Phil King
R Weatherford
EVEN NOW, IT’S HARD to believe how badly he bungled it. A trusted Craddick lieutenant who was no stranger to major legislation, his assignment was to pass a telecommunications package that would determine how Texas would get wired for the twenty-first century. Most legislators were with him, as were the governor, the lieutenant governor, and, of course, the Speaker. What could possibly go wrong? The answer, unfortunately for Phil King, was Phil King.
His goal was to free telephone companies, like SBC, from state regulations. He also wanted to allow them to provide video over phone lines and compete with cable operators. But King fretted that Troy Fraser, his Senate counterpart in crafting telecom policy, would kill his bills, so he decided that Machiavellian tactics were called for. Instead of passing his bills through the House, he decided to tack them onto other legislation, like a squirrel hiding nuts for the winter in hopes that the chipmunks won’t find them. One thing the Capitol is full of is chipmunks, and the bills that were vehicles for King’s approach died, fatally infected by the parasitic legislation they were carrying.
The last chance was for King to do what he should have been doing all along, which was negotiate with Fraser, no easy task in the best of circumstances. Unfortunately, negotiation is not among King’s strong points. He is a zealot, a true believer in his own rightness; he championed, unsuccessfully, bills restricting stem cell research and making public how many judges (and sometimes which ones) had authorized abortions for young girls—and when the call went out for a compromise, there was nobody home.
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