The Best and the Worst Legislators
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Thwarted in his hope of becoming chairman to the House Public Education Committee, he found a backdoor route for turning his ideas into law. Hammond took a procedural bill to reestablish the Texas Education Agency, a formality required by the state sunset law, and used it as a stalking horse to tread on the education powers that be. Clomp! A Hammond amendment eliminated barriers against out-of-state teachers who want to work in Texas. Clomp! Out went requirements that every teacher take those awful how-to-teach courses. Clomp! School districts must now notify parents if a teacher has no expertise in a subject area. Says Hammond: “The first name of every geography teacher in Texas is ‘Coach.’”
In a session replete with student dropout bills, Hammond passed one that might actually work: a “no pass, no drive” bill that makes school enrollment a prerequisite for sixteen, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-olds to get a driver’s license. He stood up to an attempt by Fort Worth zillionaire Robert Bass to delay state approval of new science textbooks (a Bass-owned publishing company can’t make the deadline). At a gloves-off press conference that turned the fight in his favor, he all but said the delay would leave students with science books that say the world is flat.
A fourth-termer, Hammond has always had good ideas, but he has seldom had much success. What made this session different was positioning: The Legislature couldn’t kill his recrafted sunset bill without killing the whole education agency. At heart he remains a maverick with a strong streak of cynicism. The irrationality of the political process frustrates him, especially in his own party; he describes the group of earnest Republicans who hover at the back of the microphone to champion right-wing causes as “the furrowed-brow club.” He will always be the kind of member whose personality endears him to a few good members but alienates him from the masses.
Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby
Positive Parenting
Democrat, Houston, 57—Bill Hobby has had more effect on Texas government for a longer time with a better end result than anyone since Sam Houston. If that isn’t reason enough to waive our usual rule that presiding officers and ineligible for the Best or Worst list, then consider that his ninth and final session as leader of the Texas Senate was also one of his best.
A skiing accident left him limping, but he was no lame duck. Hobby exercised power as he always has, through respect rather than fear. Like a model of positive parenting, he guides through praise and example. He usually gets what he wants—not because he demands it but because he is so far ahead of other leaders that he sets the agenda for the entire state. Long before a legislative session starts, he picks his issues, gets the appropriate senators interested, sets up a task force, puts carefully chosen citizens on it, gives it a good staff, and pitches its work to the press. By the time the session arrives, the issue has so much momentum that he can let nature take its course. It was exactly this process that produced and AIDS bill this session.
Hobby was criticized for not forcing the Senate to pass a decent workers’ compensation bill, but force has never been his style. He got the things that really mattered to him—more money for state universities and human services, a criminal-justice package that went far beyond building prisons, the AIDS bill, help for South Texas colonias. He has never cared about anything but what is best for Texas, he has run the Senate for seventeen years without a hint of corruption, and he has brought Teas government into the modern age. What will we do without him?
Mike McKinney
Reason over Fear
Democrat, Centerville, 38—Yes, there is a doctor in the House. It’s a good thing too, because more than a third of Mike McKinney’s colleagues were suffering from an acute case of homophobia. (Fifty-six members, including 39 of 58 Republicans, removed their names from a resolution expressing sympathy for victims of AIDS.) McKinney couldn’t cure the gay-bashers, but he did keep the disease from spreading to the entire House.
In one health care debate after another, McKinney, a practicing M.D., stood for reason over fear, magnanimity over meanness, and empathy over hate. His opponents saw AIDS as a special interest issue—a chance for liberals to pander to organized homosexual groups but McKinney kept forcing the issue back to medicine. “We need to treat this as a public health issue not a moral issue,” McKinney kept saying. On his bill protecting insurance policyholders who get AIDS, McKinney faced a long line of hostile questioners. “You’re treating AIDS different from other diseases,” one opponent charged. “AIDS is different,” answered McKinney. “It is a disease we can diagnose but not treat.”
When the session was over, McKinney had passed four major public health bills—all against heavy opposition. One was the AIDS insurance bill. Another required motorcycle riders to wear helmets. A third provided relief for financially strapped rural hospitals. The fourth involved the state in AIDS treatment and education. No one but McKinney could have achieved such success, because no one else could have kept the focus on medicine instead of politics. At the microphone he had that unmistakable doctor’s intolerance for foolishness, but he tempered it with an upbeat bedside manner. When he told his colleagues, “I think this bill is a good idea, it works, its time has come,” They had to listen.
John Montford
Victory at last
Democrat, Lubbock, 46—The senator who comes closest to the kind of legislator Bill Hobby would be if Hobby were a member of the Senate. He is calm and soft-spoken, he doesn’t have the desire or the capacity to showboat, he looks beyond the parochial concerns of his own district, and he puts the reputation of the Senate ahead of his own ambitions.
So it should come as no surprise that Montford has become Hobby’s most trusted lieutenant. When something important is stuck, Montford knows where to apply the lubricant. House and Senate budget negotiators couldn’t balance the bottom line until Montford said, in essence, “The time has come to give up our own pet projects, and I’ll start by sacrificing mine.” The bill to provide South Texas colonias with water and sewage-treatment systems was taking up permanent residence in a House committee until a Montford phone call helped dislodge it.
Montford has made a career out of tackling the toughest issues—water conservation, telephone regulation, tort reform, and insurance reform. But he also has a history of coming out on the short end of compromises. This session looked like the same old story. He started strong, investigating the mess at the State Board of Insurance and producing a package of reforms to clean it up. Then he lost momentum on the Senate floor when he couldn’t defeat controversial amendments backed by Attorney General Jim Mattox. That sign of weakness emboldened insurance lobbyists to eviscerate Montford’s reforms in the House. But Montford rallied: At his insistence, a House-Senate conference committee restored almost all of his proposals. Now that he has won one, look out.
Jim Rudd
Bravo!
Democrat, Brownfield, 46—To understand how Jim Rudd operates, listen to the second movement of Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto. It is a duet—a duel really—involving the piano and the strings. The angry double basses that open the movement are the members of the House Appropriations Committee, storming and raging at state bureaucrats or contesting for stray dollars in a time of scarcity. The piano that softly subdues them into harmony is their tall, silver-haired chairman, Jim Rudd.
Rudd managed the budget-writing process to achieve the result he wanted. Although he had no formal control over the House’s other committees, which developed the first spending recommendations and forwarded them to Rudd’s panel, he imposed what came to be known as Rudd’s Rule—an arbitrary spending limit that kept the other committees from squandering all the revenue available. When the Higher Education Committee exceeded Rudd’s limits on state universities, he refused to accept their plan. The Rule allowed Rudd to get control of money that the other committees would have spent across the board; instead, his own committee was able to budget the money where it was most needed—primarily education, health, and prisons.
The outcome was a budget that for the pinchpenny House was uncharacteristically generous. A rural conservative himself, Rudd is inherently skeptical of many spending programs. (He led a successful floor fight against a school-aid formula that favored big cities at the expense of rural Texas.) Yet he understood that human services agencies had borne the brunt of the budget cuts in recent years, and he allowed them to catch up. Says a committee member: “Rudd’s not only smart-he’s reasonable.” The House apparently agreed. It approved the committee’s spending bill by the unheard-of margin of 145-2.
Ric Williamson
The Work Ethic
Democrat, Weatherford, 37-The mind that launched a thousand ideas. Ric Williamson looks more like a theoretical physicist than a Texas legislator—puffing on his pipe, tugging on his suspenders, wearing a pencil tucked behind his right ear, looking out at the world through mad-scientist eyes. He has spent four years conducting experiments on the state budget in his basement office, and this was his session to put his knowledge to work.
Other budget writers think about dollars. Williamson thinks about control. He is determined to give the Legislature the upper hand over the state bureaucracy, to find out what the agencies are really doing with taxpayers’ money, and to make them-can it be?—efficient and accountable. Don’t laugh and roll your eyes. Williamson is dead serious about this. “The Legislature most convey the right kind of work ethic,” he says.
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