The Ten Best and (Groan) The Ten Worst Legislators
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McFarland has more fun ferreting out negotiable areas than most people have dancing the cotton-eyed Joe. His technique: coax the warring parties onto the dance floor, perhaps bringing in a heavy like Hobby to make a “strong suggestion.” Sit down with one side and throw out hypothetical questions—“What if we did this?” Go to the other side and ask, “What if we did that?” Finally, proclaim, “This is the way it’s going to be.” It worked on the nightmarish billboards dispute, when McFarland ended two years of warfare by crafting a compromise that both the industry and the cities that wanted regulation could accept. It worked during the wiretapping filibuster, when he fashioned an agreement that persuaded Craig Washington to sit down. When wrangles over tuition threatened to poison the entire session, McFarland raced between House liberals and Senate conservatives with a cut-and-pasted amendment; soon there was a deal. Such exploits explain why he is crucial to Hobby’s vision of the Senate as a businesslike, non-confrontational body: without McFarland, the blood would flow.
By session’s end, he was fixing bills that nobody particularly wanted him to fix. Kept trying to pump life into the hock-your-home (a.k.a. second mortgages) bill long after everyone else had pulled the plug. Refused to let the bill banning open containers in cars die a decent death; wrote language that won the extra vote to bring it out of committee. If he has a blind spot, it’s that he has trouble accepting that some bills are born to die.
Withstood the legislative heat with his trademark cool aplomb; eternally precise in his language, his grooming, his carriage, his neat-as-a-pin desk. One evening, after what senators euphemistically call a l-o-o-o-n-g dinner, McFarland put his hand out to hold an elevator while he talked to two reporters. It got stuck between the doors. The reporters panicked. “It’s not my hand I’m worried about,” McFarland assured them, unflappable to the last. “It’s my cigarette.”
Bill Messer
34, conservative Democrat, Belton
The dominant figure in the House in every way—carrying bills, devising strategy, working the floor, setting the agenda, and, ever and always, generating controversy.
As elusive to define as the elephant to the blind men of Indostan. Some regarded him as a card-carrying extension of the business lobby, citing his sponsorship of special-interest bills (restricting local ordinances against billboards, requiring the wearing of automobile seat belts), but guess who passed more labor bills than all but one other member during the session? Some criticized him for never doing anything for people who can’t take care of themselves, but guess who passed a bill protecting families of organ donors and helped save indigent health care with his floor leadership during the special session? Some say he loved playing the game more than getting public policy into law, but guess who helped devise the plan for restructuring the state water agencies and fought to tie the number of state employees to population? One colleague said it best: “He’s so good he’s bad; he’s so bad he’s good.”
Nothing he did provoked so much contention as his chairmanship of the pivotal Calendars Committee. Functioned as Saint Peter, a description made more apt by his cherubic cheeks, as he guarded the Pearly Gates through which all bills had to pass to reach the House floor. But was he saint or sinner? Some, especially senators who saw time run out while their bills languished in Calendars, accused him of abusing his power. They were wrong. Messer did not use a fraction of the clout his position gave him. He didn’t kill important bills he opposed (blue law repeal being one), nor did he hold bills hostage in exchange for help for his own program. Instead he ran Calendars like the eighteenth-century conservative he is—someone who believes that process is just as important as substance. He choreographed the entire session to keep the House from falling into the partisan and ideological traps that lurked everywhere, and he succeeded.
The one thing no one questioned about Messer was his skill. Enormously knowledgeable, both about legislation and about the world beyond (in casual conversation he has been known to launch into disquisitions on subjects ranging from electrical cogeneration to the shifting politics of Belize). Quick on his feet; countered the toughest arguments in debate; possessed an uncanny ability to assess any situation. During the conference committee on educational reform last summer, onlookers were surprised to see Messer leave his seat on the House panel and take up residence on a sofa next to Bill Hobby’s staffers. He had correctly deduced that they, not the senators, were the people he had to persuade. As usual, he did.
Hugh Parmer
45, Democrat, Fort Worth
Committed more good deeds than a troop of Boy Scouts. Found money for the hungry, rescued women and animals in peril, slipped neatly into the consumerist, do-gooder shoes vacated by Lloyd Doggett—and unlike Doggett, did it all without turning off his peers. What’s more, he did it without Bill Hobby’s benediction, which made Parmer one of the few members of either house to forge a record of accomplishment independent of the presiding officer.
Carved out the hunger issue as his own: headed a year-long interim study, put together an $18.5 million bill to help feed needy children, pregnant women, the elderly, and the unemployed, then spent half his legislative time guiding the bill over a hundred hurdles. Got conservative senators on his team with an astute appeal to the session’s great theme—cost-effectiveness—arguing that good nutrition would save taxpayers health costs in the end. Worked the House harder than any senator in years, marshaling a multilobby force and deploying it by means of a chart spread across his whole office wall, as intricate as a plan for the invasion of Normandy. Won $15 million in funding, a crowning victory in a lean year.
Meanwhile, the ever-cheerful Yalie foiled the mugging of a female Capitol employee by dropping his gym bag, shedding his glasses, and pursuing her assailant. Failed to pass dog kennel regulation or prohibit use of live animals as dog-racing lures but did rescue a turtle trying to cross Twelfth Street against heavy traffic. Even came to the aid of Chet Brooks, offering him a way to avoid the indignity of defeat by his own committee; foolishly, Brooks declined.
Sainthood? Not quite. Detractors grumbled that Parmer dragged out hearings with unnecessary chatter. Temporarily blew his good-guy status during a filibuster by ribbing Senator Carl Parker about his indictment, a terrible gaffe that flouted unwritten rules of Senate courtesy and almost led to fisticuffs. But Parmer was so contrite that even Parker found it hard to stay mad at him.
Reclaimed any lost stature by pulling off one of the session’s most masterful plays in the panicky final hours. Had squeaked a badly needed consumer bill—extending group insurance policies for spouses after death or divorce—past a hostile industry, only to find it trapped behind a legislative logjam in the House. What to do? Attach it as an amendment to an innocuous insurance measure already past the logjam. How to get the votes? Get the attention of the logjam’s architect, Bill Messer, the House’s most powerful member. Knowing Messer’s beloved billboard bill had yet to pass the Senate, Parmer donned a button reading, “No Bills, No Billboards,” brandished his running shoes, and threatened a lethal filibuster against Messer’s bill. Instantly, Messer summoned a swarm of billboard lobbyists to descend upon the House, treating amused neutrals to the rare spectacle of business lobbyists pleading for Parmer’s consumer bill. When both bills passed, Parmer had proved that nice guys really can finish first.
Jim Rudd
42, conservative Democrat, Brownfield
Not since Peter Graves has anyone undertaken such a mission impossible: come up with a state budget acceptable to both the parsimonious, Republican-heavy House and the free-spending, Democrat-dominated Senate. Somehow, the rookie chairman of the House Appropriations Committee beat the odds.
Tall, gray, and distinguished; could be typecast as a cattle-town banker in a movie about the open range era. Played the role to the hilt, doling out money with firmness and fairness but never favoritism. Thanks to Rudd, in a year when there was less money to go around than anyone could remember, there was also less rancor about the appropriations bill than anyone could remember.
Produced the state’s first kosher budget—no pork. Led by example, resisting special treatment even for Texas Tech, the item nearest and dearest to his heart. By the time the committee bill reached the House floor, Rudd’s restraint had already elevated him to demigod status among his colleagues. When the conservative caucus, led by Tom Waldrop of Corsicana, tried to cut the bill by 2 per cent across the board, Rudd argued, “If you vote with Mr. Waldrop, you are saying that all the hours that the Appropriations Committee has put in are out the window.” By a 90-50 vote the House sided with Rudd. After the debate Rudd received the rarest of House tributes, a standing ovation.
But the battle was only half won. Still ahead lay the conference committee showdown with the Senate. The central issue: Rudd’s insistence that state employees receive a pay raise in order to forestall unionization. When the Senate resisted, the five House conferees showed up wearing blue-and-white buttons saying, “Rudd’s Right.” Soon the buttons were everywhere, on House members, on staffers, on lobbyists, even on reporters—on everyone, in fact, but grumpy old senators, who had rival buttons made up praising their chairman. Rudd was right, and in the end he prevailed.
Mike Toomey
35, Republican, Houston
Mike the Knife. The supreme cutter; a Texas version of David Stockman, who knew where the budget bodies were buried and was intent on exhuming and dissecting every last one.
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