The Ten Best and (Groan) The Ten Worst Legislators
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Dogged as a terrier, when Colbert couldn’t get what he wanted from the House, he went after it in the Senate. After the House axed funding for the Texas Research Institute of Mental Sciences (TRIMS), Colbert nosed around until he found an obscure Senate bill that could provide funds to transfer TRIMS to the UT system. Then he tracked Appropriations conferees to a back room and waited till 12:30 a.m. to snatch Chairman Jim Rudd as he exited and to make his pitch. He won, saving four thousand desperately needed mental health beds for Houston. “Colbert is the most tenacious sumbitch in the world,” testified a battle-worn lobbyist. “When he gets hold of your pants leg, say goodbye to your trousers.”
The contrast between the new Colbert and the old was starkest during the billboard debate. Last session had members gnashing their teeth and voting him down by a landslide as he ran with fifteen different amendments. This year saved his ammunition for one logical, eloquent attack on the bill, arguing in a vernacular that would have come hard to the Colbert of yore. “That ain’t right! This is!” he finished succinctly. He lost, but he lost like an insider, and in a legislative career that can make all the difference.
Chet Edwards
33, Democrat, Duncanville
We have seen the future and its name is Chet Edwards, your senator for the eighties. Young (at 33, the youngest of his peers). Handsome, straight-arrow bachelor (women swoon, strong men mutter enviously). Aggie with an M.B.A from Harvard who manages to please both consumers and corporate types. Cast in that all-important Hobby senatorial mold: courteous, conscientious and gentlemanly. Sponsor of a legislative program as clean and glamorous as he is. In short, an impossibly burnished package with a surprise inside—real substance.
It’s tempting to trivialize Edwards on the grounds of that dazzling physical presence. Sure, the camera loves him and he loves the camera. Yes, he exudes the grave, Goody Two-shoes formality of a pretty face afraid of not being taken seriously. Yet if his performance proves anything, it’s that one takes Edwards lightly at one’s own risk. Spent the session cannily carving out a niche for himself, a precocious step that set him apart from the pack of sophomores. His turf, high tech, plugged right into the timely, post-oil-boom theme of economic diversity. Chaired an interim high-tech commission, then passed a panoply of bills welcomed by the computer industry.
Displayed a high techie’s love of data; craved information and knew how to use it. Good ol’ boy arguments to keep blue laws intact left him cold; he demanded documentation of how employees would be hurt, and when it wasn’t forthcoming, voted for repeal. Took on the phone companies single-handedly by trying to put a two-year ban on local measured service (LMS), a plan that would charge customers by number of calls, time, and duration. Armed with multiple version of the LMS bill and amendments for every objection, he organized one of the most impressive committee hearings in recent memory. Then, to everyone’s surprise, miraculously pried his bill out of committee after the phone folks had boasted that it was dead. Whoops—time to reprogram the computers; Edwards was somebody to contend with.
Worked yeomanlike on a range of issues that were anything but easy sells. Cleaned up and passed a Senate bill to continue the controversial Health Facilities Commission. Passed his painstaking redo of the election code (a feat that had eluded others for the past three sessions), and even prodded a presidential primary bill through the Senate. Championed nursing home reforms against wily Senate vets, one of the few moments when his smooth countenance could be seen to waver. Put it down to a naiveté that’s both a blessing (doesn’t lie, doesn’t understand what’s impossible) and a curse (doesn’t catch the sneaky stuff).
His batting average? Oh, that. Saw some major bills (LMS, primary, health facilities) go down to defeat in the House, but because all ran into booby traps, he emerged from his battles almost without blemish. Even hardened lobby cynics had to take notice. Marveled one, “You keep looking for the warts, but there aren’t any.”
Charles Evans
46, Conservative Democrat, Hurst
The perfect Puck, a redheaded imp who exults in making mischief almost as much as he exults in making policy. Not the sort of legislator you’d want a high school civics class to follow around, but when all was said and done, Evans had contributed more to the public interest than just about anyone, even allowing for a deduction or two along the way.
Carried a satchelful of good bills: a state Grace Commission to root out inefficiency and waste, a requirement that insurance companies pay for alcoholism treatment, a ban on local measured phone service—and passed all but the telephone bill. Constantly rescued the alcoholism bill from the insurance lobby’s noose, once when Speaker Lewis was about to spring the trapdoor. Just when he was getting fitted for a halo, showed up with a bad ol’ bill that tried to close some open records, which figures; Evans himself is about as open as the Berlin Wall.
Proved it in spades as czar of the Sunset process, in which a host of state agencies had to be reestablished by the Legislature or cease to exist. As chairman of the House committee overseeing Sunset, Evans delayed action on bill after bill until the fading hours of the session. Bureaucrats were putting out résumés. The Senate was having fits. House sponsors were wringing their hands. Lobbyists were going nuts. And Evans? He was loving it. Nothing is more obnoxious to Charlie Evans than a dead calm.
Then Evans opened the floodgates, and the House was awash in three-hundred-page Sunset bills whose contents he alone knew. If you are asking yourself whether that bears any resemblance to good government, you are only echoing what just about everybody in the Capitol was saying. But there was method in Evans’ madness. No lobby in the Capitol can match the power of the entrenched bureaucracy and its clients, all of whom wanted Sunset to be a rubber stamp for the status quo. Oilman Ed Cox, chairman of Parks and Wildlife, didn’t want Evans messing with his agency. H. Ross Perot didn’t want drug treatment touched. The hospitals wanted the Health Department left alone. The river authorities wanted Evans to keep his hands off the water agencies.
By waiting until the last minute, Evans diluted their power and created a fair fight. He gave Sunset a chance to do what it was meant to do. When it was all over, he had modernized drug treatment, arranged for the sale of some obsolete state hospitals, turned the sluggish water bureaucracy inside out, and in general left his stamp on state government for the better—even if he did slip in funding for a new state park in Fort Worth. Best of all, he had a whole lot of fun.
Ray Farabee
52, conservative Democrat, Wichita Falls
What else is left to be said about this good, gentle man? That he has more virtues than Mother Teresa? No, we listed a lot of them—conscientious, hardworking, smart, fair, independent, an air of inner strength—back in 1977, the first time he appeared on the Ten Best list. That he operates on a different level from anyone else, not as the voice of a single district but as the trustee of an entire state? Nope. Said it in ’81. That he is the most respected member of the Legislature, who defines by example what a senator should be? Sorry. That was ’83. So leave it at this: Ray Farabee is the sort of person who could give politics a good name.
Everybody wanted Farabee to carry their bills, though his floor skills are just ordinary, because, in the words of a Senate staffer, “having him as your sponsor is like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.” His legislative program would have sunk a supertanker: judicial reform, blue law repeal, toxic waste regulation, computer crime control, protection for time-share purchasers, securities deregulation, a bond procedures act, fine tuning of parole procedures, indigent health care. Passed most of it despite refusing, as usual, to use his chairmanship of the busy State Affairs Committee as a lever to shift votes, as other chairmen have done since time immemorial.
Remarkable above all for his fairness. Never has a hidden agenda, never gets petty, never tries to get even, never overlooks the weak and helpless. As a member of the Senate’s budget-writing team, looked out for agencies aiding delinquent youth, abused children, and the mentally ill. Has a deep-rooted faith in the process of compromise; seemed genuinely offended by the give-no-inch attitude of House budget negotiators, lecturing them that “the act of compromise is not just coming up here to sign off on the House bill,” and helped fashion the final agreement.
His one shortcoming, if it is that: he’s too trusting in the process, too aloof from winning or losing. But he’s doing better. When he was informed that three of his judicial reform bills had died in the House after he had worked on them for a year and a half, Farabee actually threw down his ballpoint pen. On the session’s closing night, he even risked exposure to the teeming House floor to inquire after the fate of indigent health care. “They’re killing our bill,” someone shouted to him amid the pandemonium. But there was nothing he could do. He was out of his element, a Lord among the Commons.
Bob McFarland
44, Republican, Arlington
The Legislature’s answer to Red Adair. Are fires raging over billboard regulation? Is a precarious agreement on tuition threatening to blow? Just call on McFarland, who institutionalized his role as troubleshooter-in-residence this session. Cleared the decks of his own program early (including an important bill to extend insurance coverage to alcoholism treatment), which freed him to prowl the halls writing amendments and sealing compromises—a roving subcommittee of one. Everyone from Bill Hobby and Gib Lewis to worried senators and reps sought out his help, but his fix-it missions seemed not so much assignments as enactments of a primal urge. Born to write off-the-cuff amendments that clean up problem bills, he composed them on the floor, on the run, on napkins at the Austin Country Club. Granted free passage by his colleagues, who know that he’s not straightjacketed by partisan politics and that his only motive is to make the process work.
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