The Ten Best and The Ten Worst Legislators
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Confused? So is everybody else. Messer is the most dominant, formidable, elusive, and ultimately fascinating character in the Legislature. Let’s dispense with the items everyone agrees on. First, has no peer in passing major legislation: carried a huge load, from the Railroad Commission Sunset bill to the revision of the antitrust laws, and knew every line of every bill. Second, he’s smart as hell: made the session’s most reprehensible bill—protection for billboards against tough local ordinances—sound like it was devised by Solomon himself. Foes were stunned when Messer, answering their claim that the industry was welshing on a deal cut in 1973, cited ten-year-old transcripts from memory to show that there had been no meeting of the minds. Third, he was the most prominent member of the House this session, by virtue of his position as chairman of the absolutist Calendars Committee—a maze with dozens of blind alleys through which a bill must travel before it can reach the floor. Fourth, he’s part of the business lobby family (literally, in one case, since chemical industry advocate Harry Whitworth is his father-in-law). Fifth, he is utterly fearless, as befits someone whose name in German means “knife.” Sixth, there is more to his cherubic face and rosy cheeks than meets the eye.
For the anti-Messer camp, composed mostly of lobbyists on the losing side of Messer bills and some wary legislators, it will be the blackest day in Texas since the Alamo if Messer ever realizes his ambition to be Speaker. They grimly forecast the return of the days before 1973 when the business lobby called all the shots and legislators were either on the team or total outcasts.
What’s wrong with this picture? Everything. Unlike, say, a Bob Vale, who always has one eye on his contributions list, when Messer sides with the lobby it is out of informed conviction. The proof lies in the independent way he handles his bills (he accepted an amendment to the trucking compromise against the wishes of the industry) and in his successful sponsorship of some of this session’s best public-interest bills—antitrust, a new civil code, a major change in the civil service law that allows local police and fire chiefs to choose their top assistants.
As for power, sure, Messer uses it. He used Calendars to delay bills he didn’t like and hurry along bills he did, as has every Calendars chairman before him. Unlike most of his predecessors, though, he based his decisions solely on substance and philosophy; he didn’t use his power to reward his friends or hurt his enemies or further his Speaker ambitions (which, if anything, were slightly diminished after he became controversial). The problem in the House this year was not that Messer was too powerful but that almost everyone else was too docile. Instead of fighting back, they just grumbled. Messer didn’t have to run over anyone; he dominated by default. What the House could use is more people with his ability and appreciation of power. He needs the competition.
Steve Wolens, Democrat, Dallas.
Talented, independent, and fearless—a combination as hard to find this session as a ground swell to declare quiche the state dish. Craves a good fight for its own sake; the kind of legislator who would rather hurdle a high fence than walk through an open gate. More often than not, landed on his feet rather than his derriere.
A carnivore who tore into the meat of the House rather than its plenteous vegetables. Invariably, when Wolens got up to speak both the subject and the opposition were weighty.
Revels in taking on complicated issues; his mind stores facts like a camel stores water—they’re there when he needs them. Within one week, handled controversial bills on three of the most difficult issues of the session—securities, antitrust, and credit insurance.
Mounted the session’s only successful challenge to House titan Bill Messer, amputating a gangrenous section of an otherwise worthy Messer bill—over the loud objections of the victim. Took on a close ally of the Speaker’s in a battle over securities regulation, something no one except the two of them understood, and came within seven votes of winning—an amazing achievement, considering the herdlike proclivity of the House to follow the team blindly when faced with a soporific subject. In the best debate of the session, a duel in the Appropriations Committee with Jim Turner of Crockett, destroyed a team scheme to let members vote for a teacher pay raise without actually setting aside any money. Even the Speaker was not immune: Wolens induced the committee colleagues to submerge their sense of self-preservation and strike $14 million for a new osteopathic library in Fort Worth that was coveted by Lewis.
At his best in debate; not even Messer is his peer. In their one confrontation, left his adversary no room to maneuver, offering to withdraw his amendment if Messer could find a single precedent “in Texas law, in federal law, in the law of any state or country” for the provision Wolens found objectionable. Messer couldn’t. Won his appropriations duel over teacher salaries with a crisp attack on the team plan—“I have three objections. One is procedural, one is technical, one is substantive”—that even the most obtuse member could follow.
He was the House’s consummate lawyer: his arguments were sharp and even brilliant, his analysis keen, his research first-rate. But as with any good lawyer, you sometimes felt that Wolens would have argued just as brilliantly for the other side had the mood so struck him. He simultaneously led fights against regulation of securities and for regulation of air conditioning contractors.
For all Wolens’ unquestioned skills, the nagging question that won’t go away is this: to what end? To reach the very top rank, a legislator must have a consistency of philosophy and purpose to give meaning to all those skills. Otherwise he is a mere air plant, nice to look at but never rooted. In Wolens’ case, the roots are still lacking.
The Ten Worst
Al Edwards, Democrat, Houston
So unseemly was Edwards’ performance during the past session that it is destined to become the stuff of legend. In an ordinary year, Edwards is a legislative nonentity who cleaves unto his pet issues: trains and Juneteenth. But his role in this year’s horse-racing battle left colleagues longing for those days—and left Edwards the pariah of the decade.
Found himself the swing vote on the committee empowered to strike horse racing dead or send it to the House floor for a vote; proceeded to milk the situation for far, far more than it was worth. Unlike Lubbock senator John Montford, who used a similar position to win concessions for his district, Edwards never made it clear what he was looking for in exchange for his crucial vote—and therein lay the problem. To be blunt, there was no evidence that Al Edwards was trying to solicit a bribe, but if he was not trying to solicit a bribe, he acted exactly like a man who was.
Coy as the town strumpet, hinted at God-knew-what to the press, sometimes shifting position three times in a single interview. “Right now my vote is no, but I’ve got some things working” was one enticingly vague quote. Members and lobbyists, aware that Edwards was contemplating an expensive race for Harris County commissioner, grew nervous about the implications.
What was clear was that Edwards was reveling in the attention: the constant temperature-taking by the press, the hand-holding by bill sponsor Hugo Berlanga, the audiences with heavies like Speaker Lewis. Ultimately—and too late, as it turned out—voted to send the bill to the floor, but not without lots of posturing about his convictions as a Christian that sent eyeballs rolling heavenward.
Indifferent to the important stuff; anything but indifferent to his own self-interest. Proposed a preposterous $1 million interim study of bullet trains (normal budget for such a study was $50,000), which left Edwards-watchers wondering how much time he wanted to spend studying where to locate tracks in that commissioner’s precinct he covets. Got himself appointed to the subcommittee considering a county roads bill introduced by El Franco Lee, his prospective opponent in the commissioner’s race, then took a walk to prevent a vote on his rival’s bill.
The extent to which Edwards had been ostracized was demonstrated the last weekend of the session. He wandered into the Quorum Club, which was packed with legislators, all of whom were letting bygones be bygones and downing a few with people they had fought with all session. From table to table drifted Edwards, a Flying Dutchman looking for a safe harbor. But none would have him. Finally he gave up and vanished into the night, alone.
Frank Eikenburg, Republican, Plano
Natural furniture whose explosive temper catapulted him out of that neutral category—right onto the Worst list. At his best, a harmless rich kid who careens around the House like a wobbling top, blissfully unaware of what’s what. At his worst, a snit-throwing disturber of the legislative peace, possessed of a bush-league mean streak that makes it impossible for him to deal effectively with other members, even when he has it under control.
Burst into prominence as a freshman last session by telling Craig Washington, who was opposing draconian drug penalties, that he hoped Washington’s children grew up to be drug dealers. Has subsequently proved that that venomous attack was no fluke. Exhibit A: during his 1982 campaign for reelection, called rape “a victimless crime.” Exhibit B: fuming about the Plano Planning Commission’s tabling of his wife’s zoning request, Eikenburg threatened a lobbyist for Texas cities that he’d better “take care of business”—then ranted and raved to other members about the situation. Exhibit C: when a woman lobbyist forgot to deliver a legal memorandum to Eikenburg on the appointed day, he threatened to condemn her to other House members as the worst lobbyist in Austin, and he chewed her out savagely in public until another member felt obliged to come to her rescue. “His mind,” says one Capitol veteran, “is not sufficiently connected to his tongue.”
Some might dispute that his mind is connected to anything at all. Nowhere was Eikenburg’s inability to think straight more apparent than on a classic bit of news film masterminded by Capitol reporter Carole Kneeland, who caught the Eik (pronounced as though you’d just seen a mouse) voting repeatedly for the absent Randy Pennington—violating a House rule often honored in the breach—and asked him why he’d done it. With camera rolling, Eikenburg stared goggle-eyed at Kneeland for a full minute and nineteen seconds and then, like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar, mumbled, “Excuse me, I have to go back to a committee meeting,” and ignominiously fled. Almost any other member could have finessed the moment by explaining that everybody does it, by claiming he had permission, something. Not Eikenburg.
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