The Best and the Worst Legislators
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Certainly there was no drop-off in his work load; he had more credits than Laurence Olivier. Without fanfare, Farabee labored on the cutting edge of the state’s biggest problems: prisons (he overhauled the much-lambasted parole system), tort reform (he provided badly needed protection from lawsuits for charities and their directors and volunteers), AIDS (he revised the state’s communicable disease laws, establishing how to test for and report AIDS), and state debt (with the investment community getting nervous about Texas’ financial condition, he established a bond review board to get the state’s fiscal house in order).
Nor did he fail to exhibit his usual scout’s oathful of virtues. In the ill-fated conference committee on the budget, which degenerated into a Babel of name-calling and rhetoric between House members and senators, Farabee steered the discussion away from personalities and back to numbers. When his own bills came under attack in the Senate, he lived up to his nickname, “Fairabee,” by being quick to compromise. His bill allowing flexibility in rate setting of local telephone service started out as highly controversial; after Farabee agreed to amendments backed by consumer groups, it passed with hardly a murmur.
So what went wrong? For one thing, his major issue, merit selection of judges, never got off the ground. For another, he suffered a rare public humiliation when a utility bill he carried proved to be full of mousetraps for consumers and went down to a 20-10 defeat on the Senate floor. Most obvious, however, is that Farabee is no longer looked to as the role model for what a senator should be. He is calm, deliberative, concerned above all about what’s best for Texans. The torch has passed to a younger group that is highly partisan, intensely ambitious, and given to showboating and political gamesmanship, and the Senate and the state are the less for it.
Bruce Gibson, 33, Democrat, Godley
The unlikely savior of tort reform. He didn’t sponsor the bill, and for most of the session he didn’t know much about the issue. Yet at the crucial moment he saw the need for an intervenor, took a cram course, inserted himself in a vicious dispute, shaped the issue to his vision, and won through tireless persistence.
Here’s the story:
Chapter One (in which our hero gets involved). The Senate passes a watered-down version of tort reform. Gibson sees House sponsor Mike Toomey pressing for a tough House bill to use as a negotiating tool. Gibson decides that it is bad strategy. Plaintiffs lawyers, who oppose tort reform, have too many loyal followers in the Senate to be intimidated. Meanwhile, House members will have to vote for one side or the other, making powerful enemies either way, when a compromise is the best that can be hoped for in the long run. Gibson asks to be named chairman of the subcommittee assigned to study the bill. He is.
Chapter Two (in which our hero earns his spurs). Under Gibson the subcommittee fashions a compromise. The House passes it after a strong floor speech by Gibson helps Toomey fend off a lethal amendment. The bill goes to a House-Senate conference committee that includes Gibson. One week is left in the session.
Chapter Three (in which all seems lost). Senate conferees spend five days pouting. They ignore three House offers. Forty-eight hours to go, no movement toward a compromise. The Senate makes its first offer. No progress. Twenty-four hours to go. The meeting breaks up with tempers flaring. The word passes through the Capitol: tort reform is dead. Everybody except Gibson is ready to call of the negotiations. Gibson urges one last meeting in the morning of the session’s final day.
Chapter Four (in which hope is restored and lost again). Fourteen hours to go. Toomey is boycotting the morning meeting. Looking for the right mixture, Gibson offers another deal. Nine hours left. The Senate finally gives a little. Tempers grow short again. Eight hours left. Gibson and Senate sponsor John Montford start trading and reduce their differences to three. Four hours left. Just two issues to decide. Tempers explode. Toomey throws in the towel, heads for the door to entomb tort reform at a press conference.
Chapter Five (in which all live happily ever after). But Gibson reaches out, grabs him by the coattails, sits him back down. Talks renew. Minutes later, there’s a deal.
Bob Glasgow, 45, Democrat, Stephenville
At last he shed the curse of “potential” and joined the Senate’s first rank. Everybody counted on Glasgow this session: fellow senators, who relied on his acute legal mind for help in drafting their amendments; Bill Hobby, who made him the Senate’s point man on taxes; and the lieutenant governor’s staff, who depended on him to catch dangerous flotsam and jetsam in the last-minute flood of legislation.
If Glasgow had been a truck, he’d have been over the weight limit. He was one of the session’s premier bill passers: His final tally sheet showed 64 bills sent to the governor, including an economic development package, and three constitutional amendments. He was also one of the premier bill killers. In the closing hours of the session he discovered dubious language in a child support bill and killed it on a point of order. It turned out that the portion of the bill that disturbed Glasgow included efforts of two House members to settle custody disputes with their ex-wives.
His grandest moment was a devastating attack on a bill deregulating AT&T. In the Senate, where rules require that a bill must be supported by two thirds of the members before it can be debated, it is next to impossible to change the fate of a bill on the floor, but Glasgow was part of a team of senators who did it. Attacking AT&T’s assertion that the bill would lower rates, Glasgow thundered, “Those of you who are voting for this bill, you tell me someone who has told you this is a good bill besides a lobbyist. This is the number one worst bill I’ve seen since I’ve been in the Legislature.” Glasgow’s oratory helped cement the fragile coalition that succeeded, by margins as narrow as one vote, in attaching crippling amendments to the bill.
Juan Hinojosa, 41, Democrat, McAllen
Watching Juan Hinojosa work the legislative process is like watching a professional plate spinner—as soon as you think one of those plates is about to fall, he dashed back and gets it moving again. In a session in which most members’ efforts resulted in broken crockery, Hinojosa hardly caused a chip.
What distinguishes Hinojosa is that he uses his insider’s skills and his considerable personal charm to advance one of the more unusual agendas: legislation that will improve the lives of Texans who need someone to look out for them. These include women with abusive husbands (they were being charged up to $200 for protective orders; Hinojosa reduced it to $36); parents of newborns or sick children (his plan to give government workers unpaid leave passed the House but died in the Senate); rape victims (they will now be able to use a pseudonym in court proceedings); and children involved in custody disputes (judges must now consider evidence of parental violence in custody cases).
Whether bills like these become law depends upon how good the sponsor is. No powerful lobbyists labor on their behalf. Enemies are poised to kill them on a whim. Hinojosa succeeded because he is a master of the process. He has traveled the secret passages around the dreaded House Calendars Committee known to only a few (one opponent thought he had killed the protective order bill in Calendars; Hinojosa then attached it to another bill that came over from the Senate). And he’ll ask anyone for help, conservatives as well as do-gooders, in an era when fewer and fewer legislators are crossing party and philosophical boundaries. He’ll also go straight to the top. Hinojosa was the sponsor of the open meetings reform bill, which was stalled in the House. He successfully lobbied Speaker Gib Lewis about the merits of the bill, then whipped out a press release to announce Gib’s blessing. Lo, hearts softened, and it became another piece of legislation for the governor’s signature.
But he’s not afraid to oppose the powers that be. He spoke eloquently against the referendum to ban a state income tax, saying it was an abdication of legislative duty. And Hinojosa votes his conscience even when it wins him few friends back home—take his votes against the lottery and the abortion bills.
Year in and year out Hinojosa is regarded as a sort of moral compass. When colleagues want to know the opinion of a member whose judgment is based on his beliefs, not on the last lobbyist he spoke to, they know they can ask Juan Hinojosa.
Jim Parker, 42, Democrat, Comanche
A country lawyer with a jeweler’s eye. Devoted his session to scrutinizing such legislative valuables as the governor’s crime package; in his care, diamonds in the rough became gems.
Because he labors far from the spotlight in glamourless committees (Criminal Jurisprudence and Judicial Affairs), Parker is the kind of legislator who is easily overlooked. But no one in the House did as much to clean up so many bills. As head of the subcommittee on the much-ballyhooed but poorly drafted crime package, he performed the near-impossible feat of making it palatable to both conservatives and liberals; for one of the few times in memory, neither side demagogued anticrime bills on the floor. As the head of another subcommittee on bail bond reform, he produced a bill that the full committee passed without a dissenting vote (“Nothing like that has ever come out of CrimJur eight to zip,” marveled a lobbyist). Later, when the Senate tried a last-minute ploy to undo the reforms. Parker held firm and the Senate capitulated.
In an arena in which egos frequently outweigh talent, Parker is just the opposite. Approached about carrying the bail bond bill, he said apologetically, “I’m no Bill Messer”—a reference to a master bill passer of yore. In fact, his relaxed wit and West Texas drawl make him an effective advocate when he does engage in floor debate. But he’d rather be in committee, guarding the law and the constitution.
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