The Best and the Worst Legislators 1991
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“He is just great,” said Appropriations Committee colleague Ric Williamson. “When I see where he’s going, that’s where I want to go.” Senators working on welfare reorganization evidently agreed; they altered their plan and went with Vowell. This summer a group of Republicans who tried to cut the budget by more than $800 million found out why almost no one tangles with him. Vowell explained the consequences in his low, gravelly chainsmoker’s voice: “If you adopt this amendment, you cut not just $800 million but $2 billion, because you will lose federal funds. You will knock 100,000 people off the welfare rolls. That means they will have no money to live on. You would take 90,000 people off of Medicaid. Half the people receiving nursing-home care would not be eligible. This is going backward, not forward.” The cuts failed. Take on Jack Vowell and you court not only defeat but shame.
Ric Williamson: The revolutionary
Democrat, Weatherford, 39—Six years ago Ric Williamson, then just a freshman, walked into the Speaker’s office and dropped a two-volume analysis of the state budget on an assistant’s desk. He had prepared it himself, working month after month at his computer in the back corridors of the Capitol basement. So excited did Williamson become in explaining his ideas that he found himself standing on top of the aide’s desk, gesturing wildly. Today a considerably calmer Williamson doesn’t have to confine his notions to obsessive reports. As vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, he put them straight into a new state budget that is unlike anything Texas has ever seen.
No longer will the Legislature micromanage agencies by telling them how much to spend on every task assigned to them or how much to pay each employee. Don’t regulate money, Williamson argued, regulate performance. The new budget enables agency directors to set salaries, pay achievement bonuses, and freely transfer money within their budgets, none of which was possible before. But it also tells agencies what the Legislature expects them to do. The budget directs the Railroad Commission to plug at least one thousand wells next year. It instructs the state education agency to reduce the number of school districts with excess administrative costs from 400 to 350. Even the Supreme Court is not immune; it is supposed to cut five days off the average time for disposing of a case. If Williamson has his way, agencies that don’t meet the standards—which they helped set—won’t get as much money in the next budget.
As Senate and House negotiators spread out through the Capitol in early August, a rough pattern took shape: The House let the Senate take the lead in deciding how much money to spend, and the Senate let Williamson inject his cherished concept of “free-market government” into the budget. Williamson was everywhere, dropping in here, huddling there, with his eyebrows arched and his hair straight up and his long years of toil bearing fruit at last.
In politics it is not enough to be right; you must also be able to convince others that you are right. Although Williamson is regarded as arrogant by some and as eccentric by others (not without cause on both counts), inside the Appropriations Committee he has earned an awed respect that knows no ideological or party limits. One on one, there is no resisting him; he knows too much and sells it too well. Has he oversold it? Only a handful of people know and understand everything Williamson did this session, and they are true believers. Says Mike Toomey, a budget expert and lobbyist who was chief of staff for former governor Bill Clements, “He has transformed state government single-handedly and without grandstanding.”
Steve Wolens: Listening to reason
Democrat, Dallas, 41—A one-man loyal opposition—to whatever he thinks needs opposing. In the speak-no-evil House, where confrontation is out of style and floor debate almost a lost art, Wolens serves the essential function of reminding his peers that there are other roads to success than going along to get along. But Wolens is no gadfly; more often than not, he wins.
Who else but Wolens would have fought a bill backed by Ann Richards, Ross Perot, Tom Luce, and Speaker Gib Lewis? They were pushing a proposal to lure aircraft builder McDonnell Douglas to Texas with bonds that could have left the state holding a $500 million tab if the financially troubled company later went belly-up. As chairman of the Business and Commerce Committee, Wolens boned up on the company’s financial reports, consulted bond lawyers, went public with tales of high-pressure tactics, and insisted on bonds that don’t obligate the state.
Not the good ol’ boy type that prospers in the House, Wolens thrives nonetheless because his motives are good, and so are his arguments. His opposition is pure—based solely on reason, never on partisanship, personality, horse trading, or self-interest. In debate he’s fun to listen to; during a battle over regulating the legal profession, he answered a jocular question about the bar with “I take the Fifth.” (Wolens forced the arrogant State Bar to follow state purchasing and disclosure requirements.) During one debate, a colleague claimed that an amendment Wolens supported would cause a rash of lawsuits; Wolens went to the microphone and dared him to come back and explain why. The silence was deafening.
Wolens has learned how to offset his fierce intellectual rigor by poking fun at himself. Sponsoring a simple bill before a House committee, he asked if there were any questions and, when there were none, said, “Please, ask me some questions.” He has also learned how to operate like an insider; he persuaded the sponsors of a bill combining environmental agencies to include his proposal strengthening criminal penalties for environmental misdeeds.
He is such a good i-dotter and t-crosser that the House leadership put him on the team that wrote and defended the House ethics bill. The position, alas, proved his undoing. Wolens’ greatest flaw is an inability to hide his contempt for the contemptible—in this case, senators posturing that their weak ethics bill was far stronger than the House’s weak ethics bill. Wolens’ haughty lectures to Senate negotiators (“This is important stuff”) and concern for due process even at the expense of a strong ethics commission earned him a spot on the Dallas Morning News regular-session list of “bottom of the class” legislators. Preposterous! What the House needs is more independent members like Steve Wolens.
The Worst Legislators
Eddie Cavazos: Canceled
Democrat, Corpus Christi, 48—His reputation collapsed faster than a Russian coup. A member of the Ten Best list four years ago, Cavazos began the year in position to put his stamp on the session: chairman of the House Insurance Committee, sponsor of the governor’s insurance-reform bill, and chairman of the Hispanic caucus. Intoxicated by his own power, he substituted intimidation for intellect, foolishness for foresight. By summer’s end, he had left his stamp, all right—on himself. And it read, “Canceled.”
Once a feared opponent in floor debate because of his quick wit, Cavazos lost his sense of humor and with it his aura of invincibility. His downhill slide began when he sneered at a freshman member opposing the lottery, “I had no idea who you were.” In debate he treated other members more like hostile witnesses than colleagues. “I’m asking the questions,” he snapped at one. When Glen Maxey of Austin, an out-of-the-closet homosexual, tried to limit lobbyists’ entertainment of legislators, Cavazos retorted that Maxey didn’t understand the cost of living because he wasn’t a family man. Cavazos and Mark Stiles of Beaumont feuded constantly over the insurance-reform bill. Chairman Cavazos wanted most of the credit while Stiles and other committee members were doing most of the work.
Cavazos got his comeuppance when he defended the budget bill against Republican attacks shortly after urging the Hispanic caucus to vote against the same bill. A Republican asked Cavazos if he now planned to vote for the bill. Cavazos dodged the question, but he couldn’t dodge the follow-up: “I just couldn’t tell which side of the mouth you were talking out of.”
Occasionally Cavazos showed flashes of his old ability. He minimized a proposed increase in the penalty for late auto loan payments, and he fought proposals to earmark revenues for elections and prisons instead of education. More often, however, he was demagoguing or showboating. He added a malicious amendment to the ethics bill that required newspapers to disclose their conflicts of interest (the provision was quickly dropped), and he attached a pork barrel provision to the budget bill that gave out funds meant for UT and A&M to smaller colleges (also dropped). By the time the last special session ended, everybody was laughing at Cavazos instead of with him.
Temple Dickson: Do the wrong thing
Democrat, Sweetwater, 56—The most disappointing member of the Legislature. Dickson began the year as a new committee chairman who was liked and respected after a good freshman session in 1989. But if there was a wrong way to do something—run a committee, pass a bill, improve the quality of education, or negotiate a deal—you could count on Dickson to find it.
Dickson’s Economic Development Committee was a procedural disaster. No one could be sure when a bill would receive a hearing, not even senators; there was no reliable schedule. When a bill finally did come up for discussion, Dickson let testimony drag on and on, forcing other bills to be delayed. Witnesses had to keep returning to Austin, never knowing whether the bill they were interested in would be heard. “I feel like telling him, ‘Go to your office for two hours, and we’ll clear your docket for you,’” said a committee member.
The make-or-break issue for Dickson this year was tort law reform—and it broke him. Three major bills proposing tort law changes that improved the economic climate for business were assigned to his committee. All three passed the House; all had strong support in the Senate. None made it out of Dickson’s committee. The post-mortems are still trying to determine why the bills died, but this much is beyond dispute: Plaintiff’s lawyers opposed the bills, Temple Dickson is a plaintiff’s lawyer, and the bills died in his back yard without coming to a vote. No one would have criticized Dickson for opposing the bills in a fair fight, but using close-door power as a committee chairmam to bury them wasn’t a fair fight—especially when the effect was to help his profession.
Some of the things he did were just plain baffling. Why would anyone with a lick of sense try to gut the state’s no-pass, no-play rule? Then, after his first attempt succeeded in the Senate but failed in the House due to scathing statewide criticism, why did he try it again? (This time the Senate said no.) Why didn’t he know that his own bill allowed retail credit card interest rates to rise to 21 percent, instead of the 18 percent that he claimed during debate—especially since another senator kept telling him he was wrong? As usual.
Charles Finnell: Survival of the unfittest
Democrat, Holliday, 48—A walking argument for term limitations. After 22 years in the House, his legacy is as insignificant as Piltdown man’s.
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