TLG

Article VIII, Section 6 of the Texas Constitution

As amended November 2, 1999:

No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in pursuance of specific appropriations made by law; nor shall any appropriation of money be made for a longer term than two years.

Editor Comments

As adopted in 1876, this section read: "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in pursuance of specific appropriations made by law; nor shall any appropriation of money be made for a longer term than two years, except by the first Legislature to assembled under this Constitution, which may make the necessary appropriations to carry on the government until the assemblage of the Sixteenth Legislature."

—Attorney Steve Smith

Recent Decisions

None.

Historic Decisions

  • Bullock v. Calvert, 480 S.W.2d 367, 372-73 (Tex. 1972) ("It may be true that these parties are unable to raise sufficient funds by their own devices. And it may well be that the only other alternative is an expensive special session . . . . However, these are considerations which we cannot reach without assuming to ourselves what the Texas Constitution does not allow us. That Constitution requires legislative authorization and appropriation for the expenditure of public funds. Since we can find no statutory provision empowering the Secretary of State to expend state money for the conduct of party primary elections, it becomes our constitutional duty to deny the petition for mandamus.")
  • Friedman v. American Surety Co., 151 S.W.2d 570, 580 (Tex. 1941) ("From what we have said it is evident that we hold that this Act does not violate Section 6 of Article VIII of our . . . . In other words, the funds attempted to be appropriated in the McCombs case were ad valorem taxes, levied and collected as such under authority of Section 9 of Article VIII of our State Constitution. The money here involved is not the property of the state in any capacity, but is a trust fund to be held out of the State Treasury, but in the hands of the State Treasurer as trustee, for the benefit of a class of employees whose employers pay it in by virtue of a tax levied, the tax being in the nature of an excise tax.")
  • Dallas County v. McCombs, 140 S.W.2d 1109, 1111 (Tex. 1940) ("Plaintiff in error contends that even if this appropriation running for five years is in violation of the two years' provision of Section 6 of Article VIII of our Constitution as applied to the five year period taken as a whole, still it is not in violation of such constitutional provision as applied to the first two years of the five year period. It seems to be the law that . . . . We interpret this to mean that if an appropriation is made for more than two years, it can be enforced for the first two years if it appears that the Legislature undoubtedly intended such appropriation to operate for two years, regardless of whether or not it could do so thereafter.")
  • National Biscuit Co. v. State, 135 S.W.2d 687, 694 (Tex. 1940) ("The constitutional biennium provided by the Constitution has already elapsed, and the appropriation is not yet effective because no final judgment has . . . . This appropriation can therefore now never become effective. To uphold an attempted appropriation, such as this, after the two-year biennium has elapsed, would violate the very fundamental purpose of the two-year constitutional provision under discussion, and permit one Legislature to make appropriations of money in unlimited and undetermined amounts, and to take effect at unlimited and undetermined times in the future, regardless of how long that time might be.")

Library Resources

Online Resources

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