American political scientist, is currently a professor of politics and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She previously taught at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Maryland, College Park. Lee specializes in American politics focusing on the U.S. Congress. From 2014 to 2019, Lee was co-editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly and is the first editor of Cambridge University Press's American Politics Elements Series. Her 2009 book Beyond Ideology has been cited over 600 times in the political science literature. Lee is also a co-author of the seminal textbook Congress and Its Members, currently in its eighteenth edition.
Political polarization is a prominent component of politics in the United States. Scholars distinguish between ideological polarization and affective polarization, both of which are apparent in the United States. In the last few decades, the U.S. has experienced a greater surge in ideological polarization and affective polarization than comparable democracies.
The 2022 United States House of Representatives elections in Texas will be held on November 8, 2022, to elect the 38 U.S. Representatives from Texas, one from each of the state's projected 38 congressional districts. The elections will coincide with other elections to the House of Representatives, other elections to the United States Senate, and various state and local elections.
