The Best and Worst Legislators 1993
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Ike Harris
Poster Child
Republican, Dallas, 61. If he ever had any sense of public mission, it hasn’t been evident for years. After more than a quarter of a century in office, the dean of the Senate has become the disgrace of the Senate. His office is known to Senate staffers as Club Ike for its late-afternoon party atmosphere. He doesn’t even make a pretense of proper decorum. When Dallas freshman Royce West asked for a moment to read an amendment during a meeting of the State Affairs Committee, chairman Harris was clearly irritated. “I thought you told me never to vote on anything I hadn’t read,” West said. “Some damn fool may have told you that,” Harris retorted, “but it wasn’t me.”
His public agenda is inseparable from his private agenda. Harris practices law before state agencies regulating alcohol and insurance and has close ties to racetrack interests; his list of bills reads like the lobby’s letter to Santa. He proposed authorizing tastings at liquor stores, letting beer companies advertise at racetracks, giving a racetrack permission to switch sites, and placing a gag rule on the consumers’ advocate at the State Board of Insurance. He single-handedly killed a bill requiring topless dancers to be at least 21 years old. At first he said he opposed it because the bill didn’t apply to male strippers (wrong), but later he told reporters, “I sure know what I prefer to see. And it ain’t guys.”
He was equally in the lobby’s pocket when it came to other senators’ legislation. Backers of tougher drunk-driving laws had to sacrifice a bill strengthening the open-container law just to get a hearing in Harris’ committee on a bill streamlining procedures for suspending drivers’ licenses. “He forces you to give things up for the lobby,” says a Senate staffer.
“Ike is Ike,” say his defenders—and they are surprisingly numerous. Translated, this means that his foibles are forgiven because (1) he isn’t a partisan obstructionist; (2) he knows how to pass contested bills, even if they usually aren’t very good bills; and (3) in the words of a veteran lobbyist, “Even after lunch, he’s still smarter than most of the Senate.” It doesn’t matter. Ike Harris has spent 26 years accumulating knowledge and power only to expend it for topless bars, racetracks, and his own legal practice. A colleague summed Harris up: “He’s a poster child for term limitations.”
Fred Hill One of a Kind
Republican, Richardson, 53. Fred Hill is unique in the Texas Legislature. He is a suspicious and uncivil man in an institution that is totally dependent upon mutual respect and civility. “He’s got the Phil Gramm problem,” said a fellow Republican. “Even his friends don’t like him.”
Hill was involved in more tacky exchanges during debate than the other 149 members combined. “I resent it when you know something and don’t disclose it to the House,” he told the sponsor of a bill to move supervision of the lottery. If there was a nefarious plot going on, it wasn’t apparent to Hill’s colleagues, who voted for the bill. In a fingernails-on-a-blackboard exchange with Appropriations Committee chairman Rob Junell, Hill said in successive comments, “All I’ve heard so far is a lecture,” “You bet I want you to answer my question,” “Okay, you kind of got emotional here without knowing all the facts,” until his patronizing attitude finally drove Junell to explode: “You don’t be smart aleck to me!” While questioning a supporter of the school finance bill, Hill, an opponent, took his adversary to task for receiving whispered advice from Public Education Committee chair Libby Linebarger: “I know she’s telling you the answers. I’d just as soon hear it directly from her,” Hill carped.
To someone unfamiliar with the formalities of the legislative process, these gratuitous irritations may seem like small potatoes. In fact, they have reduced Hill’s effectiveness to zero and made him a pariah, even among fellow Republicans. (“If I don’t vote like he does, he thinks I’m a bad Republican,” said one. “He doesn’t understand that my district isn’t like his.”) When a college in his district asked him to help get funding for a special project, Hill had no one to turn to. At the last moment a senator had to come to the rescue. Hill’s chairmanship of the Urban Affairs Committee was doomed from the start; Hill and the urban Democrats on the committee quickly reached a stalemate of mutual distrust.
No one even wants to listen to him. When word got around that Hill was going to fight a motion to send a liquor bill back to committee (he wanted to amend it on the floor), the bill’s sponsor raised a point of order against his own bill. This ingenious procedural ploy sent the bill back to committee without debate—just to keep Fred Hill quiet.
Ted Kamel
Throwing Boomerangs
Republican, Tyler, 33. Hilariously inept. Not a bad guy, really—just someone whose understanding of the legislative process is fatally flawed. Kamel has the misguided notion that the way to get ahead in the Legislature is to plant bombs and hurl hardballs rather than build relationships. Like the cartoon coyote, he forever ends up the victim of his own schemes when his bombs explode in his face and his pitches behave like boomerangs.
Here’s Kamel at work. It’s a key vote on school finance, and the leadership is desperately searching for Republican support. Kamel decides that this is the moment to play tough. He’ll vote for school finance, he tells Speaker Laney, if the speaker will support Kamel’s bill to make UT-Tyler a four-year institution. Laney’s response: I’ll meet you halfway. You vote for school finance, and I’ll let you keep the two years you have now.
Undeterred, Kamel tried to bargain again on a bill protecting owners of fast-food restaurants against companies like McDonald’s that grant franchises. As the chairman of a subcommittee studying the proposal, Kamel held up the bill in hopes of forcing a key senator to drop his opposition to UT-Tyler’s four-year status. The stratagem failed when the full committee simply found a different version of the bill to vote on.
Kamel tried to pass a bill regulating roadside vendors but did such a poor job that a colleague had to go to the microphone to tell him how he should have argued the bill: “You need to tell these members this is about local taxation, equity, and local small businesses in compliance with health standards and not get deviated into other business.”
“You have effectively taken the words right out of my mouth,” said Kamel.
Then there was the time Kamel reminded a Democrat who was pleading for Republican votes that just the night before, a Republican had had to make a similar plea for votes. “Where were the swing votes when we needed help in the House for a fellow Republican?” Kamel asked. Good point, except the reason the fellow Republican had to plead in the first place was to remove a gutting amendment backed vociferously by…Ted Kamel.
These antics may seem harmless, but they’re not. They take up time, fray tempers, cause rifts, and undermind serious issues. Perhaps it was symbolism, not chance, when smoke began pouring from the wiring under Kamel’s desk on the next-to-last day of the session: Those who play with fire get burned.
Glen Maxey
Not Yet a Hero
Democrat, Austin, 41. To some people around the Capitol, Glen Maxey is a hero. He is the first openly gay Texas legislator, a champion of reform, underdogs, and the environment. Why, then, is he on the Ten Worst list? Because he reflects so much that is wrong with contemporary politics: posturing for the media, focusing on interest-group politics, and demanding to be treated like an insider while reserving the right to behave like an outsider.
Case 1: It is a scant few days before the end of the legislative session, and Maxey has just blocked consideration of an ethics bill with a point of order. The measure cannot be reconsidered until the last day for debating bills—a delay that will prove fatal. He is surrounded by angry legislators on the House floor: at first five, then eight, ten, twelve. Everybody wants to know why he did it. After all, in his two terms in the Legislature, he has been a strong advocate of ethics. If he didn’t like the bill, why didn’t he just offer amendments to make it better?
Maxey’s answer, according to two members who were present: “I wasn’t invited to participate. I’m never invited to be on the inside of things.”
The next day, however, the Austin paper has a different story: “By threatening the bill, Maxey said he hoped to get stronger ethics legislation.”
Case 2: The House has just approved the state budget. Only four members have voted no. One is Glen Maxey. A member asks why. Maxey’s answer: There isn’t enough money for AIDS.
Case 3: Maxey is speaking against the bill to legalize the carrying of handguns. “The next time I’m standing on the corner of Fourth and Congress and someone yells out ‘faggot’ at me, I may be carrying a gun,” he warns. Maxey votes no. The bill passes.
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