The Enforcer
He's rough! He's tough! He won't take any guff! He's Rick Perry's chief of staff! He cuts Democrats—and Republicans—in half! Mike Toomey is The Enforcer.
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MICHAEL TOOMEY III GREW UP in Houston, the eldest of three sons in an Irish Catholic family undermined by his father's alcoholism. His dad, a lawyer whose practice ultimately failed because of chronic drinking, divorced his mother when Toomey was around twelve years old. He saw little of his father during his teenage years, though he sometimes went with his brothers for weekend excursions to the family's bay house. "We went down there to see our father," he recalled, "but everybody was just drunk. Just a bunch of drunks hanging around smoking and drinking."
His mother, Rosemary, returned to teaching at St. Vincent de Paul, the Catholic grade school Toomey attended before going to all-male Strake Jesuit College Preparatory. He credits her hard work and frugality for influencing his conservative outlook. "Because we didn't have much money, she was very prudent," he said. "She would say the old expressions everybody my age grew up with: 'Eat everything on your plate; people are starving.' So I learned to be frugal about my own money. I worked all the way through high school and college."
He selected Baylor University because he wanted to go to a small college. "I was pretty shy," he said. "I'm still pretty shy. I don't think I come across that way, because I can be very aggressive, but around people I'm still very shy." Though tuition would have been cheaper at a larger, public university, Toomey decided he could handle the expense of Baylor with the help of scholarships, loans, and odd jobs, including enforcer at the adolescent treatment center. He intended to pursue medicine, but he struggled with science courses, and by the end of his sophomore year, he was looking for a new major. Then he signed up for a philosophy course taught by a professor who hit an intellectual nerve. He went on to major in the subject.
"Who is your favorite philosopher?" I asked.
"Oh, boy, is this going to get me in trouble," he said, covering his face with his hands. "It was Nietzsche. Back in that time, I got caught up in existentialism. I was fascinated by it, and he was the top star there." Toomey now attributes his God-is-dead phase to the general unrest of the late sixties. "Others rebelled by doing other things," he recalled. "I rebelled by getting into existentialism."
After Baylor, he returned home to Houston, still unsure of what he wanted to do with his life. He got a job on the psychiatric ward of Bellaire General Hospital, serving in much the same capacity as he did in the Waco treatment center. (He met his first wife there, a nurse named Mary, and the couple had two girls. They are now divorced; he remarried in 1996 and has two children, ages four and one, with his second wife, Stacy.) A few months later, he entered South Texas College of Law and began assisting his father with cases. "His practice was deteriorating," Toomey said. "At some point, he couldn't do it anymore, but I got some on-the-ground experience."
After he earned his law degree, he became involved in civic affairs—the West Houston Chamber of Commerce and the Optimist Club. A friend suggested that he run for the Legislature in 1982, and he campaigned against higher taxes. "When you speak to Republican women," he said, "you order little trinkets for them. So I had a little bottle of hand lotion that said, 'Don't get chapped over higher taxes. Vote Mike Toomey.'"
In what was then a gregarious, backslapping, nights-on-the-town atmosphere in the Legislature, Toomey didn't fit in, even on the detail-oriented House Appropriations Committee, to which he was appointed in his second term. "His personality made people nervous," recalled committee chairman Jim Rudd. "He didn't have much of a sense of humor." One evening, Rudd and several of his committee members went to a local bar for a drink. They invited Toomey and were surprised—because of his grinding work habits—when he showed up. As he got up to leave, Toomey tossed a $10 bill on the table for the tab. The committee members had it framed and presented it to him: It was the first time they had seen him part with money.
In his third session, in 1987, Toomey left the Appropriations Committee to handle a successful, though mild, effort at tort reform. But he remained involved in budget issues; when the appropriations bill reached the House floor, he led a futile Republican attack against it. Later, Toomey led a Republican bloc that voted against a tax bill needed to fund the budget, even though GOP governor Bill Clements had signed off on it.
"I was really ticked off at Mike for that," Rudd said. "We had done a good job on the budget, had scrubbed it as much as we could. He wasn't willing to vote for the tax bill. It disappointed me. The party made him do that."
Not so, Toomey said: "I thought that whatever we were short—three billion dollars—I wanted them to cut. Bear in mind that was on the heel of a tax bill in '83 and a tax bill in '85. At some point, it's enough." The incident has strong implications for this year's session, in which the shortfall is almost $10 billion. You can be sure that Toomey's philosophy hasn't changed and that the son of the alcoholic father, who watched his mother struggle to make ends meet, will not have much sympathy for governmental programs that necessitate higher taxes.
"You've got to look at what the core purpose of government is," he said. "It is not to do everything. The core element of government is to help people who can't help themselves. Beyond that, it's not a high priority."
Toomey believes now, as he did when he led the attack on the budget in 1987, that lawmakers are poor stewards of taxpayer money. "I always felt [scrubbing the budget] was a ruse," he said. "The committee pretends to want to cut. They do a little on the edge. But no one really structurally changes anything. No one went in there as I wanted to do and I believe we will do this time: start over and examine everything."
TOOMEY'S 1987 TAX STAND INFURIATED Democrats, but it earned him admiration within his own party. When Clements asked former Texas Secretary of State George Bayoud to serve as chief of staff, Bayoud agreed on one condition: that he could hire Toomey and another former lawmaker. "They agreed and I got a press release out before they changed their minds," Bayoud recalled.
Toomey's job in the 1989 legislative session was to keep Clements from having to sign another tax bill. This time he succeeded. "We did everything humanly possible—cut lots of money, did lots of smoke-and-mirrors maneuvers, and browbeat insurance companies into settling [a dispute with the state] for hundreds of millions of dollars," he said. Former state senator Kent Caperton, now an Austin lobbyist, who served as the Senate's budget chairman that year, reflected on Toomey's hard line with the insurance companies: "He's a helluva negotiator. One of the things he has learned is not to reach a deal too quickly. You can hold out and hold out."
That was exactly the tactic Toomey took during a prolonged fight over workers' compensation reform later that year. Employers were crying out for a complete overhaul of the insurance system for injured workers, and the powerful Texas Trial Lawyers Association opposed the changes. Toomey held out so long, in fact, that Bayoud was afraid that the chance to make a deal might pass. "Don't be so unflinching that we lose it," Bayoud told him. In the end, Toomey said, "It was a big victory."
Later, lawmakers had to deal with a school-finance crisis. They passed a quarter-cent sales tax increase, which Toomey urged Clements to veto and, for the first time, took on the role of the enforcer. In a news story about the controversy, the Dallas Morning News noted that Toomey was collecting signatures from Republican legislators who promised to vote to uphold a possible veto. According to the story, Toomey said that lawmakers who refused to sign would have to answer to the voters—and might find Clements backing their opponent. "Their vote is a vote against their Republican governor and it's a vote for higher taxes," Toomey told the newspaper. Bayoud intervened, telling Clements to sign the tax hike because his veto would be overridden. While Toomey "might not have liked" his advice to the governor, Bayoud had praise for the role Toomey played. "Mike is tough. He's into policy. He's well-versed. Mike knows the numbers. It's hard to maneuver around him because he knows his stuff," Bayoud said. "And a lot of times, the governor wants you to stay tough."
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