The two governments are near-opposites, from their varied people to the prevailing political ideology, and yet they are in the same gut-wrenching race against time.
Iraq's General Assembly and the Texas Legislature have little in common at first glance. One is a newborn democracy trying to stay alive; the other an established bedrock of conservancy in middle-America. However, both are in a heated frenzy trying to craft legislation deemed critical to the state's immediate success, and both face the same potentially negative compromises because of that furor.
Texas's time-vice comes in the form of school finance reform where lawmakers are trying to do everything at once: lower property taxes, increase funding for schools and change the profit-sharing system between rich and poor districts. What once started over a year ago is still ongoing and in jeopardy of collapsing after one regular and three special legislative sessions. Also on the line are the political careers of key lawmakers.
Special interests and political wrangling have overshadowed the school finance debate for too long. In the current special session to address the problem, House members failed again by soundly voting against two key bills.
A world away in the Middle East, Iraqi leaders are trying to craft a completely new constitution by a mid-August deadline under intense American pressure. There has been some clamor among the 71 Iraqis authorized to write the constitution that up to six months is needed to hammer out divisions among the delegates, according to a Monday report in The New York Times.
A very real consequence of the hurried drafting could mean a bitterly divisive future for Iraq because of the vast differences between the country's Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. At risk are the issues of women's rights, the role of Islam and the extent of Kurdish self-rule.
"The Americans are the ones who want to have this done quickly," Mahmood Othman, a Kurdish member of the Iraqi National Assembly and a member of the constitutional drafting committee told the Times. "And they are doing it so they can begin to implement their exit strategy."
The problem with pushing delegates to a hurried solution is that any compromise could be the spark of a firestorm in the form of civil war.
Too many Americans, Britons, Iraqis and others have died so that a new Iraqi state could be established. With the revelation that there are no weapons of mass destruction, the establishment of a sound and democratic Iraqi government is the only justification for the war. And a hasty constitution could make all the bloodshed on both sides meaningless.
Less dramatic than the saga of Iraqi independence is the Texas school finance struggle. Lawmaker's have less than two weeks to bridge differences on a spending and tax plan or risk doing nothing.
This is the last chance for the legislature to make any progress, and like the Iraqi constitutional dilemma, hasty solutions and hand-wringing will only result in a rocky foundation.
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