Instructor: Dr. Sungdae Lim
Instruction:
This assignment is to encourage you to add your own deliberation based on the course readings,
lectures, and your background knowledge, experiential lessons, and critical thinking. By giving
answers, please make sure to spell out what the readings state correctly, what your opinion or
idea is, how you have come up with it, why it is a significant point of view, which data or factual
information may support your thought, and what implications can be finally made.
In an MS Word document, answer the following two questions; each has sub-questions to be
thoroughly answered. Please limit yourself to a total of 3 double-spaced pages, using 1” margins
and 12 fonts, Times New Roman. You may add references on a subsequent page after the main
text, which is not included in the page counts. Refer to the APA guidelines for formatting,
paraphrasing, quoting, and citation details. hone your answers by “wordsmithing” rather
than tinkering with font size and margins. The Essay 2 assignment is worth 15 points toward
your final grade. All questions are equally weighted; they will be graded on accuracy and quality
of the discussion, organization of the essay, adequate use of existing literature, and grammar and
spelling.
Questions:
1. Describe how a bill becomes a state law in general first. Then choose a bill from a past or
current legislative session at the Texas legislature website
(https://capitol.texas.gov/Search/TextSearch.aspx), and to track that bill’s progress
through the legislative process. Summarize the process with information on what it is,
which chamber it was proposed in, committee markup, whether it passed committee or
the chamber, any conference committee information, and whether it was signed into law
and when.
2. The office of Texas governor is one of the weakest offices in the nation. Why is this the
case?
What are some of the limitations that the Texas Constitution places on the
governor?
What are some of the informal powers that the governor may use to bolster the
power of the office?
