The Best and the Worst Legislators
For 140 days the seventy-seventh legislature searched for its personality without finding it. This was a budget-trimming session in which money was tight. No, it was a free-spending session in which state expenditures increased by $14 billion.
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It's no secret that Ellis has grown wealthy as a bond consultant while in office. But he is also the rare lawmaker who does good deeds with little publicity. He prevailed upon Continental, Southwest, and Delta airlines to provide free tickets to Austin so minority students could visit the University of Texas campus, and he runs an internship program for young people who are interested in politics. With Ratliff not returning as lieutenant governor and Republicans expected to increase their majority in the Senate, Ellis is not likely to remain as finance chair. At least when he got his chance to lead, the result was mission accomplished. Colin Powell, eat your heart out.
Juan Hinojosa
If the competition for the ten best list had been a horse race, nobody would have bet on Juan Hinojosa. He was carrying too much weight: a package of criminal-defense reforms, many of which were anathema to district attorneys and victims-rights groups, not to mention the lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key types in the Legislature. To get his bills out of the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, which he chairs, he faced a series of obstacles—including four law-and-order Republicans, among them an ex-sheriff and an ex-cop.
This last vulnerability Hinojosa turned into a strength; he joined the Republicans to his cause. He first came to the Legislature in 1981, back when it didn't matter whether you had an R or a D after your name; left in 1991 to run for the Senate (he was defeated in the Democratic primary by Eddie Lucio, Jr.); then returned in 1997 to find the House a different place, with far less camaraderie and far more emphasis on partisan divisions. But Hinojosa still operates in the old style. This session he forged a relationship with former Travis County sheriff Terry Keel, who is the most credible authority in the House on how law enforcement really works. ("A great chairman" is Keel's description of Hinojosa.) It was an amazing sight to see conservative Republicans asking friendly questions of Hinojosa during floor debate on his bills.
Here's the laundry list of what he passed: a plan to provide indigent defendants with competent counsel; a DNA-testing procedure for inmates to attempt to establish their innocence; a ban on executing the mentally retarded (which faces a potential veto by Governor Perry); a requirement for corroborative evidence for drug busts, assuring that a much-criticized undercover operation in the Panhandle town of Tulia will not be repeated; and a prohibition of racial profiling by peace officers. He lost a few fights—notably, an attempt to provide a life sentence without parole as an alternative to capital punishment—but who would have ever guessed how often he would finish in the winner's circle?
Bill Ratliff
Triumph and tragedy: the churchillian title sums up the session of Bill Ratliff, which began with his selection as lieutenant governor by his colleagues and ended with his decision not to seek election to a full term in 2002. The triumph was his own; the tragedy was Texas'.
For twelve years Ratliff has been an unwavering North Star in a political universe in serious need of guidance, moral and otherwise. But it was that very quality that led him to conclude that he could not bring himself to do the things that are necessary to run and win a statewide race. The job of lieutenant governor required Ratliff to balance responsibility with ambition for the first time. In the past his constituents in the northeast corner of Texas were happy to send him to Austin with no strings attached, trusting him to use his engineer's skills to fashion sound public policy. In his new post ambition could have tempted him to use his prestige to jump-start a reelection campaign that likely would have cost him more than $10 million. Instead, Lieutenant Governor Ratliff turned out to look and sound a lot like Senator Ratliff. He mentored younger members, restored calm in tense moments, and mediated disputes, usually siding with the powerless against the powerful (for example, far-flung University of Texas campuses against UT-Austin).
He cast fewer than ten votes, supporting increased penalties for hate crimes, a ban on racial profiling by the police, approval of the state budget, and the creation of a teacher health insurance plan. But his fairness and scruples, so valuable inside the Capitol, did not play well with influential Republicans outside it. Ratliff once described himself as "51 percent Republican"; they wanted 100 percent. He was committed to an evenhanded Senate redistricting process; they wanted the most partisan plan possible. He wanted the hate crimes bill to pass; they wanted it to fail. And they blamed him for the eight-year-old Robin Hood school-finance plan that he helped pass at a time when the alternative was having the Texas Supreme Court close the schools. He is the kind of officeholder Texas needs, but he is also the kind that partisan politics does not produce. His withdrawal leaves a huge void—as if, suddenly, a black hole appeared where there once was a guiding star.
Paul Sadler
Session after session, speaker Pete Laney assigns Paul Sadler the responsibility of passing the most important, most demanding, most difficult issue on the Legislature's agenda. And session after session, Sadler cruises to a successful completion of his task: overhauling the state's education laws, raising teachers' salaries while cutting school property taxes, and devising a farsighted tax-reform plan that, though it died in the Senate, continues to simmer on the back burners of public policy. This year's mission: state-funded teacher health insurance.
"Around the first of April, I had serious doubts that we could do this," Sadler reflected late in the session, when success was assured. "It looks so easy now, but we were befuddled. At a meeting of the House committee chairmen, I told them that this was maybe an issue we couldn't simply solve." The problem was finding a single plan for the state's thousand-plus school districts that didn't break the budget. The answer, Sadler finally decided, was not to look for a one-size-fits-all solution. He created a basic insurance program that is mandatory for small districts (those with fewer than five hundred employees) and optional for the rest; the districts and the state will share the cost for now, with the local share increasing to 100 percent after six years. But he couldn't ignore the big school districts, who already offered good insurance benefits but had the political clout to kill the deal if they didn't get something. So he provided for every teacher in the state to receive $1,000 to upgrade his or her health insurance—or, if a teacher chose, as additional compensation. A grateful House passed the once-controversial bill by the remarkable vote of 146-0. Once again Sadler had proved that if necessary, he could thread a needle with his toes.
This was a session, however, in which Sadler needed two miracles, and one was beyond his power to produce. In February his ten-year-old son was severely injured in an automobile accident. Doctors were not sure whether he would ever walk or talk again. Sadler left Austin for five weeks and did not return until his son began to show signs of improvement. On the last weekend of the session, Sadler strolled through the House, saying good-bye to colleagues and accepting their congratulations on two fronts: for the final passage of his bill and for the recovery of his son.
Senfronia Thompson
If you have a fenced goat, a fenced mule, a fenced chicken, a fenced hog, they are protected. If you happen to hurt those animals that are fenced in, you're gonna get a chance to go to the state jail, get a state jail felony against you for that. . . . We have a chance, just like we protect the pigs and the goats, to protect human beings. And that's what I am asking you to do when I ask you to vote for this hate crimes bill." With that speech, Senfronia Thompson started the session's most controversial bill on its way to passage. But she belongs in the top tier of legislators not simply because she passed hate crimes; rather, she was able to pass the hate crimes bill because she is in the top tier of legislators.
Thompson's speech reveals why she is regarded as one of the best bill passers in the House. Instead of making moral appeals to her colleagues, she says, in effect, "You can vote for this; it's not such a big deal." And there's always a little wry humor attached. When Republicans started asking questions about her bill to raise the state's $3.35-an-hour minimum wage, she barked, "Let the little dogs eat"—a twist on the old adage "Let the big dog eat," meaning that it is futile to fight the rich and powerful. Her bill requiring insurance companies to cover women's contraceptives, just as they cover Viagra, would end "redlining in the bedroom." (Like hate crimes, the minimum wage and contraceptives bills passed.) She delights in playing on House resentment of the Senate. Complaining about changes the upper chamber made to another of her bills, she told her colleagues, "We sent the Senate a doughnut, and they sent us back the hole."
Thompson and Speaker Pete Laney are the last active members of the 71-strong House freshman class of 1973. They are about as different as two members can be—a white male farmer from the High Plains and an African American female urbanite—and yet in one essential way they are the same: They notice everything, they forget nothing, and they almost always get what they want.
Arlene Wohlgemuth
Dear Arlene,
You don't mind if we call you by your first name, do you? Everybody else around the Capitol does. You could be the title of a C&W song: "Ara-lene, Ara-lene/Toughest gal I ever seen." We're writing to warn you that we're fixing to ruin your reputation: We're putting you on the Ten Best list. The Shiites and the Black Helicopter Caucus and the other true believers on the right wing of the Republican party in the House, who look to you as their leader, may begin to have second thoughts.
My Library
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