The Best and the Worst Legislators
(Page 5 of 6)
Washington unleashed his fury at Lewis after the House killed a Senate amendment requiring the new Texas Department of Commerce to award 10 percent of its contracts to businesses controlled by minorities and women. His outburst (“He’s standing in the door like George Wallace….He’s a chauvinist racist in my view”) was bad politics: It poisoned Washington’s chances of getting what he wanted from the House, then or later. It was also bad policy. Whatever their merits, minority set-asides offer notorious opportunities for tokenism, pork barrel, and corruption. To equate opposing them with opposing school integration is irresponsible.
So was his twenty-minute filibuster to kill the tort reform compromise as time ran out on the session. Washington argued that there had been no chance to study the agreement that had been hammered out just hours earlier. On the face of it, he had a point. But there had been plenty of time to sit in during the week of negotiations (as other senators, but not Washington, had done), and there was still plenty of time to get an explanation from his colleagues (which they were eager to give him). In short, Washington was unprepared and conceded as much. He filibustered anyway. In the special session that began the next day, Washington asked questions for around six hours. Most of them concerned points that had been settled in the bill that had been debated and passed by the Senate three weeks earlier. The rumbling on the Senate floor was that Washington was trying to justify his filibuster. One day later, the compromise passed unchallenged.
And so Washington is on the Worst list for the second session in a row. It’s too bad. No one who heard his speech opposing Bill Clements’ appointees to the Board of Pardons and Paroles (Clements replaced two minority board members with two white males) could doubt Washington’s ability: “I hope to live long enough to see a day when the color of an individual’s skin no longer matters. I do not delude myself into believing that that day has arrived.” The Senate, swayed by his eloquence, voted down the appointments. When Washington’s on, he’s the best. But when he’s off, he’s the worst.
Triple Whammy
Yes, in case you’re counting, we have only seven names on the Worst list instead of the usual ten. We have left three places vacant in symbolic recognition that the most significant failures of the session belonged to the three leaders: Bill Clements, Bill Hobby, and Gib Lewis. Under our rules, the leadership is ineligible for either the Best or the Worst list. The governor and the lieutenant governor, after all, aren’t legislators, and the Speaker rarely functions as one. But if they were eligible, there’s no doubt where they would be. Individually, each of the three leaders had his defenders around the Capitol; collectively, they had none.
Bill Clements, 70, Republican, Dallas
He’s not the first politician to paint himself into a corner, but he’s surely the first to survey the situation and then apply a second coat.
After campaigning on a platform of no new taxes, Clements consented in February to extending temporary sales and gasoline taxes passed last fall. When it became clear, however, that still more new revenue was needed for even a bare-bones budget, Clements reinstituted his opposition to any other new taxes, like a deflowered virgin seeking to redefine chastity.
Clements kept insisting that it was possible to maintain state services without more taxes. His budget showed how it could be done—with cuts in corpulent programs like vocational education and full-day kindergarten, and new revenue from selling state lands and making Texas A&M and the University of Texas use their endowments for research. All of his proposals had some merit; all were highly controversial. The only way they could become reality was for Clements to throw all his weight behind them, as Ronald Reagan did with his budget in 1981. But Clements didn’t even lobby for his budget-balancing proposals. Without his support, they quickly died. The only choices he left the Legislature were to make deep cuts or send him a tax bill he had sworn to veto, and they weren’t eager to do either.
Then came the unfathomable events of late April and early May. Clements went on a seventeen-city tour to build support for his no-new-taxes stance. Having built it, he promptly tore it down. After a meeting with H. Ross Perot, Clements hinted that he was ready to reverse himself and agree to raise taxes. But the next day, after meeting with angry House Republicans, he reversed his putative reversal. He spent the rest of the session feuding openly with Bill Hobby and vowing to stick by his veto pledge even if state government had to shut down in September. Meanness and stubbornness had become substitutes for leadership.
Bill Hobby, 55, Democrat, Houston
From the start, he was dispirited this session, almost as if he felt predestined to fail. The prophecy indeed proved to be self-fulfilling.
Throughout the session, Hobby acted like a reincarnation of Henry Clay, who is remembered for saying that he would rather be right than be president. Hobby is unquestionably right that the state should stop relying on oil and gas, overhaul its tax structure, and build its future on education. But he was wrong to insist on getting his way this session. Hobby didn’t hold the right cards; the aces belonged to Clements: 56 Republicans in the House, enough to sustain a veto. Hobby upped the stakes anyway. As president of the Senate and as its spiritual leader, he gave his blessing to a spending bill that required $3.1 billion in new taxes above Clements’ bottom line.
Hobby gambled that either Clements or the House Republicans would eventually see the light and come around to his way of thinking. He badly misjudged both. The size of the Senate bill was an affront to Clements, an indication that Hobby wasn’t making the slightest effort to compromise or even to take Clements seriously. As for the House Republicans, a handful might have voted to override Clements’ veto of a compromise budget package; an override at the spending and taxing levels Hobby sought was unthinkable. By May the Hobby-Clements relationship was a textbook disaster, complete with private and public insults. They were two stubborn men, each determined not to yield.
Bill Hobby has been a great lieutenant governor. But he wasn’t a great lieutenant governor this session. He forgot the most basic rule of politics. It appeared on lapel buttons during the last week of the session, and it was the theme music for the slide show the Senate staff presented on the final night: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
Gib Lewis, 50, Democrat, Fort Worth
Where was the Speaker in this battle of the titans? Nowhere. For most of the session, Lewis never had a plan to deal with the budget. Then, when there was too little time left to accomplish anything, Lewis burst forth with a series of plans du jour, none of which anyone took seriously, including Lewis. On the day that a state lottery bill came up for a vote in the House, Lewis announced simultaneously that (a) the lottery was part of his latest package to solve the crisis and (b) he wasn’t going to ask anyone to vote for it. With that ringing endorsement, the lottery went down to defeat, and a new plan surfaced.
With Clements and Hobby at loggerheads, the good-natured, well-meaning Lewis should have been the peacemaker and deal maker. But he was paralyzed by the deep divisions within the House and his own lack of vision for Texas. Lewis prefers to have others work deals out and bring them to him for enforcement—an approach that worked for tort reform and trucking deregulation but not for the budget.
All session long the House kept sending mixed signals. It quickly passed a tax bill—making the temporary taxes permanent—that the governor said he would accept, but the language was deliberately written to prevent the bill from becoming a vehicle for a later compromise. Score one for Clements. Lewis kept assuring the Senate that another tax bill was on the way. Score one for Hobby. But it never came. Meanwhile, the House Appropriations Committee was floundering. It didn’t know how much money to spend, because Lewis didn’t know how much he wanted to raise. Without guidance from the Speaker’s office, House spending rose so high that in budget negotiations with the Senate, the House disavowed its own bill.
In effect, Lewis had let the House vote to spend high and tax low, as every politician the world over would like to do. But sometimes politics requires hard choices. Making them isn’t fun, and it isn’t easy, and it gets people beat. But making these choices is what makes leaders, and that’s what the House of Representatives—and, for that matter, the 70th Legislature—didn’t have.
Most Moving Speech
The usually inattentive House fell silent when Ernestine Glossbrenner (Democrat, Alice) made a rare trip to the microphone to oppose the abortion bill: “I’m a fat old-maid schoolteacher. I’ve never been pregnant, and I’m never going to be pregnant. But I have a concern here for those who will…I believe what we’re doing here today will mean that some of the abortions that are being performed in clinical places now will be performed in back alleys and dirty motels. And some young girls when they are old enough to be mothers will have been, if not killed, probably disfigured…”
Best Testimony as a Lobbyist
Bob Leach of Noonday, president of the Texas chapter of the United Game Fowl Breeders Association, in opposition to a bill that would mandate seizure of cockfighting equipment: “If God Almighty Himself wanted to try to create earth today, he couldn’t get a permit to do it.”
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