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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Two dominant themes had emerged in Toomey's career: an aversion to higher taxes and a deep conviction that lawsuits were harming Texas businesses. Today, those two issues once again are at the heart of the legislative session, and once again Toomey is in a position to do something about them—only this time, Republicans are in control.
Toomey got the chance to turn his tort-reform philosophy into his profession when he began his lobby practice, in 1990. In 1994 he gained a new client that would propel him to the top rank of business lobbiest when a group of Houston businessmen headed by homebuilder Dick Weekley hired him as the chief lobbyist for their new organization, Texans for Lawsuit Reform. Toomey not only got paid to promote legislation that he believed in but the political contributions he dispensed through the TLR helped change the makeup of the Legislature. In 2000 the TLR donated 92 percent of its $1.4 million war chest to Republicans.
"Mike would never lobby for someone he didn't agree with philosophically," says Ric Williamson, another old friend from Toomey's legislative days, who is also a member of Perry's inner circle and a Perry appointee to the Texas Transportation Commission. "He has passed up fees because he would not work for something that was not his cause. His tort-reform views are that a bunch of lawyers are gaming the process and not trying to achieve justice."
Getting the TLR as a connection cemented Toomey's stature as the Capitol's top business lobbyist and as an enforcer. Before the TLR came along, most lobby groups took a live-and-let-live attitude toward lawmakers who didn't vote their way—but not Toomey. Many a legislator has grumbled about feeling threatened that the TLR would find an opponent to run against anyone who failed to support bills helping business defendants in lawsuits. "Sure, we've heard that," said Ralph Wayne, the president of the Texas Civil Justice League, another tort-reform lobby group. "It's a feeling that has gotten around, but I've never found any evidence of it." Yet few would dispute that the TLR's campaign contributions produced a Senate majority for the Republicans in 1995 and contributed to a GOP House majority this year. "He's very aggressive and some people take umbrage," Wayne acknowledged. "He's never rude. But he doesn't spend a lot of time chatting."
THE BEST KNOWN EXAMPLE OF Toomey's enforcement technique was his play to oust Kim Ross as the head lobbyist for the Texas Medical Association. At the beginning of Toomey's efforts to change Texas tort law in 1987, doctors were advocates for tort reform. A large number of frivolous lawsuits had made it hard for doctors to get affordable malpractice insurance. Toomey helped pass a compromise tort-reform bill that year, but he felt that the TMA had been too willing to compromise with the plaintiffs lawyers. The rift grew worse when managed care came along, in the nineties. Doctors found themselves at the mercy of health maintenance organizations that dictated what they could charge and how they treated patients. In 1995 the TMA made a truce with its old enemy—the Texas Trial Lawyers Association—to pass legislation allowing HMOs to be sued for malpractice. Business-oriented lobby groups, employers, and the TLR opposed the bill, which Governor George W. Bush vetoed. Bush later made peace with the doctors by having most of the bill's provisions adopted as rules by the state agency that regulates insurance.
Perry reopened the rift in June 2001 by vetoing the TMA's top legislative priority, a bill requiring insurance companies to pay doctors promptly. Toomey opposed the "prompt pay" bill, unsuccessfully, on behalf of an insurance company client and the TLR. After the session ended, however, he lobbied two top Perry staffers for a veto, according to a Dallas Morning News report. This time he was successful. Whether Toomey raised the TLR's objections during the session, when there was time to fix the bill, or after lawmakers went home remains in dispute. Doctors and their supporters cried foul. John Coppedge, a politically active Longview physician and a Republican, asked Toomey why he didn't express his reservations to TMA lobbyist Ross. According to a widely circulated letter from Coppedge about the conversation, Toomey replied, "Dr. Coppedge, you don't understand. Those people are the enemy."
Ross met with Toomey over lunch a few weeks after the veto. Toomey, said Ross, "laid out in the most thorough, methodical, detailed manner why he felt I was involved in a national conspiracy [with the trial lawyers]. We ended up on the grassy knoll. It was a highly reasoned argument and fundamentally one hundred eighty degrees off from reality."
Last November, following Perry's easy victory over Tony Sanchez, the governor's office said it would not deal with the TMA as long as Ross remained in charge. Ross said he resigned his position after it became clear that he would not be able to represent the doctors with Perry as governor. "Any deviation from Toomey's philosophy is considered heretical and you get shot to death. Look at me," Ross said. He now represents clients on issues pending in Congress, and the doctors rely mainly on outside lobbyists. Even Toomey's close friends agree with Ross that Toomey views the world in absolutes. "He sees the world as good and bad, evil and pure, right and wrong," said Ric Williamson. "You're not a little bit right."
IN LATE MARCH THE HOUSE of Representatives fought for two weeks over a TLR-backed tort-reform program that was weighted heavily in favor of business defendants. Even before the debate unfolded, tempers flared when the bill's House sponsor, Houston Republican Joe Nixon, absorbed a popular bill aimed at reducing medical-malpractice insurance rates into the controversial tort-reform proposal. Although there are several stories about who thought up the clever stroke, Toomey is generally given credit for it. The stratagem worked, and the House passed the tort-reform bill by a wide margin. Asked if he saw Toomey's fingerprints on the combined bill, Dallas Democrat Steve Wolens, an opponent, responded, "I don't see his fingerprints. I see his brain prints."
A common complaint heard around the Capitol is that Toomey "hasn't taken off his lobby hat"—meaning that as Perry's chief of staff, he continues to argue positions favorable to his former clients, especially the TLR. Toomey was ready with his answer when I raised the point in our interview: "I have two responses to that. First of all, I didn't have any client that I didn't agree with philosophically about what they were doing. Just go through my client list. I don't have clients I disagree with." The second rebuttal was that he delegates issues on which he has lobbied previously to other staffers. As an example, he said he sent representatives of SBC Communications (Southwestern Bell) to an assistant, who could take the company's concerns directly to the governor, since Toomey himself had worked as a lobbyist for its competitor, AT&T.
But word that Toomey had participated in a meeting on a resurrected prompt-pay bill, advocating a position favorable to employers and insurance companies and anathema to doctors, swept the Capitol early in the session. "I was involved—with the governor's blessing," Toomey acknowledged. "I came in hoping I could get an agreement on prompt pay and not have those two groups [employers and doctors] fighting. We failed. We couldn't bridge them together."
Toomey's involvement on behalf of his former clients might become a major problem if he returns to lobbying for them, but Williamson says that is unlikely. He and other friends predict that Toomey will return to electoral politics, running for a statewide office like comptroller, or alternatively, go to work for a conservative advocacy foundation.
As we were winding up our interview, I mentioned to Toomey that many people had suggested that I wait until after the session to write this article, when the inflammatory issues of the budget and tort reform would be settled and they would be freer to talk.
"Are you saying that people are afraid of me?" Toomey asked, incredulous. He collapsed in his chair and looked at the ceiling, as if in despair—but just for a second. Then the enforcer collected himself and gave what sounded like a final argument to a jury: "If people are going to pass bills that are going to regulate business, if they want to make it more costly to do business here, if they want to raise taxes, if they want to get government more involved in people's lives or businesses' lives, I'm going to tell the governor, in my opinion, he ought to veto it."
And he closed with the comfortable air of a man who suffers no self-doubt. "If people are afraid of that," he said, "I don't know what I can do to appease them."
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