The Idiot’s Guide to the Speaker’s Race 
1. Tom Craddick
How did Tom Craddick become the most powerful Speaker ever— and the most powerful Texan today? Let us count the ways.
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He also won that vote for a less apparent reason: House members were more afraid of Craddick’s wrath than the wrath of the voters back home. Not only does he determine whether lawmakers get the committee assignments and leadership posts they crave, thereby giving him veto power over their ambitions, but—and here is where he surpasses the power of other Speakers—he also, as the result of many years of work to build a Republican majority in the House, has close ties with GOP donors statewide, giving him de facto control over how most of the big Republican money is spent at election time. This latter threat doesn’t have to be explicit; a Republican who considers bucking Craddick over anything the Speaker deeply cares about knows that he may find himself with a well-funded primary opponent, especially since, in this case, two of the party’s biggest givers, University of Texas backers Peter O’Donnell and Louis Beecherl, are Craddick allies who strongly support tuition deregulation.
But Craddick still had to persuade the Senate. Actually, it was more like beating the Senate into submission. This he did by using what already had become his personal trademark: hard-nosed, uncompromising insistence on getting his way. In the larger budget bill, the Senate wanted an extra $500 million for state universities and a more liberal qualifying standard for Medicaid and children’s health insurance. It emphatically did not want tuition deregulation. Craddick simply refused to negotiate with Dewhurst, who presided over the Senate: Either the Senate accepted tuition dereg or he would throw the entire budget into a special session, which nobody wanted. Craddick got what he insisted upon, and the Senate got to keep the $500 million for higher education.
“The Senate was against it,” said Craddick, who is convinced that what he did was not just right but morally right. “I was really passionate. A lot of people were unhappy about it.” Republican senator Steve Ogden, of Bryan, a friend of Craddick’s who was on the committee that agreed to the final budget, said that he did not want to do it. “A lot of us ended up casting a vote we did not like casting,” he told the Houston Chronicle in 2003, adding that Craddick was “the toughest, hardest trader I have ever met.”
The Immovable Object
GREAT POWER TENDS to sow the seeds of its own destruction. As Craddick begins his second term as Speaker, he faces opposition on all fronts. For all of his successes, the stark fact is that he presided over, and was partially responsible for, one of the most acrimonious legislative sessions in Texas history, both within the House and between the House and the Senate. As far as anyone can tell, the 2005 session is starting with all of the anger from 2004 intact, which is noteworthy, since the main item on the agenda is the issue that caused the biggest trouble between the House and the Senate last time: school finance. At the end of the spring 2004 special session on school finance, Craddick had a partisan revolt on his hands, having convinced many Democrats that he was deliberately cutting them out of the lawmaking process. He had excluded their leading expert on school finance, Scott Hochberg, of Houston, from a large committee he had appointed to deal with the subject, and he had shut off floor debate rather than let them offer their amendments. His situation was no better on the other side of the Capitol. To get any of his agenda through, Craddick will have to contend with the Senate and the lieutenant governor, who, having been bested by him several times in the last session, are now both alert to his modus operandi and determined to force him to make hard trades for everything he gets.
At least Craddick has considerable control over what happens inside the Capitol. He has none over an even greater threat to his political career outside the Capitol: the investigation by Travis County district attorney Ronnie Earle into the use of illegal corporate money to help Republican House candidates in the 2002 elections, which is now in its second year. Last September Earle brought 32 indictments against three individuals and eight corporations, all related to a Republican fund-raising entity called Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee, or TRMPAC. Though Craddick has not been singled out as a target of the investigation and was not an officer of TRMPAC, he was closely involved with it. He helped it raise money and personally accepted a $100,000 check on its behalf, and his office distributed $152,000 in TRMPAC funds to Republican candidates. (Craddick says he was out of the state at the time.) None of that is illegal on its face, but Craddick’s TRMPAC activity has produced a steady stream of stories in the press linking Craddick and the PAC. He could be indicted if Earle can show that either 1) Craddick knew he was raising illegal corporate money or 2) he arranged to give campaign funds to candidates in exchange for their voting for him for Speaker. Unless somebody is in a position to know that something illegal occurred and is willing to talk about it, Earle will have a hard time making a case, but until the investigation is over, it will continue to cast a shadow over the session and Craddick’s future.
Craddick told me, as he has said all along, that he did nothing wrong and that he consulted an ethics attorney every step of the way to make sure that what he was doing was legal and ethical. “I was very careful,” he said, his voice rising for the first and only time in many hours of interviews. “I did not chair the PAC because I didn’t want to be involved. I thought I did everything exactly to the letter of the law. I know nothing about their administrative structure, where they spent their money, or what they spent it for.” For now, the investigation seems merely to have dented him: Democrats gained only one seat in the 2004 elections, and that victory is being challenged in the House by the losing candidate. If the Republican majority overturns the outcome, that will only infuriate Democrats more.
Given the circumstances, there is considerable speculation in the Capitol about whether Craddick might be more conciliatory this session. When he changed press secretaries just before the start of the session, the talk was that he might want to remake his image. But it has never been his nature to spend time healing wounds or reaching out to aggrieved parties. His great advantage is that other politicians aren’t used to someone who doesn’t compromise. They’ll give in a little, expecting Craddick to do the same, but his track record suggests that he won’t. He never does. He never backs down, never gives in. He is proud of his stubbornness, his willingness to take a hard position and stand by it, whatever the consequences. It would not have encouraged those who are optimistic about a kinder, gentler Craddick to have heard a story he related during one of our meetings in Midland, about a recent deal he’d made with a major oil company. He and the negotiators for the company had come to an agreement. But as they were preparing to sign on the dotted line, one of the negotiators tried to change it. “I’m not gonna do it,” Craddick said, and, as he tells the story, the other man’s jaw almost fell to the floor. The man made another proposal. Again Craddick said no. He got his way. Nadine, listening to the story, had the last word: “Tom is very persistent and very tenacious.”
Legislators, too, have learned that playing a game of chicken with Craddick doesn’t work. Take the case of a group of Democrats, so-called WD40’s (white Democrats of middle age), who tried to back Craddick down at the eleventh hour on the tort reform bill, which severely limited the damages plaintiffs could win in medical malpractice lawsuits. It was something that Republicans, particularly Craddick, wanted very badly. But because the issue involved a constitutional amendment, Craddick needed 100 (of 150) votes, instead of a simple majority. Since only 88 members were Republicans, he had to have at least 12 Democrats.
All of which gave the WD40’s bargaining power, or so they believed. At three-thirty in the morning on the night before the vote, a group of them walked up to the Speaker’s apartment and woke Craddick up. They had two demands, they said: one to change the date on which the public would vote to approve the amendment, the other to change the size of the majority needed in the future to modify the law on damages. They knew, and he knew, that the Speaker had to have their votes. Craddick told me about what happened next: “They said, ‘We want these changes or we are not going to vote for it,’ even though they had committed. I said, ‘I am not gonna do it. Y’all need to get out.’ And then, at six in the morning, I called them all and visited with them one on one, and they all voted for it except one who had never committed. If you give under pressure, it really weakens your ability to deal with people. We made an agreement. If I give in that early in the session, my term is over.”
Another well-known game of chicken occurred during the climax of the prolonged process of redrawing the boundaries of the state’s congressional districts. For more than a week, Craddick and Republicans in the Senate were deadlocked on how to draw the legislative map of West Texas. Craddick insisted that his hometown of Midland get its own congressman, at the expense of Abilene and Lubbock. Lubbock’s senator, Robert Duncan, objected. Dewhurst accused Craddick of “playing the Iranian cabdriver negotiations, where you get what you want and then you start adding two or three other requests.” Even DeLay could not get Craddick to budge; either Midland got its own congressman or the bill would die. The Senate blinked. Craddick won again. An influential lobbyist told me, “I was floored when Tom Craddick and Robert Duncan were willing to sink the entire redistricting bill for one little section. There will be hurt feelings forever on that one.”
For all the controversy that swirls around him—the DA looking over his shoulder, the Senate gunning for him, the House Democrats hoping for a chance to get even—Craddick’s power is undiminished. Like him or not, it is impossible to imagine anyone but Craddick running the House for the foreseeable future. In the two years that he has been Speaker, Texas politics has changed, and the Legislature has changed, but Tom Craddick remains the same.
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