The Best and Worst Legislators 1993
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David Cain
Striking a Balance
Democrat, Dallas, 45. The perfect man in the middle. Like the assayer in a gold rush, he is the unbiased person everybody in the House relies on to tell whether their claims have value. Cain weighs issues on an internal scale that enables him to strike a balance between competing sides.
Although his presession bid for speaker was stillborn, he was able to resume his role as mediator, brokering three of the session’s biggest battles: trucking deregulation, telephone deregulation, and an overhaul of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. The pivotal moment in the trucking negotiations came when Cain, previously a defender of regulation as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, decided that the time had come to allow more competition—but not too much more. The compromise was fashioned in the Senate, but it would not have happened without Cain’s green light. To make sure that the notorious liquor lobbyists known as the Booze Brothers did not dictate the writing of the Alcoholic Beverage Commission bill, Cain became a member of the committee that deals primarily with liquor regulation—the legislative equivalent of volunteering to clean the sewer.
The sole criticism of Cain has always been that he isn’t really committed to anything except getting an agreement. A bear of a man who once played college basketball, he is reminiscent of the talented athlete who drives coaches crazy because he lacks a burning desire to win. On the rare occasions when he takes the microphone in opposition, he seems almost apologetic. “I hate to oppose this,” he began as he launched a successful attack on a proposal to open medical disciplinary hearings.
This session, though, Cain fought when it counted. Prior to the session, he had been chairman of the sunset review process, under which state agencies are scrutinized to improve their performance. Cain sponsored many of sunset’s good-government recommendations, only to find that the process itself was in grave danger: Ann Richards, Bob Bullock, and Pete Laney all had their own reasons for wanting to get rid of it. Cain’s opposition kept the anti-sunset bill on the back burner all session, but it’s not his way to go for the kill. In the end, with sunset safe for another two years, he decided to—what else?—compromise and allow the leaders to save face.
Pete Laney
Salt of the Earth
Democrat, Hale Center, 50. Can it be true: A Speaker of the House made the Ten Best list instead of the Ten Most Wanted list? Three of the previous five speakers, after all, were charged with crimes while in office. But Pete Laney did a lot more than merely stay out of trouble. As the newly elected speaker, he used his moment of power for the noblest of purposes: to restore public confidence in the House of Representatives.
Laney ran the fairest, cleanest, most open, most democratic House in memory. He directed members to write new rules that reformed House procedures. No longer could the Calendars Committee, which sets the daily agenda for the House, kill bills behind closed doors. No longer could members be forced to vote on major bills at the end of the session without having time to read them. Laney made his executive employees take a no-revolving-door pledge prohibiting them from becoming lobbyists; he ended lobbyists’ access to the hall behind the House chamber that is closed to the public; he refused to accept lobbyists’ gifts on Speakers Day (the cost of the affair, a reunion of former members, dropped from $110,000 last session to $13,000); he was uncomfortable at the idea of charging a fee to Hollywood producers wishing to use his office for a film scene, saying, “It’s not something you rent out,” and suggested that they contribute to a scholarship fund honoring Bill Blackwood of Mesquite, a respected legislator battling cancer; and he ended the tradition of boozy office parties on the last day of the session.
Laney did all this not for the show but because he believed it would make the House a better legislative body—and it did. He is the archetypal citizen-legislator, a salt-of-the-earth Panhandle farmer who shuns the limelight, drives an old station wagon, and wears polyester suits—though less often than he used to, thank goodness. He visited members in their offices rather than summon them to his, and he dropped in unannounced on late-night committee meetings to hear testimony. He pushed no agenda, played no favorites, and punished no adversaries, and he watched from the podium with obvious relish as the House floor became a level playing field where members could do what they were big enough to do. He never twisted an arm to get a vote, not even on school finance; asked what it took to pass the bill, he deadpanned, “Four bottles of Maalox.” It may sound corny, but Laney meant what he said in a private conversation late in the session: “All I want is for this place to be better when I leave here than it was when I got here.”
Mike Martin
Welcoming the Enemy
Democrat, Galveston, 33. Except for one little detail, he operates like a veteran senator—the detail being that he serves in the House, though he longs to run for the upper chamber. In just his second term (he made the Ten Best list as a freshman in 1991), he has an aura of professionalism and a seriousness of purpose that seem almost out of place in a body whose collective behavior can resemble a Shriners’ convention.
No one but Martin could have passed the governor’s health insurance bill, which ranks alongside the criminal-justice package as the best public-interest legislation of the session. It guarantees that people will not lose their health insurance if they get sick or move from job to job. Drawn to the issue because his brother, who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease last November, lost his insurance after contracting the disease, Martin crafted a bill that was acceptable to both employers and insurers. He defeated a hostile amendment that was touted as good for small business with a rousing attack: “I can tell you, after three and a half months of working night and day with these folks, along with insurance industry and consumer groups, there isn’t anybody out there who supports this amendment. And let me tell you why: Because this amendment doesn’t do what [its backers] say it does.” Insurance lobbyists, who were naturally suspicious of Martin, a plaintiff’s lawyer, ended up singing his praises. “He welcomes the enemy into his office and says, ‘Let’s work this out,’” said one. “He does that better than anybody in the House.”
Martin never lets back scratching or logrolling interfere with legislating. Even as he was working with the governor’s office to pass the health insurance bill, he was uncovering waste in her pet agency, the State Board of Insurance, as a member of the House Appropriations Committee. While other members dutifully obeyed the hands-off designation on a products-liability compromise negotiated by Lieuntenant Governor Bob Bullock, Martin pored over the bill and found a problem that all sides agreed needed to be fixed.
He never forgot why he came here. In a committee hearing Martin got the Department of Human Services to agree to provide callers with a central 800 help number. (Acting as a private citizen, Martin had called the agency to get assistance for his brother and had been bounced from bureaucrat to bureaucrat.) He ran for the House to right the wrongs his family had suffered, and in just two sessions he did everything he set out to do.
John Montford
The Deputy
Democrat, Lubbock, 50. If the Senate were the Olympic Games, John Montford would win the decathlon. No one enters so many events or performs in them so well. He is the essential senator, the role model the other thirty could not do without.
Montford was Bob Bullock’s ambassador to trouble. When trucking deregulation negotiations hit one last roadblock, Bullock delegated Montford to steer them through. When war broke out between fast-food franchise operators and their parent companies, Montford helped get a compromise out of the Senate. As a former prosecutor, he backed a proposal to drop sodomy as a crime by pointing out that public lewdness carries a punishment of up to a year in jail and a $5,000 fine, while the current sodomy law is punishable by only a $500 fine. “Are you just trying to politicize this issue?” Montford asked the chief proponent of retaining the sodomy law. “That’s what it looks like to me.”
His major achievement was the $70 billion state budget, which increased spending by 11 percent—mostly to build new prisons and meet federal requirements in health care—without raising taxes. As Finance Committee chairman, he made the budget work by using comptroller John Sharp’s savings recommendations to restore up to $1 billion in human services cuts. Montford completed the Senate budget in record time and then made sure that a House-Senate negotiating team mostly endorsed the Senate spending plan.
No matter how busy he was, Montford never seemed to have even one mussed hair on his perfectly combed silver head. When Laredo senator Judith Zaffirini grabbed more than her share of money for her hometown college, touching off an insurrection by House budget negotiators that threatened the entire budget, Montford stepped in and found enough funds to placate the House Team. He set an example for other senators by avoiding the traps of partisanship, regionalism, and knee-jerk voting on emotional issues. In back-room negotiations, Montford repeatedly shamed lobbyists who got too greedy; during the trucking talks, he responded to proposals he regarded as avaricious with the sincere question, “What’s good for Texas about this idea?”
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