The Elephants in the Room
With solid majorities in both houses of the Legislature and control of every statewide office, Republicans are girding for the ultimate battle with the real enemy in the 2006 elections: other Republicans.
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Nearly a century ago, a sharp-penned journalist named Ambrose Bierce defined a “conservative” as “a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.” Bierce disappeared into revolutionary Mexico in 1913, never to be heard from again, but his observation about the role of ideology in politics retains its force. The search for the perfect doctrine, and the insistence that it be adhered to, is an exercise in futility. Ideological consistency is all but impossible in a system in which people who put politicians in office want them to address problems. Before Hurricane Katrina, no one wanted to federalize disaster relief at a cost running into the hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s amazing how the sight of bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans will change your perspective.
Still, nothing will dissuade the purists from demanding ideological consistency. The most heated battle in Texas politics—far more intense than the gubernatorial smackdown between Perry and Strayhorn or the endless sniping of Dewhurst and Craddick—is the debate over whether the party’s elected representatives have betrayed its principles and what the consequences for the heretics should be.
WHAT’S HAPPENING INSIDE the Republican party today is an inevitable consequence of political success. To win elections, a party must become a big-tent organization. But each time a new person is brought inside the tent—or shoves his way in—the likelihood of harmony diminishes. Today’s GOP consists of social conservatives with ties to evangelical Christianity, fiscal conservatives who reiterate anti-tax activist Grover Norquist’s injunction to “starve the beast” of government, business conservatives who want goodies from government but not regulation (unless it would work to their benefit), libertarians, and mainstream conservatives who are neither political activists nor ideologues but are attracted to what the party stands for—supposedly.
The conflicts are self-evident and unavoidable: between social conservatives, who want to impose their ideas of morality on everything from cheerleading to marriage, and libertarians, who want government out of just about everything; between fiscal conservatives, who want to cut taxes and rein in spending on government services, and business conservatives, who want increased spending for some services, such as transportation and education, at all levels for their future workforce. Meanwhile, the mainstream conservatives are left to wonder what became of the party they once knew. I am reminded of what Karen Hughes, then the communications director for Governor George W. Bush, told me in 1996 when evangelical conservatives took control and refused to respect the unwritten rule that the governor gets to chair the state’s delegation to the national convention: “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.”
The recent legislative marathon, consisting of the regular session and two desultory special sessions on school finance, was suffused with doctrinal conflict. The issue that best exposed the fault lines between “starve the beast” ideologues and mainstream Republicans involved two Perry-backed proposals to choke off local governments’ access to money. One measure was aimed at limiting “appraisal creep”—annual increases in the value of real estate, as calculated by local officials for property tax purposes—to 5 percent. (The current cap is 10 percent.) Appraisal creep enables cities, counties, school districts, and other taxing authorities to take in more money each year, so long as property values increase, without raising their tax rates. Another bill sought to achieve the same end by limiting the revenue available to local governments to the previous year’s budget plus 3 percent. If a city or county wanted to exceed that limit, it would have to do so by raising the tax rate—but only with the approval of voters (the assumption being, of course, that the voters would never approve).
Appraisal creep is a legitimate concern; repeated property tax increases can become such a burden on homeowners that they may be forced to sell their homes. But the proponents of appraisal and revenue caps ran up against another principle straight out of traditional conservatism: local control, the idea that the government that governs best is the one that’s closest to the people. When Republicans were out of power in Texas, they assailed Democrats for imposing mandate after mandate—often unfunded—on local government. Echoing Barry Goldwater, the godfather of modern conservatism (“I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow”), they rejected the idea that all wisdom flowed from Austin. If local control was a tried-and-true idea in Democratic Texas, then it ought to make even more sense in Republican Texas, where most GOP legislators represent cities, counties, and school districts whose elected officials are overwhelmingly Republican (although city and school elections are officially nonpartisan). Yet the caps were the ultimate mandate. Fred Hill, a longtime conservative stalwart from Richardson and a strong proponent of local control, led the fight against the caps and likened them to Proposition 13 in California, which devastated the ability of local governments to perform basic services. Of the 86 Republicans in the House, 35 voted for a Democratic amendment that killed appraisal caps. Only a Democratic blunder allowed revenue caps to pass the House; later, the proposal died in the Senate.
Another high-visibility issue that gave Republicans “heartburn”—the euphemism du jour for being scared to death of getting a primary opponent—was the increased level of state spending. The Republican leadership reached a rare (if unspoken) consensus that the Legislature should restore state services reduced or eliminated in 2003, when lawmakers faced a $10 billion revenue shortfall. Outside the Legislature, however, no such consensus existed. The Texas Public Policy Foundation was particularly unhappy; as budget writers were putting the finishing touches on the new spending bill last May, the TPPF’s vice president, Michael Quinn Sullivan, warned in a press release that spending might increase as much as 15 percent (which turned out to be an underestimation) and urged lawmakers to exercise fiscal restraint. After lauding the Legislature for cutting spending in the face of the 2003 budget crisis, Sullivan lamented, “By all accounts that same discipline does not seem to be in place today.” His concerns fell on deaf ears: Not one Republican senator voted against the budget, and only 11 House Republicans did so (along with 29 Democrats). Those on the inside understand that voting for the budget is part of the responsibility of being in power. But will Republican primary voters care about such nuances when a challenger accuses an incumbent of voting to increase spending by 20 percent? Jim Pitts, of Waxahachie, the much-admired chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, is about to find out: He has an announced primary opponent.
“They’re clueless,” says Senator Steve Ogden, of Bryan, the Senate’s chief budget writer, of the critics of the new spending bill. “Go back to May of ’03,” he says. “We passed a bill that spent $118 billion. That’s what the critics are comparing to $140 billion to justify saying that we increased spending twenty percent. But total state spending for the biennium, when you count the emergency appropriations bill we pass every session, was $127 billion. Then $140 billion really represents a ten percent increase, not twenty percent.” Ogden is one of many lawmakers whose conservative credentials have previously been regarded as impeccable, only to have them challenged in the GOP’s eat-your-young frenzy. This session, he stood up for budget savings against entrenched opposition, insisting on a plan, opposed by doctors, that is estimated to result in savings of $109 million per biennium for the costly Medicaid program and scotching a pork barrel program for a good cause (state universities), known as tuition revenue bonds, because it violated the state’s pay-as-you-go rule. “It’s a fiction,” he told me, “just a way to issue general-obligation bonds without asking the people to vote on them.”
Ogden owns up to following the course set by previous legislatures of resorting to budgetary legerdemain to make ends meet. But, he insists, “This is a fiscally responsible budget. It’s a ten percent increase over a two-year period, corresponding roughly to the growth of the economy and still leaving enough unspent to have a $3 billion surplus. Grover Norquist, you’re full of bull.”
THE CENTRAL FIGURE in the Republican drama is Speaker Craddick. So far there have been no casualties in the War Between Republicans, but he has suffered the most wounds. Craddick came to the Legislature in 1969, when there were only eight Republicans, and he has seen scores, maybe hundreds, of GOP colleagues come and go. He has close ties to only a few House members; his real loyalties lie with people outside the Capitol—Republican power brokers like Leininger, Louis Beecherl, of Dallas, and tort reformer Dick Weekley and lobbyists Bill Messer and Bill Miller. Hard to pin down ideologically, he is more of a traditional business and economic conservative—particularly if the business happens to be oil and gas or real estate, professions in which he has amassed a sizable fortune and which drive the economy of his hometown of Midland—than a social conservative. Nevertheless, he identifies with his party far more than any Democratic Speaker of memory ever did, and he regards it as his duty to push its agenda.
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