Why Does Dolph Briscoe Want To Be Governor?
And when is he going to start?
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The three major displays of gubernatorial arm-twisting in the last session came on the Coordinating Board bill and the confirmation of his appointees Walter Sterling and Hilmar Moore. In the confirmation cases, two of his long-time personal friends were opposed by Senate liberals; he generated a ferocious counterattack to put the liberals down. In the other case, he expanded the power of the Coordinating Board (dominated by his own appointees and chaired by his close friend Harry Provence) against the indignant opposition of the University of Texas regents.
Anything that erodes executive power is likely to meet his personal opposition; he is more interested in keeping power than in using it. A provision in the new constitution that would have made gubernatorial appointments expire after February 1 of odd-numbered years, thereby eliminating “midnight” appointments by an outgoing governor, was regarded as a plot hatched in Bill Hobby’s office to snatch away Dolph’s rightful future powers. An uncontroversial bill revising the rules governing emergency medical leaves for penitentiary inmates—which had the support of prison officials and the Board of Pardons and Paroles—was vetoed; it had taken away the governor’s existing (but practically never used) authority to countermand those leaves.
If there is anything that characterizes Briscoe’s relations with the rest of state government, it is this petty insistence on preserving abstract power. At times it seems that not only does he not want to do anything himself, he does not want anyone else to do anything. There are those who see the hand of Janey in all this, protecting her husband from imagined threats to his authority; others see the hand of his staff, unable to distinguish between power that matters and power that doesn’t. But the truth may be that Dolph himself, the soft-spoken son of that two-fisted rancher, is behind it: proving to any doubters that he is not some weak-kneed Milquetoast who lets others get the best of him. Remember those speeches: he is a man of firmness.
Insofar as Briscoe has a personal program, this idea of forbidding things is its dominant motif. Forbidding people to take away his power, forbidding them to get the best of him; and above all . . . forbidding any new taxes. That is the one continuing policy year-in-year-out which elicits his whole-hearted enthusiasm. It is the sole irrefutable accomplishment of his three years in office. One illustration will suffice to show the depth of Briscoe’s attachment to this, his single monument:
Texas has never imposed a tax on refineries; legal authorities agree this could be done, and one state (New Hampshire) has already done so. The tax would get passed along to the customers who buy the refineries’ products, of course, but because so much of the nation’s petroleum is refined in Texas, a majority of those customers are out-of-state; thus, whatever share of the tax they pay, Texas gets to keep, free and clear. It is, all things considered, a nifty way to skim off for the benefit of home folks some revenue from the petroleum that passes through or from our state. A refinery tax is potentially a huge moneymaker: the Legislative Budget Board has estimated that a rate of a penny a gallon would yield a billion dollars per biennium—about the same as a state income tax. During the 1975 session, Speaker Clayton, Lieutenant Governor Hobby, and House Ways & Means Chairman Joe Wyatt brought up the idea of a refinery tax with Briscoe. Clayton inquired whether the governor would consider signing one if another existing source of revenue, like the sales tax, were reduced by an equivalent sum—an exchange that would actually lighten the tax burden Texans must carry. Briscoe said no because it would be—that’s right—a “new” tax.
The shibboleth, No New Taxes, and its corollary, Cut Back Government, call to mind California Governor Jerry Brown. The controversy between traditional liberals and traditional conservatives today has essentially degenerated into little more than a dispute over who should get the government’s money. Though Briscoe’s more sophisticated Austin critics may not want to believe it, both he and Brown are in touch with a genuine, and rising, public desire to restrain government’s apparently limitless growth, a desire that may be the coming thing in contemporary politics. The difference is that Briscoe’s understanding stops with the crabbed assumption that the best government governs least, while Brown perceives that even the best government has limits to what it can accomplish. Briscoe concludes “it is not the duty or function of government to solve all the problems that exist in today’s society”; Brown concludes “there are problems that cannot be solved. . . . There may be no solution other than acceptance.” One philosophy reflects unconsidered dogma; the other, the experience of the past 40 years of American life. Briscoe is satisfied to cut back the number of problems that government should feel a responsibility to help solve; Brown is sobered by the realization that when government tries to solve problems it may be powerless to succeed. Given the complexity of the times, Brown’s view has the ring of truth and Briscoe’s, though superficially similar, is merely an archaism.
Another difference, of course, is that Brown is trying to act on his discovery, while Briscoe is largely just talking about it. Neither on taxes nor on controlling governmental growth has Briscoe faced the issues directly. He has not been tested on his tax pledge because the state’s anticipated deficits in 1973 and 1975 were unexpectedly cancelled by a windfall of extra oil and gas tax dollars produced by the higher petroleum prices, by federal revenue sharing and social services reimbursement, and by inflationary increases in sales tax revenue: none of which he had anything to do with. His idea of forestalling a future tax increase by squirreling away part of the plump 1975 surplus into a working capital reserve account came to naught because legislators instinctively hate to leave money lying around on the table unless they are absolutely forced to, and Briscoe, true to form, failed to roll up his sleeves and play the tough politics required to force them. As a result, state fiscal experts anticipate “a tax bill of unprecedented size”—that means, around a billion dollars—in 1977.
Briscoe’s attempts to control governmental growth have largely consisted of cutting back the number of employees in the various branches of the governor’s office from 510 to 336, a plan that sounds like a good start until one notices that many of them have simply been shifted to other slots in state government. The Comprehensive Health Planning Unit, for example, was moved from the governor’s office to the Department of Health last year. Many former employees of the governor’s defunct Office of Information Services, a computer-coordinating bureau, now work for Comptroller Bob Bullock, who estimates that 95 per cent of the original group are still on the state payroll somewhere. Bullock says he has even received letters from the governor’s top aides asking him to hire people they are trying to unload.
Briscoe’s hiring freeze has produced some queer results. For example, it has prevented the replacement of many departing employees whose salaries are paid by federal grants instead of state taxes (some sections of the governor’s office are more than 90 per cent supported by federal money). While this technique is at least saving some tax money, even if it isn’t state tax money, its usefulness as a means of reducing the federal budget is akin to Lyndon Johnson’s thrifty penchant for turning off the White House lights. And because federally salaried positions carry a 15 to 20 per cent bonus payment directly to the state for overhead expenses, each new vacancy takes more money away from the people who remain to carry on the operation. The reductio ad absurdum of all this was reached when the growing shortage of full-time secretarial and clerical personnel forced some departments to hire part-time “Kelly-Girl”-type assistants, who hour-for-hour are more expensive than the employees they have been brought in to replace. The upshot, admits Briscoe’s budget director Dicky Travis, is that the actual cost of running the governor’s office has gone up, not down.
No wonder, then, that morale among the surviving employees has been plummeting for months. By January, surreptitious job-hunting was widespread.
Briscoe’s meat-cleaver attack on governmental growth shows how simplistic his understanding of the state’s entrenched bureaucracy really is. Whatever governor eventually does prune down its size will succeed only by first using his personal leadership to win broad public support for the inevitably bitter and protracted fight. Though the Texas electorate may soon be skeptical enough of big government to grant that support, Briscoe has shown no inclination to invoke the governor’s personal leadership for that battle or for anything else.
It should go without saying that Briscoe should be judged on the (basically conservative) things he wants to do, rather than on the (basically liberal) things his most vocal critics would prefer him to do. But you do not secure a niche in the pantheon of conservatism by botching conservative goals.
To stand back and contemplate the ongoing fiasco that is the Briscoe administration is to find oneself asking how such a remarkable political phenomenon could occur. 1972 is easy to explain: Sharpstown: a broke, liberal woman for a runoff opponent: a fluke. But what about 1974? Not why did Briscoe defeat Farenthold; that is easy. But why did he have no other opponent? Not Hobby, not Hill, not Armstrong, no one. If Briscoe and his people were so hopelessly overwhelmed by their job that the office was in a permanent condition of collapse, why did the conservative business interests—whose political clout is great and who after all can no longer enjoy the luxury of a government that does nothing—not find someone to take Briscoe’s place?
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