The Ten Best and (Groan) The Ten Worst Legislators
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Specialized in the three M’s: meddling, misleading, and mucking up. So pathologically partisan—she once told a colleague, upon learning at midsession that he belonged to that other party, “Oh, and you seemed so nice” – that even other Republicans loathed her. Anointed herself judge and jury of party purity, then played more-Republican-than-thou, berating comrades for votes she deemed wayward. Asked a fellow Republican how he stood on horse racing, saying that her poll was purely personal. It wasn’t. When the poor fellow said he favored it, she informed churches back in his district and goaded them into a calling frenzy. After he told her off, she began soliciting candidates to run against him. Rejoiced another Republican after a similar encounter, “she’s not speaking to me, thank God.”
Exhibited as much grasp of issues as the squirrels on the Capital lawn. Squabbled with other members over who had the territorial rights to reforming pornography laws. Won permission from Criminal Jurisprudence Committee chairman Terral Smith to introduce the same pornography bill he had labored over last session, but procured the wrong draft; proceded to cut and paste it into monstrosity, removing anything she didn’t understand, which meant there was a ton of white space; produced a bill that among other omissions inadvertently legalized bestiality, then blamed the Legislative Council for the messy draft. Caught again—the council’s code numbers, which everybody in the Capital knew about but McKenna, were conspicuously absent.
Nowhere did she play the cockroach to more damaging effect than on abortion. Hunted high and low for bills onto which she could tack antiabortion amendments, like someone playing pin the tail on the donkey. Clung to the back microphone like a barnacle, defending her cause with gems of illogic: “If it’s unnecessary, if it’s not needed, let’s put the amendment on.” Thought it clever to attach an antiabortion amendment to a liberal bill that she opposed, but days later screamed bloody murder when others tried the same ploy in hopes of luring conservatives to support another bill that she opposed. “I’m as pro-life as anyone,” a senior member told her, “but you’ve set abortion legislation back three sessions.”
Last session McKenna attributed her presence on the Ten Worst list to freshmanitis. It didn’t wash then, and it doesn’t wash now. A floor exchange with Houston Republican Milton Fox is the epigram for McKenna’s dreadful career. Fox: “Did you introduce this bill at the request of someone in your district?” McKenna: “No, this is something I thought of myself.” Fox: “I’m afraid that’s what concerns me.”
Robert Saunders
39, Conservative Democrat, La Grange
Like a medieval pope, launched crusades against the infidel to recapture the Holy Land, and plunged everything around him into chaos. Schemed and plotted to restore orthodoxy to the Texas Department of Agriculture and put heathen Commissioner Jim Hightower to the sword, pillaged and plundered anyone who stood in his way, but in keeping with the fate of earlier crusaders, succeeded only in bringing discredit to his cause.
With his bunched-up shoulders and farm-boy blond hair, Saunders seemed molded for his job as chairman of the House Agriculture and Livestock Committee. But it wasn’t his looks that endeared him to the notorious lobby clique—the Farm Bureau, the Chemical Council, the growers, the co-ops—that regards itself as the agricultural establishment. It was his zeal to serve their power struggle with Hightower the way a tractor serves its driver: unquestioning, unrelenting, its only duty to go where it is pointed.
Headed straight for Hightower’s budget. Let agricultural chemical lobbyists help write an alternative version that would have done Draco proud; it eliminated the jobs of top aides involved with the environment and pesticides, gutted the pesticide regulation program so noxious to the Chemical Council, even dictated how employee business cards should read. Saunders’ budget so crippled the agency the Speaker Lewis, no admirer of Hightower, intervened to force a compromise.
Round two: hatched the session’s most nefarious plot in an effort to undo Hightower’s ability to regulate pesticides. Refused to abide by a Senate compromise agreed upon by Hightower and his adversaries; substituted his own bill that shifted authority to a new board on which Hightower would be perpetually outvoted, then plugged his rendition as the real compromise, leading a committee member to observe, “It’s a compromise between those who want to hang Hightower and those who want to tar and feather him.” Late in the session Saunders lost a point of order that delayed floor action on his substitute for two days, during which he amused himself by killing the bills of members who opposed him. They began to retaliate; the session seemed on the verge of falling apart. On the morning of the vote, a Chemical Council lobbyist asked a respected Republican to help Saunders and was told, “You’ve been too sneaky and too greedy.” When the vote came, the House agreed.
None of that should be construed as a defense of Jim Hightower. He brought many of his troubles on himself by his thinly concealed contempt for the Legislature and his ill-judged decision to install as his marketing director a talented woman who also happened to be his live-in girlfriend. But the battle with Hightower was not over personalities or budgets or pesticides but over power: whether the good-ol’-boy network and the agricultural lobbies could mortally wound the first agriculture commissioner who was not beholden to them—a description that could never be applied to Robert Saunders.
Ralph Wallace
35, Democrat, Houston
A happy bumbler whose erratic flounderings cast him from the sea of mediocrity onto the perilous shores of the Worst list. Incapable of thinking issues through, he introduced legislation not so much by design as by accident. At the request of a constituent, carried the session’s worst bill, a measure that would have gutted the holy Texas Open Beaches Act; when warfare broke out at a committee hearing, admitted he probably should have read the bill first. Then faced the ultimate humiliation of having to beg fellow members to kill his own bill.
Had no more idea of the big picture than an ant in a redwood forest. Case in point: his gyrations on handgun law, a classic performance that mde the best case for his unlikely nickname, “Disco Ralph.” First proposed a bizarre bill under which a tax on gun sales would be dedicated to the arts; the Ways and Means Committee tabled it right in front of him, denying him even the normal courtesy of sending it to subcommittee. Oops, maybe that gun bill had been perceived as too liberal. So Ralph made a power drive to the right, introducing a bill to allow every man, woman, and child in Texas to pack heat. Oops, now the other side was mad, particularly when Wallace told a committee that “every back man in Houston carries a gun.” Spent the rest of the session trying to explain what he really meant.
For all his meandering, displayed an uncanny and unbecoming sense of direction when it came to the lobby. His single, ill-disguised aim: to run for railroad commissioner someday. Laid the groundwork this session by trying to cultivate big-bucks Houston bankers, telling them he had a lock on the chairmanship of the Financial Institutions Committee (he didn’t) used that putative chairmanship as a fundraising ploy in his reelection campaign, shamelessly sending out solicitations emblazoned with a quotation from powerful Houston banker Ben Love.
When he wasn’t with the lobby he loved, he loved the lobby he was with. Named instead to the chair of the lowly Cultural and Historical Resources Committee, he ingratiated himself with the tourism folks without missing a beat. Shortly before voting on the tourism budget, coaxed his committee into a grueling three-day, multi-city, industry-sponsored circuit of Texas tourist attractions that detractors dubbed the Magical Mystery Tour. Always too enamored of penny-ante legislative perks, he plunged gleefully into a whole new world of freebies. Soon was distributing passes to almost every theme park and tourist mecca in the state—a nifty follow-up to his ritual distribution of oil derrick neckties, an annual event by which Wallace contrives to shake the hand of every member of the House and Senate. “That’s what you have to do to get ahead,” he once told a lobbyist. “That’s how you move your legislation.” Ralph, we hate to be the ones to tell you-and after five sessions, we shouldn’t have to—but it ain’t that easy.
Craig Washington
43, Democrat, Houston
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Washington, one of the most brilliant and respected members the House has ever known, shouldn’t have become the stuff of Senate jokes. Question: “Where’s Washington on this issue?” Answer: “In Houston.” The laughter is sad and nervous; no one seems prepared to accept that Washington, now in his second session, has sunk from first-rate to fifth-rate, an indifferent absentee who only sporadically rouses himself to effectiveness.
That’s the essence of the Washington dilemma: there is no in-between. It’s his way or no way, as he demonstrated on the horse-racing issue in a play that symbolized his whole approach to Senate life. A cosponsor of last session’s almost-successful pari-mutuel bill, insisted anew on reserving part of the state’s take for welfare—badly misjudging the depth of this session’s fiscally conservative mood. When Hobby and fellow senators balked, he vowed to kill horse racing in the House, setting the stage for its ignominious defeat.
Did he really care more about welfare than about horse racing? If so, why in the session’s waning hours did he try to slap a dog-and-horse-racing amendment on the indigent health care package so vital to his urban black constituency? Had Hobby not quashed this ill-conceived ploy on a point of order, the back-door move would have imperiled the health care plan in the House.
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