The Ten Best and The Ten Worst Legislators
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Sometimes the best measure of a member’s effectiveness is what doesn’t happen.
Consider the case of the Local and Consent Calendars Committee, which oversees those all-important local bills that endear reps to the home folks. When Hill was named chairman, there were a few groans because he was in position to pile up bargaining chips for future Speaker’s race. But when the session was over, for the first time in memory the committee had not drawn a single protest.
Plays the legislative game almost as though he wants to be underestimated. A Mr. Nice Guy in committee; as former chairman of Elections, became the rock of his panel without ever upstaging this year’s successor. “You can go to him with the dumbest scheme, and he’ll tactfully tell you what’s wrong with it and how to fix it,” says a committee colleague, who didn’t find out secondhand. Never attacks, but digs in to defend his own positions with the tenacity of a tick. The only member of the Legislature who said he was for a tax bill and would vote for a tax bill, and then did vote for a tax bill even as members of the Ways and Means Committee shrank from Mark White’s tax package as from the Green Slime. Refused to give up on a state employee pay raise despite an empty treasury; added a rare floor amendment to the appropriations bill, ensuring state workers a pay hike—and did it with a shrewd parliamentary trick that saved rather than cost money.
Put a stop to the worst power play of the session after discovering that the Speaker’s lieutenants, in a rage over Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower’s intervention in the truck deregulation fight, had vowed to shred his agency’s budget. Didn’t rail about right and wrong but gave exactly the right advice; you can’t win a press release battle with Jim Hightower. The best thing about Gerald Hill is that the House isn’t likely to turn into a snake pit as long as he’s around.
Lee Jackson, Republican, Dallas
The case for Lee Jackson was succinctly stated by a colleague on the Ten Best list: “He’s so far ahead of the rest of us it’s not even a race.” Why this kind of tribute for someone who is not quite in the top rank as an orator, a power broker, or a bill passer? Because Jackson is to the Legislature what Greenwich is to time—the standard reference point for what is right. Approaches every issue and every vote by considering not whether it will affect his buddies or his reelection but whether it is good public policy.
Inspires more tributes to fairness than the rose in English verse. When a bill abhorrent to his civilian employer was sent to his Business and Commerce Committee, Jackson had an opportunity to curry favor with the boss by burying the bill in a hostile subcommittee. Instead, he warned company lobbyists that if he got so much as one phone call from corporate executives about the bill, he’d make certain that it passed. Cast the decisive vote in subcommittee to keep alive a controversial bill benefiting service station owners, even though he found it philosophically objectionable, because of what he believed was a larger principle: major bills shouldn’t be killed without giving the full committee a chance to express its will. Because of Jackson’s clemency, the bill survived to become law, leading a lobbyist to say, “He’s so fair that sometimes you’d rather he was on the other side.”
One of the most recognizable figures on the House floor: walks with his head sticking forward, in a pose reminiscent of a figurehead on the prow of a ship. One of the most active figures as well. A ringleader in the floor fight against a spendthrift college-construction plan; then followed through in a House-Senate conference committee by insisting on, and getting, strict controls on bonding authority. Opposed a dumb bill creating native-Texan license plates by appealing to the members’ sense of dignity. Rising to the compliment, the House discovered same and killed the bill.
His own legislative program, like his demeanor in debate, is clean and scrubbed: a strong ethics bill (most of which was incorporated in the law that finally passed) and a variety of good government ideas (most of which, sad to say, died in the Senate after Jackson had shepherded them through the House).
Jackson is not and will never be a member of the House inner circle. It is not a place for the urban or the urbane. But even his exclusion by the good ol’ boys is a sign of respect, an acknowledgment that he has the same shortcoming that Disraeli observed in Gladstone: “He has not a single redeeming defect.”
Ray Keller, Republican, Duncanville
The right man in the right place at the right time. Untied the Gordian knot of prison reform, but unlike Alexander of Macedon, did it with common sense rather than the sword.
Could have pouted away the session on the back benches after getting stiffed by Speaker Lewis in committee assignments (though made a chairman, Keller received neither the committee he asked for nor the seat on the power-brokering Calendars Committee he was promised as a consolation prize); instead, used his minor committee to play a major role. As a law enforcement chairman, refused to follow the traditional legislative script: give prison officials all the money they want and tell the folks back home that you’re for law and order. When a rock-ribbed, tough-on-crime conservative like Keller decided that the business-as-usual approach cost far too much money and showed far too little success, he made prison reform respectable.
Jaws hit the floor the day Keller began talking in committee about a no-growth policy, sounding like an environmentalist who’d wandered into the wrong meeting by mistake. Not only would there be no new prisons but he also wanted to take $200 million from the prison system and spend it on halfway houses and better parole supervision. In the beginning even his own committee was against him. In the end—after Keller shrewdly arranged for the poor fellow burdened with defending the sate prison system in federal court to show up during the budget deliberations—heresy became doctrine. The House passed the entire reform package without a single hostile question in floor debate and without a dissenting vote on six of the seven prison reform bills.
A team player in the best sense of the term. When other lieutenants were besieging the Speaker with self-serving advice that plunged Lewis into hot water with the Senate, Keller established himself as a loyal voice of reason. In the heated battle over trucking deregulation, when most team insiders were all for running over the pro-deregulation forces, Keller made sure that Lewis didn’t give his imprimatur to a phony compromise. Used teamwork on his own program as well. Drew on colleagues for his ideas on prisons (Jim Rudd of Brownfield), but he was no mere coach getting the credit for his players’ touchdowns. Says a fellow member of the Ten Best list: “Only Ray Keller could have made it happen.”
Bob McFarland, Republican, Arlington
Got a problem with a bill? Call McFarland, the Senate’s handyman who can fix anything. The opposite of a cockroach—the legislative term for someone like Al Edwards, who falls into things and messes them up. Messy things fall into McFarland’s hands and he cleans them up.
Rode to more rescues than the U.S. Cavalry. Speaking of which, the horseracing bill would have been stillborn but for McFarland. Looking for a way he could support it, came up with an amendment calling for a statewide referendum that pried it loose from a Senate committee. Helped save the antitrust bill proposed by attorney general Jim Mattox after proponents had written him off as a negative vote; they paid him a courtesy call that turned into a six-hour line-by-line marathon through a 65-page bill. When McFarland finished the bill was palatable to conservatives, and Mattox, the most partisan Democrat this side of Tip O’Neill, was tossing bouquets to a Republican.
Also restored to working order the ethics reform package after state Democratic chairman Bob Slagle claimed that outlawing the conversion of campaign contributions to personal use discriminated against impoverished minority legislators. Some Republicans were all for letting this embarrassing defense of sleaze get the blame for killing the bill; McFarland rejected partisanship in favor of patching up. His remedy: an advisory commission to determine when conversion is okay. Slagle agreed and promptly joined the swelling ranks of Democrats moaning because McFarland is a Republican.
Everybody wanted McFarland on his dance card. In the closing days of the session, served on a Guiness-record fifteen conference committees to settle differences between House and Senate bills. Passed major bills on prison reform, the state’s debt-ridden unemployment fund, nepotism, and the re-creation of state agencies under the Sunset process; also found time to negotiate agreements on interest rates and venue reform. Came close to pulling off the coup of the session, proposing a compromise to the notorious billboard bill that would have made it cheaper for cities to get rid of the signs, but changed only nine votes when he needed ten.
As upright in posture as in principle. Stands, chin pointing heavenward, as though he were posing for an old daguerreotype. Traces his ideological independence to his work as an FBI agent in the South during the racial unrest of the sixties, when he helped track Martin Luther King’s assassin; prides himself on not having knee-jerk reactions to social legislation. The most noteworthy aspect of McFarland’s performance, however, is that it took place during his first session in the Senate, where freshmen are supposed to learn rather than teach. With a little experience, he may amount to something.
Bill Messer, Democrat, Belton.
Everybody puts him on their Ten Best list—except, that is, those who put him on their Ten Worst list. The case for Messer as best: he manipulates the levers of power in the House better than anyone since Ben Barnes. The case for Messer as Worst: he manipulates the levers of power in the House better than anyone since Ben Barnes.
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