Majority versus Super Majority

"....more than a majority of a quorum [would be required] for a decision.  That some advantages might have resulted from such a precaution, cannot be denied.  It might have been an additional shield to some particular interests, and another obstacle generally to hasty and partial measures.  But these considerations are outweighed by the inconveniences in the opposite scale.  In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed or active measures to be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed.  It would be no longer the majority that would rule;
the power would be transferred to the minority.
....a practice which leads more directly to public convulsions,
and the ruin of popular governments, than any other which has yet been displayed among us."
James Madison, February 20, 1788
Federalist No. 58

"Where the law of the majority ceases to be acknowledged, there government ends; the law of the strongest takes its place, and life and property are his who can take it."
Thomas Jefferson to Annapolis citizens, 1809
Memorial Edition, Vol. 16, p. 337

"It has been shown ... that all provisions which require more than the majority of any body to its resolutions have a direct tendency to embarrass the operations of the government and an indirect one to subject the sense of the majority to that of the minority.  ....And the history of every political establishment in which this principle has prevailed
is a history of impotence, perplexity, and disorder."
Alexander Hamilton, March 26, 1788
Federalist No. 75

"A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism.
Unanimity is impossible; so that rejecting the majority principle,
anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left."
Abraham Lincoln, first inaugural address, March 4, 1861

"Majority rule must be preserved as the safeguard of both liberty and civilization.  Under it property can be secure; under it abuses can end; under it order can be maintained -- and all of this for the simple, cogent reason that to the average of our citizenship can be brought a life of greater opportunity, of greater security, of greater happiness.
...pioneering for the preservation of our fundamental institutions
against the ceaseless attack of those who have no faith in democracy."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, August 18, 1937

How do these ideas apply to Texas?