The Ten Best and (Groan) The Ten Worst Legislators
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Though a newcomer to budget writing, had all the qualities essential to mastering this most difficult of legislative arts: industry (toiled late at night, on weekends, and before breakfast), inspiration (hit upon the idea of holding Sunday conferences with individual budget staff experts, extracting information in private that could never be gleaned in public), a mind for detail (“He knows where every office is, what it looks like, who works there, and what they do all day,” marveled one senator after a head-to-head bout with Toomey), and objectivity (a staunch partisan Republican, but never let partisanship guide his stiletto). Said one thirty-year Capitol veteran, “There’s never been anyone who knew the budget like Toomey.”
Bureaucrats feared him. Democrats respected him. But Republicans deferred to him. When they wanted to know how to distinguish cost-covering fee increases from taxes, Toomey came up with a go-no-higher number that GOP leaders called the Toomey line. It virtually became a Republican battle cry: “That good old Toomey line/That good old Toomey line/We’ll never spend a penny more/Till Toomey says it’s fine.”
The pivotal figure on the ten-member House-Senate conference committee that wrote the final budget. Sat by himself on a separate tier, surrounded by mountains of file folders containing notes about every state agency, so that he could readily gain the ear of Chairman Rudd. Without grandstanding, quietly forced cut after cut upon reluctant senators, whose knowledge of the bill was no match for his. Even managed to eliminate $4.4 million from attorney general Jim Mattox’s budget—no easy feat, considering that two of the senators on the committee would like Mattox’s job (and budget) for themselves.
The sight of Toomey at work was one of the lasting images from the session. Walking around with his arms folded, a very private man, protecting himself and his space; or seated, dark and intense, with a piercing, quizzical gaze that looked through the eyes of an adversary as if to probe his brain. He was unforgettable, essential, a person without whose contributions there would never have been money to balance the budget. But for all his brilliance, Toomey held fast to a narrow ideology that had room for no-new-taxes, law-and-order, and little else. The question now is whether he will grow beyond technical artistry into the kind of statesmanlike leader that Republicans in the House so desperately need before, as will inevitably occur, their party ascends to power.
Tom Uher
47, conservative Democrat, Bay City
As refreshing as an eddy in a stagnant pool; the most independent member in a House so docile toward the leadership that it seemed as if opposition had been prohibited in the rules. Embodied the best qualities of the old-line legislator: hewed to a consistent philosophy, yielded to reason but not to pressure, reveled in a floor fight, didn’t care a fig about offending the leadership, and didn’t live in constant dread that someone back home was peering over his shoulder on every vote.
All of which made him Mr. Right for one of the toughest jobs: overseeing the House budget for higher education, the most sensitive part of the appropriations bill. Faced intense pressure to give special treatment to UT, A&M, all the private colleges, and Baylor medical school, and stood up to them all.
Laid aside his deceptively clownish streak (on the floor he dispensed backslaps, bear hugs, and one-liners like a Shriner at a national convention) and applied his deep-felt agrarian conservatism to the sober nitty-gritty of appropriations. His thankless assignment: to divide up a diminished pie and still satisfy the state’s most voracious appetites. Uher’s recipe:
- Concentrate on the basics. His budget pumped $250 million more into faculty salaries than earlier budget staff recommendations, $60 million more into departmental operating expenses, $30 million more into libraries.
- Ignore the frills. Every school clamored for extra bucks to fund special items that had little to do with basic education—robotics programs, schools of industrial relations, and the like—but were great for grant chasing. In a lean year, Uher decided, they would have to wait.
- Woe to the boondoggles. Uher proposed deep cuts in dubious doles to private colleges and lushly funded Baylor medical school. Why subsidize them, he asked reasonably enough, when there’s no money for our own schools?
- Protect the weak and let the strong fend for themselves. Uher stuck up for junior colleges, the traditional route off the farm for rural Texas. They received $96 million more than the budget staff recommended. But the UT and A&M system offices, which have access to all that oil money, got not a penny more.
What did Uher get for his troubles? Martyrdom. He was shut out of a well-deserved slot on the budget conference committee; by then he had stepped on too many sensitive toes (including Speaker Lewis’, who hadn’t forgotten that Uher had once eyed the speakership himself). Without Uher, the big powers had a field day in the conference committee, especially UT and A&M in the area of special items for high tech, while junior colleges suffered mightily.
But Uher refused to lie down and play dead, even after he was dumped. Hours after learning of his omission, he was leading a floor fight against higher college tuition proposals, forcing the Speaker to cast a rare vote to guide his straying flock. And Uher may not be through yet. With a major study of higher education scheduled for the next two years, you can bet that he’ll be fighting those battles all over again.
The Ten Worst
Chet Brooks
49, Democrat, Pasadena
A prosecutor’s job is not always a happy one, particularly when the accused is dean of the Senate, a man who has compiled a long history of accomplishment in the social services. But this session the spotlight shone on health issues, and in its glare Brooks showed himself to be not a leader but a mean, petty person bent on undoing his own good works. Before convicting him of conduct unbecoming a dean, let us give sober attention to the indictment.
Count one: Got too close to the lobby. Brooks styles himself the father of nursing home reform, but over the years has grown tight with the industry, a big-bucks contributor to campaigns. So instead of carrying the ball on a Sunset bill loaded with much-needed nursing home reforms, Brooks turned himself into the industry’s premier apologist. Those nursing home abuses you’ve been hearing about? State inspectors were the problem, not the nursing home, Brooks told senators. Then he fought successfully to reduce penalties and fines for those abuses and to kill a fund that would have paid off damage suits against offending homes.
Count two: Tried to sabotage key indigent health care measures. Did he step to the fore on the important indigent health care package? Nope, just the opposite. He did his damnedest to save hospitals from beefing up their charity-reporting procedures and to spare them from civil liability and license loss if they kicked out critically ill patients. Even Brooks’ own committee rebelled by voting against him unanimously—a stinging chastisement for a Senate chairman to endure. Brooks left in a snit, peevishly blamed House indigent health care sponsor Jesse Oliver for his setback, and then at a local watering hole, did the unheard of, telling Oliver never to lobby Brooks’ committee again.
Count three: Kept dropping the ball on the powerful Finance Committee. Committed himself to help fund a program to prevent child abuse; on the critical day, he was missing in action. As the session wore on, Brooks’ attention wore short. His work on Finance slipped far below his usual standard—so far that Hobby took the unprecedented step of not reappointing Brooks to his prized seat on the conference committee that negotiated the final state budget. Brooks had already tested Hobby’s patience by opposing revenue-raising measures no conferee was supposed to oppose; it is a Senate axiom that if you don’t vote to raise the money you don’t get to spend it.
Count four: Set an abysmal senatorial example. Among his undeanly deeds: made a brutal personal attack on the commissioner of higher education in floor debate; questioned a fellow senator’s integrity during the filibuster of a shrimping bill; seriously breached Senate etiquette by launching a filibuster without first informing Hobby or the sponsor; blustered unbecomingly whenever a bill strengthening campaign reporting laws reared its head.
Appeared more interested in dining out on the lobby than in doing his work. “Sometimes a person can stay too long,” said a former-Senate-aid-turned-lobbyist. We agree, and find the defendant guilty as charged. But in consideration of his past record, we are prepared to let him out on shock probation, provided that he heeds this quatrain, originally written for the queen consort to George IV: “Most gracious Chet, we thee implore/To go away and sin no more,/But if that effort be too great/To go away at any rate.”
Bill Ceverha
48, Republican, Richardson
An absolute zealot who, but for an accident of birth, could have been a Bolshevik revolutionary or a Middle Eastern bomb thrower. Shares the same drive to lay waste to anything that stands in opposition to his extreme conservative ideology, even if the innocent have to suffer in the explosion.
A case in point: The Texas Commission for the Deaf. Its newsletter listed the subjects to be covered by 22 panels at a deaf women’s conference in California. Uh-oh. One was called “Gay Deaf Women.” Here came Ceverha, with handouts and speeches condemning the agency.
An ex-TV anchorman whose understanding of the subtleties of politics runs about ninety seconds deep. Watched fellow Republican Mike Toomey put on a clinic in the Appropriations Committee about how to cut attorney general Jim Mattox’s budget—stick to logic, avoid partisan issues, don’t get the Democrats riled up—but absorbed nothing; undermined Toomey’s patient efforts by trying to riddle Mattox’s consumer and environmental division.
My Library
