The Ten Best and (Sigh)…The Ten Worst Legislators
Could any public body, anywhere in the world, be quite like the Texas legislature?
(Page 6 of 6)
Introduced a bill to make his own birthday a state holiday (“Senior Citizens Day”).
Tom Uher, 37, Conservative Democrat, Bay City. The devious, scheming chairman of the House State Affairs Committee. Speaker Clayton’s legislative hit man: his job was to kill bills. The record: 321 bills referred to Uher’s committee; 119 bills reported favorably; 202 notches on Uher’s gun. Because delaying a bill until late in the session can effectively kill its chances of getting through both houses, Uher’s early session record is even more revealing: 254 bills received by mid-April, only 14 reported out. His committee was nicknamed “the embalmers” by disgruntled colleagues.
There are those who will defend Uher’s attitude as just a healthy conservative suspicion about new laws; but there are few who will defend his tactics. Tells members he’ll get a bill out, then finds an excuse to send it to subcommittee—in Uher’s bailiwick, a one-way trip. Tried to kill utility regulation all by himself, but stumbled over his own feet when he said he wouldn’t appoint anyone who favored a utility commission to the subcommittee: there are some things better left unspoken. Was more successful in killing a proposed human relations commission and in bottling up a proposed state-owned superport after assuring their authors he’d give the bills a fair chance.
Consistently votes against efforts to open the political process. “More against change than anyone I’ve ever served with,” said one member. “He doesn’t want things to stay the same; he yearns to return.” Other members say he can resist any argument appealing to reason. Grew more puffed up by the hour with his chairmanship, apparently thrilled that anyone with such modest ability could rise to such heights of glory.
Last session was the prototype of a “cockroach”—someone who gets into things and messes them up. This time he had a chance to mess up more important things. Said one colleague: “When a cockroach gets a chairmanship, it’s gonna make him or break him. It didn’t help Uher a bit.”
Larry Vick, 33, Republican, Houston. The hands-down winner as the most detested member of the House. A loner because nobody else wants to be seen in his company.
Likes to lob big, controversial bombshell issues into the lap of the legislature, not because he expects to solve anything but because he enjoys watching the smoke and fire. Example: his proposal to place a prohibition against busing in the new constitution, a wacky enough idea in any case (considering that any federal court inclined to order busing would make short shrift of a state law against it), and one which he drove into the ground so badly day after day that even the members who deplored busing finally got sick of him.
Sent to Coventry by his colleagues, he subsided somewhat in the 1975 session. “Not as abrasive as he was during the Constitutional Convention, mainly because that would have been impossible,” said a fellow Republican member. Made himself into a buffoon early in the session by flying off to Illinois and North Dakota to lobby for resolutions that would have stalled the Equal Rights Amendment there, getting caught drawing his $12-a-day per diem expenses while he was gone, and then trying to defend his behavior by insisting that he had been on “important state business.”
Carries a negligible legislative program: six bills, four of which dealt with the same subject (insurance). None passed.
Personally, among the sleaziest of members. Used thinly veiled threats to try to force a state law school to enroll one of his aides. Once attempted to have a female sergeant-at-arms fired because she resisted his advances. Some good news: he may not seek reelection.
Doyle Willis, 64, Moderate Democrat, Fort Worth. “You can’t make a list of the Ten Worst and not put Doyle Willis on it,” said a Capitol observer of many years’ experience. A perennial choice, and the only House repeater from 1973.
The archetypal bad member, an aging politico who has learned only enough of the legislative art to twist it to his own crafty ends.
A typical Willis performance:
At a hearing on legislation that would have let the University of Houston escape strict state laws requiring easy access to college buildings for handicapped students, a blind woman student from UT-Austin testified against the bill, speaking movingly on the difficulties she and others had faced getting into buildings that lacked special aids. Willis, in a protracted and emotional series of questions, sympathized profusely with the young woman and assured her of how very, very deeply he agonized over her plight. “Oh, little lady,” he gushed, “we just want to take care of you and all the other little blind children of Texas the very best way we can.” By the time he had finished he was in tears, leaving observers convinced he would fight such legislation to the death.
Moments later, a dry-eyed Willis privately told a lobbyist: “Don’t worry. We’ll get your bill out.”
But why go on? In the words of one lobbyist: “Just say, ‘And Doyle Willis, of course.’ There’s no need to explain.”
Furniture
The term “furniture” first came into use around the legislature to describe members who, by virtue of their ineffectualness or stupidity, were indistinguishable from their desks, chairs, and inkwells. It is now used, casually and more generally, to identify the most inconsequential members.
The Furniture List for the 64th Legislature:
House
Jim Clark, Pasadena
Tony Dramberger, San Antonio
Michael Ezzell, Snyder
Tony Garcia, Pharr
Forrest Green, Corsicana
Don Henderson, Houston
Joe Hernandez, San Antonio
Sam Hudson, Dallas
Elmer Martin, Colorado City
Ed Mayes, Granbury
Robert O’Kelley, El Paso
Tony Polumbo, Houston
Don Rains, San Marcos
David Stubbeman, Abilene
Ruben Torres, Port Isabel
Kenneth Vaughan, Garland
Leroy Wieting, Portland
Senate
Roy Harrington, Port Arthur
Frank Lombardino, San Antonio
Lindon Williams, Houston
Unidentified Flying Object
Neither the Furniture category nor the Ten Worst list can do full justice to Terry Canales, 29, a sophomore representative from Alice. Nothing can do justice to Canales.
Missed all but three roll calls from January to mid-March; absent for 48 of 177 record votes. When he finally showed up in early April, the Speaker asked to see the credentials of this “stranger in our midst,” and then Canales received a standing ovation.
When the Capitol Press Corps chose him as one of its Top Ten Dumb, he is reported to have replied, “I may be, but there’s no way for them to tell, ‘cause I’m never here.”
Legislation bearing his name is rarer than the Gutenberg Bible. Half of his legislative program was a bill (which never came close to passing) to require staggered terms for the Starr County Hospital directors; the other half, a resolution to impeach his political arch-foe, District Judge O. P. Carrillo.
Has a nice sense of humor, according to a member who once met him.
Special Worse Than Worst Award
The Scene: The Texas Senate Chamber, May 22, 1975. A meeting of the State Affairs Committee, Bill Moore (57, Bryan), Chairman.
Moore has just denounced the House-passed utilities bill, saying he didn’t want to hear debate on it because he’d heard debate on bills like that for 25 years, and has offered his own lobby-written utilities bill as a complete substitute. At the back of the chamber, a utility company lobbyist strides through the door and walks up to a friend, another utility lobbyist. “Everything going according to plan?” he asks. “Yep.” For 25 years, the lobby has depended on Bill Moore to make sure everything goes according to plan. He seldom disappoints them, and then only because he intends to; Moore never does anything accidentally. Last session we gave him the “Special Best and Worst Award” because, we said, “Few men have mastered parliamentary tactics and the art of good-humored gamesmanship as well as he; few men have so scant a legacy of significant public accomplishment to show for their skills. “His wit is legendary, his abilities immense. Without him the Senate would be a husk of its present self; with him, the Senate can bear fruit only by overcoming the impediments he places before it.” This session Moore outdid himself. He dominated the Senate as no other member could, while: walking out on a major public hearing in his own committee, leaving two dozen witnesses waiting to speak; dismissing critics of UT Regent nominee Walter Sterling, a former John Birch Society member, as “rabble rousers”; authoring legislation to raise small loan rates as high as 31.7 per cent a year; passing a bill to hand over to highway contractors more than $ 1 million in interest money that now goes into the state treasury; opposing a government economy commission, an alcoholism treatment program, and the new Constitution; cutting short a hearing on a bill to aid low-income housing with the comment: “Are there any witnesses here against it besides the Chairman?” refusing to discuss amendments to his child care regulations, then tossing the bill into the wastebasket when his colleagues declined to bring it up for immediate debate; and warning that “socialism and communism” lurked in utility commission proposals. It is uncanny how his comments sound outrageous in print, while on the floor they seem lovably eccentric. Last session we wrote: “He is baffling, unclassifiable, larger than life. Of him it could be said, as it was said of the nineteenth century Irish patriot/villain Daniel O’Connell, The only way to deal with such a man is to hang him up and erect a statue to him under the gallows.’” This session we are not so sure about the statue.
My Library
