The Best and Worst Legislators 1993
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The stories abound. A colleague asked Carriker to delay passage of a bill while some problems were worked out. He said he would—but he didn’t. Carriker offered what he said was just a technical amendment to a civil service bill. It wasn’t: The change made it all but impossible for local voters to rein in municipal employee unions. Once the true effect of the language was discovered, angry colleagues reversed the outcome. He played coy about when his ethics bill would be presented in committee, and he said that a key compromise would be in his version of the bill overhauling alcoholic beverage laws, but it wasn’t. “When Carriker gets a bill, anything goes,” complained a Democratic senator. “You’ve got to have some credibility in this process, or you’re dead.” R.I.P.
Warren Chisum
Ozzie and Harriet
Democrat, Pampa, 54. Pat Buchanan with a smile. The Texas Legislature never seems to run short of people like Warren Chisum—another narrow-minded rabblerouser out to impose his Ozzie-and-Harriet notions on everybody else. As chairman of the Conservative Caucus, Chisum seized on headline-grabbing issues like sodomy and abortion. But when issues came along that really could make a difference to families, such as keeping criminals locked up or improving public schools, Chisum was nowhere to be found.
He spent the session playing gingham dog to gay Austin legislator Glen Maxey’s calico cat, and sure enough, there was a terrible spat. It happened during the debate over a major bill revising the state’s criminal laws. Maxey wanted to repeal the law making sodomy between homosexuals a crime. Chisum wanted to broaden the law to apply to heterosexuals. This led to the session’s low point, a graphic debate over anal sex that caused one member to ask if there were schoolchildren in the gallery. It featured Chisum against Debra Danburg of Houston. Here’s a portion that is just barely fit for publication:
Q: You’re trying to criminalize behavior between people of the opposite sex?
Chisum: That’s right.
Q: Even if they are married?
Chisum: Especially if they are married.
Q: Even if it’s consensual?
Chisum: Under any circumstances.
Q: Even if they slip?
When Danburg asked, “What’s the penalty?” Chisum answered, “If you were in my county, it could be hanging.”
He was joking, of course. But he wasn’t joking about having sodomy remain a crime—even though prosecutors testified that they preferred to charge violators with public lewdness, which is easier to prove and carries a tougher penalty. Chisum won by threatening to defeat the entire penal code—a law-and-order bill that should have been priority number one for the Conservative Caucus—if it legalized sodomy.
Chisum belongs on the Ten Worst list because he would rather give litmus tests than solve problems. He proposed an amendment he said would prevent fraudulent abortions by clinics that falsely tell women they are pregnant, but he lost because he also insisted that before any abortion could be performed, a doctor had to find that it was “necessary.” The best that can be said of him is that he was amusing rather than spiteful; he killed so many bills by finding technical glitches that the mere sight of Chisum approaching the microphone set colleagues to whistling the sound of falling bombs. Not everyone was amused, however. When one of Chisum’s own bills had a technical flaw, a foe was ready: The bill, she said, violated three House rules—“and common decency.”
David Counts
Ping-Pong Ball
Democrat, Knox City, 56. One could scarcely imagine that there were so many ways to fail. Counts was a quadruple-threat disaster: awful as a committee chairman, terrible as a bill sponsor, hopeless as a mediator, defenseless as a floor debater. No one would have predicted such a fate for this mild-mannered West Texan a session ago. But then Pete Laney became speaker, and Counts, as one of his most loyal lieutenants, found himself propelled into the legislative stratosphere. Who forgot the oxygen?
He spent more time in hot water than a Jacuzzi salesman. Counts got burned three times: on regulating the waters of the Edwards Aquifer, on a major review of insurance laws, and on extending the life of the Department of Public Safety. He walked straight into an ambush on the DPS bill, which went down to a temporary defeat after the best response Counts could offer to critics was “I remember our arguments very well, and, ah, I don’t disagree with them.”
The aquifer bill was a fiasco of epic proportions. As chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, Counts was supposed to bring rural and urban competitors for the Edwards together. Instead, he sided totally with the farmers, which would not have been surprising, given his rural roots, except that a federal judge was threatening to take over the aquifer if the Legislature didn’t come up with a plan. Counts’s first proposal was about as feasible as a perpetual-motion machine: Put a cap or a valve on the biggest springs to keep the aquifer from emptying. His second idea was to let the farmers continue pumping all the water they wanted, while San Antonio paid for new reservoirs. By mid-March, he was declaring that an agreement was hopeless. Eventually he suffered the ignominy of seeing the defrocked chairman he had replaced take over the bill and pass it.
His performance on the insurance bill was, impossible as it might seem, even worse. As the bill’s sponsor, Counts publicly requested that all amendments be submitted not to him but to an insurance industry lobbyist. His failure to act as a gatekeeper on his own bill set off a feeding frenzy of pro-industry amendments in committee. Ann Richards denounced the bill as trash, and he reneged on commitments to insurance lobbyists, even on issues in which the facts were on their side. Poor David Counts. He exerted no more control over his destiny this session than a Ping-Pong ball does over the paddles that knock it to and fro.
Betty Denton
Broken Record
Democrat, Waco, 46. So many years, so little to show for it. In her ninth term in office, she finally compiled a record. Unfortunately, it was a criminal record. In the first week of the session she was indicted for tampering with government records and perjury. The charge (which she denies) is that she falsified campaign reports to show that she had raised more money than was actually the case, presumably to scare her opponents. The idea that this sort of activity should be subject to criminal prosecution is a little silly, and Denton would have had the wholehearted sympathy of her colleagues had she gone about her business with dignity. But she wasn’t up to it.
Instead, Denton used her position on the House budget writing committee to seek vengeance upon the state-funded Travis County prosecutorial team that had indicted her (and, earlier, her husband, for an unrelated offense). Ignoring stern advice from the committee chairman, she offered a series of punitive amendments against the prosecutors that would have micromanaged what is essentially an arm of county government.
Her efforts in floor debate were equally futile. She is for all the right-sounding issues—education, the environment, consumers—but whenever she tries to do something about them, her reputation precedes her. She tried to amend the school-finance bill and got waxed, 138-9. She tried to keep out-of-state radioactive waste from being stored in Texas and got 14 votes. She tried to stop utility companies from passing on the cost of their charitable contributions to ratepayers and got 13 votes. She did succeed in holding up a bill extending the life of the Department of Public Safety—but only briefly.
As the session wound down, there was Denton, standing before the House again, on an inexplicable tirade against a court reporters’ bill. “I don’t know why somebody continues to do that in spite of all the evidence to the contrary,” the bill’s sponsor said wearily. “Vote aye, and let’s go home.” If only she would stay there.
Al Edwards
More Money
Democrat, Houston, 56. A habitual bottom feeder; the only suspense is whether his malefactions will surface to become public knowledge. (The last sighting came in 1989, when Edwards made the Ten Worst list for such shenanigans as sponsoring a bill to amputate the fingers of convicted drug dealers.) It’s hard to catch a fellow when the highlight of his legislative program is a resolution inviting Bill Clinton to speak in the House chamber, but Edwards hooked himself with his heavy-handed fundraising tactics as chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus.
Most legislators raise money in order to run for office. Al Edwards runs for office in order to raise money. Recent reforms prohibit lawmakers from seeking campaign contributions during the legislative session, but no such strictures apply to groups like the Black Caucus—and Edwards took full advantage of the loophole. He badgered lobbyists for funds, told some donors that a $500 contribution wasn’t enough, and asked them for $1,500 instead. This gambit was usually successful.
To their credit, reform-minded members of the caucus wanted Edwards to account for the money he raised. Led by Karyne Conley of San Antonio, they suggested that the caucus follow the same rules that the rest of the Legislature does: Report contributions and abide by a budget. Edwards took it personally. In apparent retaliation he later declined to vote for a top caucus priority: a proposed constitutional amendment aiding minority-owned businesses. His timing for this churlish display of ego could not have been worse. The amendment needed 100 votes to pass, but without Edwards, the tally was stuck on 99. Speaker Laney, who normally doesn’t vote, had to provide the winning margin. Later that day Edwards offered his resignation as caucus chairman, but the members, fearful that the crisis would cause the caucus to fall apart, declined to accept it. The reforms weren’t personal, they said in asking him to stay on while the caucus developed guidelines about handling money. It was Conley who resigned instead.
In the waning hours of the session, the Black Caucus gathered on the speaker’s podium so that Edwards could present Laney its G.J. Sutton Award—Edwards kept calling it the C.J. Sutton Award—for helping the caucus. Conley remained stoically at her desk, but Edwards summoned her forward. Her embarrassment was palpable. She slowly walked to the podium, but she would not climb the stairs. The message was clear: She would honor Pete Laney, but not Al Edwards.
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