An F for Effort
Too much finance, not enough school: That was one of the problems with the special session called for the purpose of eliminating Robin Hood in favor of—what? Nobody seemed to have a workable alternative. Regardless, the Speaker and the governor bumbled along, and all signs point to the people of Texas paying dearly.
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The vote was anticlimactic—Grusendorf easily had enough votes to pass the bill out of committee—but the discussion beforehand was revealing. Rene Oliveira, a Brownsville Democrat, exposed the fatal weakness of the bill in a mild-mannered but devastating attack: The committee’s bill, after almost a year of work, sets as its goal a 55 percent passing rate on the new TAKS test (which replaces the TAAS and is designed to be more difficult). The funding for Texas schools will be based on the cost per pupil, determined in a study by a team of university researchers, of reaching the 55 percent level, which, under the state’s rating system for schools, is regarded as “acceptable.” Oliveira asked rhetorically why it made sense to peg the funding to a 55 percent passing rate, thereby leaving the remaining 45 percent of the students to fail. That seems like a fair question to me. Later, during House floor debate, Grusendorf explained that a 55 percent passing rate on the more difficult TAKS is equivalent to at least a 90 percent passing rate on TAAS, but I don’t understand how that justifies hitching our wagon to a 45 percent failure rate. Failing is still failing. The real answer to Oliveira’s question, of course, is that to pay for the next level of achievement, at which a school is rated as “recognized,” would cost an additional $2 billion, and Republicans haven’t shown themselves willing to pay for the lower level of achievement, much less the higher.
AND SO THE COMMITTEE sent the bill to the House. Craddick had three days to try to round up his votes for the bill before it was scheduled to be debated on the floor. He could count on only one Democrat, Ron Wilson, of Houston, who had paid the price for his alliance with Craddick by losing his seat in the March Democratic primary. But on Monday, the day before the vote, Perry sent word that he would veto any bill that contained a payroll tax and then confirmed it with a press release. Craddick had no choice but to remove the payroll tax from the bill—and the slot machine proposal as well, because it had no chance of passing. By the time floor debate began the next day, the bill was just a shell of its former self.
The day would be one of the most incredible scenes anyone at the Capitol could remember. As debate began, more than two hundred amendments to the bill sat on the Speaker’s desk. The first was offered by Jim Keffer, the champion of the payroll tax that the governor had scotched. “Until four o’clock yesterday, I thought we had a plan,” he told the House. “Before you is the governor’s plan. He called us here without so much as a consensus and then undermined our process and criticized the committee’s plan.” So Keffer proposed to amend the bill by substituting the governor’s plan. “If you’re for it, vote yes,” he said. “If you don’t like it, vote no. Mr. Speaker, show me voting no”—against his own amendment. The House erupted with shouts of “Vote! Vote!” accompanied by whistles emulating the sound of falling bombs, a sure sign that the governor’s plan was going down. A couple of Republican lawmakers rushed to the governor’s defense (“This is wrong.” “This is childish.” “Is it your purpose to be wasting your time on foolishness?”), but at this point it didn’t matter who was a Republican or who was a Democrat; the battle was joined between those two ancient foes, the Legislature and the executive, and the House’s blood was up. The vote was zero for the governor’s plan, 126 against, and 16 present but not voting: a shutout. Has a governor ever been rebuked so resoundingly? This was one of those moments in the House when the members run loose like a pack of dogs, out of control, and no bill is safe.
Oliveira soon followed with an amendment to kill a proposed increase in the tax on automobiles and a new tax on automobile repairs. Back in the regular session, Democrats couldn’t get any Republican support for their amendments, but this was different. The House was mad at the governor, mad at Grusendorf, mad at the lobby, mad at the world. An attempt to table Oliveira’s amendment failed, 32 votes for and 111 against. The course for the rest of the day was clear: Amendments would be offered to remove every tax from the bill, and they were destined to pass.
But Craddick is not one to allow destiny to get in his way. He sent Talmadge Heflin, the formidable chairman of the Appropriations Committee, to the microphone with a parliamentary ploy to move the previous question. If the motion carried, it would cut off all further amendments, end all debate, and force an immediate vote on the bill. This was, as Democrats pointed out, a terrible breach of the democratic process, an affront to the republican form of government. Someone in the back of the hall shouted, “Sieg!” Craddick has been criticized often, including by me, for his iron-fisted control of the House, for forcing Republican members to vote against their will, for using parliamentary maneuvers that deny his opponents the opportunity to debate, but you have to give the guy this: He is fearless. He does what he has to do, and he doesn’t care how bad it looks. And what he had to do at that point was to get Heflin to move the previous question. If he didn’t, the dogs would have stripped the bill to the bone. His Republican members were put in the untenable position of having to choose between voting against tax cuts to save the bill or voting for tax cuts and effectively killing the bill and the session. The Democrats objected to the motion, of course, and some heated rhetoric ensued, but the wisest among them knew that Craddick had no choice.
The vote to move the previous question went largely according to party lines. But the surprises weren’t over. The next vote was to pass what was left of the bill—and the nays had it, 77–69, with 19 Republicans voting no. Once again Craddick did the unthinkable. He left the House standing at ease, officially in session, while the Republican caucus went off to a closed meeting. When the Republicans returned, more than an hour later, Craddick had turned barely enough votes to pass the bill, 73–70, and send it to the Senate, where, at this writing, it is expected to expire. Please, no flowers. No one is mourning.
THAT’S WHERE WE ARE NOW, a week later, except that the House voted the next day to kill a constitutional amendment authorizing a state property tax and legalizing slot machines. Only, 26 of the 150 members voted for the resolution, 74 short of the number needed for passage. Meanwhile, Dewhurst had six days left to win support for his plan: a business tax to fund education, other taxes for property tax relief. Unlike the original Perry and Craddick plans, it will have the support of education advocates—but will it have the support of a taxaphobic Legislature?
In taking stock of what round one of the school finance fight has taught us (and there will surely be a round two), the place to start is with Rick Perry. If his first priority was to get rid of Robin Hood so that he would be insulated from attack on the issue by a 2006 opponent, the House bill was a bigger fix than his own plan. He didn’t have to torpedo it. But he did. The reason he gave, that the tax could cost Texas jobs, is exactly the argument against his own proposal of taxing business property separately from residences.
Let’s follow this trail. Perhaps the reason to kill the payroll tax is that it represented the big fix. It looked like a tax increase, even though the revenue it would have raised went to property tax relief. Perry doesn’t want to be identified with any kind of tax increase. Why not? Remember that one of the participants on Perry’s midwinter trip to the Bahamas to discuss school finance (and scuba dive), paid for with campaign funds, was Grover Norquist, the Republican anti-tax activist. Perry’s plan was chock-full of anti-tax provisions and anti-spending provisions. It imposed ceilings on increases in property values and on increases in the tax rates of cities, counties, school boards, and any other governmental entity that levies property taxes. It set aside one third of future state surpluses to be used for property tax reductions. Entreaties that Texas was following the course of California, whose infamous Proposition 13 is said to have hamstrung local governments, fell on deaf ears in the governor’s office. Is it possible that Perry has set his sights beyond Texas, that he is positioning himself to be championed by Norquist as the man who slew the government beast by putting it out of the taxing business, with an eye on the national GOP ticket in 2008 or 2012?
The other person in the spotlight is the Speaker. Craddick’s autocratic style of running the House—deciding on the policy he wants and expecting his Republican members to ratify it, with wiggle room if he senses he has pushed too hard—didn’t work this time. He had to back off expanding the sales tax and legalizing slot machines. He was barely able to reverse the initial vote against the House bill. Is it possible that GOP members are growing some backbone? Don’t bet on it. You’ll seldom go wrong by banking on the spinelessness of the average House member. Still, it would be nice if Craddick actually tried to build a real bipartisan consensus on school finance. But it’s hard to build a consensus when you don’t believe in compromise.
And what of the Democrats? Thus far I have addressed only the actions of Republicans, because they are in charge. Irrelevant in statewide elections, reduced to ineffective minority status in the House, clinging to influence in the Senate only because of that body’s tradition of requiring a two-thirds majority to pass legislation, the D’s have been relegated to the role of critic in the school finance debate. Yet they do have some leverage. Both Perry and Craddick propose a statewide property tax, something that is prohibited in the state constitution. So are slot machines. Republicans are short in both houses of the two-thirds majority needed for a constitutional amendment. It is not hard to envision a scenario in which Democrats provide their votes in return for more money in education. But the nature of minority factions is to retreat into ideology, to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Here’s an example: If Republicans were to offer to put more money into education but to do so through sales taxes, Democrats would likely object that sales taxes are regressive and kill the deal, instead of taking the view that how the money is spent is far more important than how it is raised. So great is the antipathy toward Craddick among House Democrats that they would rather see the Republicans fail than the schools succeed.
A governor who hates government. A Speaker who hates compromise. A minority party that hates the opposition. An education committee chairman who hates education advocates. Can this get any more entertaining? Unfortunately, it can.
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