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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This is the source of his problems. As members have always seen it, part of the role of the Speaker is to protect them from no-win situations in which they make enemies regardless of how they vote. Appraisal caps and revenue caps were two such situations. Vote against them and you anger the ideologues (including Perry, who was pushing for the caps). Vote for them and you anger your local officials who are fellow Republicans and see your constituents every day while you are off in Austin. Neither proposal had the votes to pass without Craddick’s twisting arms to get them. So he twisted arms, particularly on revenue caps. Every member understood what had happened: Their Speaker had cast his lot with the outside-the-Capitol crowd.
The same thing happened in the school finance battle. Grusendorf’s bill was anathema to the education community, though it had support from fiscal conservatives and some educational reformers. Rather than try to find a middle ground, Craddick resorted to arm-twisting, once again putting his members in the position of going against superintendents and school board members back in their districts. In fairness to Craddick, he had to pass a school finance bill, but he didn’t have to pass one that many Republicans hated. He had to pass a tax bill too; it was necessary to replace the revenue that would have been lost due to proposed property tax reductions, had they passed. But his favored method of raising revenue—allowing businesses to choose between a payroll tax, which many Republicans saw as a roundabout tax on income, and a tax on business partnerships, which was a tax on income—was sure to be controversial. (It was not lost on Republican members that these taxes were good for the oil and gas industry, leading some critics to call it the “Fair to Midland” plan.)
Sometimes GOP legislators found themselves facing a dilemma to which there was no safe answer—for example, a motion to kill a proposed increase in the tax on beer and other alcoholic beverages. Voting against killing the increase would anger the fiscal conservatives who oppose anything that smacks of a new tax. Voting for killing the increase would anger social conservatives—in particular, the Texas Eagle Forum—who oppose all sin. Thirty-three Republicans decided that the safer haven was to oppose sin. Sure enough, the vote was one of 25 chosen by the Eagle Forum (“Progress Through Preservation of Traditional Values”) for its postsession conservative rating of all House members. Forum president Cathie Adams, while praising one of the most staunchly conservative members, provided this sorrowful jeremiad: “Of the 181 elected Texas legislators serving during the [Seventy-ninth] Legislative Session and special called sessions in Austin, only 11 legislators were commended for their conservative voting record.”
Let’s not feel too sorry for lawmakers who have to cast dangerous votes; that’s part of the job. What particularly rankles members is that many of those votes were demanded of Republicans by their own leader. To make matters worse, Craddick had declared war on the education groups by blaming superintendents for the Legislature’s inability to pass a school finance bill. “They just want money, and they don’t want any changes in the system,” the Speaker was quoted as saying by the San Antonio Express-News three days before the second special session expired. One San Antonio—area superintendent returned fire: “Those people, and the Speaker especially, see public education as a liability, not as an asset.…They want to find anything else that’s cheaper.” Craddick is not alone in his assessment of educators, inside or outside the Capitol, but many of his Republican members—particularly those from rural areas and newer suburbs—come from districts where the schools are well regarded and are the center of their communities. Yet they were pressured to vote against proposals that would have given their school districts more money.
And that’s not the worst of it. Many suburban members also cast a series of votes undercutting the programs and values that are most important to their schools. One amendment proposed to protect funding for the master science and math teachers program. It was killed in a virtually straight party-line vote. Another proposal ensured that funding for advanced placement programs would not be cut. AP classes are filled with the kids of Republican primary voters who are desperate to get their children into top colleges. It didn’t matter; Republicans voted no. How about allowing a child who is assaulted by another child to be kept away from him? Sorry, no. (A separate bill allowing the victim to transfer to another school was later passed.) This by no means exhausts the lists of such votes, but you get the idea. Why did Republicans cast such dangerous votes? Because Tom Craddick forced them to, even if it meant that Republican members had to vote against their districts’ interests. This has nothing to do with good government or good leadership and everything to do with Craddick’s intense dislike of losing any vote for any reason, especially when Democrats are on the other side.
Nor are his members supposed to stand up for the public schools. When he became Speaker, Craddick did not reappoint Todd Smith, a longtime advocate for schools, to the Public Education Committee. Bob Griggs, of North Richland Hills, a retired superintendent who last session was appointed by Craddick to the education committee, voted against school vouchers and met the same fate this session. Griggs endured his banishment in silence, which he broke only to make a memorable speech against Grusendorf’s education bill and the leadership’s malevolence toward superintendents, and, to no one’s surprise, announced his intention to retire after just two terms. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Griggs struck back from his political grave, issuing a statement that was a call to arms for educators (including school board members) to run for the Legislature: “I…have witnessed and battled a misguided and widely held belief in the Legislature that established educators are the problem with education and that the system cannot be fixed without wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch…There is more here than just one retired superintendent can handle without additional reinforcement. It is for this reason I am putting out this call to enlist more administrators, more educators, and more school board members to answer the call. Texas needs you to…come to Austin to fight for the needs of the schoolchildren of Texas, to challenge the false belief held by so many of my legislative colleagues.”
At least twenty education-community candidates have emerged to challenge House GOP incumbents, who will have to defend those votes against fully funding AP classes and similar issues in the GOP primary. (Senators, with huge districts and war chests to match, face no such threat.) The conventional wisdom is that the education challengers are underdogs because they won’t be able to raise money and may hold other views (such as being pro-choice) that will torpedo their candidacies. Maybe so. But school board members have previously run in their communities, just as legislators have, and their names are before the public too. And in rural and new suburban areas, the schools enjoy widespread support—except, in some instances, from their own legislators.
Meanwhile, what does Craddick do? He can no longer be sure of having a working majority in the House. He might try backing conservative challengers over GOP incumbents who have defied his wishes, but that is a dangerous game, and if he loses, he would turn someone who has supported him in the past into an implacable enemy. Craddick has told several of the members whose districts were polled by the state party that he will support all Republican incumbents. Of course, he can always sit back while others who have grievances against incumbents—perhaps Leininger or Perry—take the lead. In El Paso, for example, Perry’s biggest supporters are backing a challenger to veteran incumbent Pat Haggerty, a mainstream Republican. The more prudent way for Craddick to increase his majority is to go after Democratic incumbents, several of whom won by narrow margins in 2004, and no doubt Republicans will make an all-out effort to do so. They will surely pick up the seat held by the retiring former Speaker, Pete Laney. But Democrats think they have a good chance to wrest a few seats from Republicans too, and 2006 isn’t shaping up as a great GOP year.
It is too strong to say that Craddick’s position as Speaker is in danger. But it isn’t far away. As the result of his leadership—or the lack thereof—Craddick has alienated a number of GOP lawmakers who originally supported him for Speaker. Loose lips sink ships and political careers, so it is impossible to say how many malcontents there are. Some put the number as high as thirty, but already there has been attrition, with the retirement of Griggs and several other Craddick critics. And it is one thing to be disgruntled and quite another to attempt to overthrow a sitting Speaker. Still, the idea has taken hold among his strongest GOP critics in the House that he has seen so many members come and go that he is indifferent about who occupies a seat, so long as it is a Republican, and if a veteran mainstream lawmaker loses to an ideologue, so much the better for Craddick.
Craddick’s actions in the last session—demanding votes that expose members to defeat—have fed these suspicions. For all his institutional knowledge, resourcefulness, and connections to Republican power brokers, he has be come more of an obstacle to his party’s ability to govern than an asset. Dewhurst would turn cartwheels to see him go, and Perry has become disenchanted by his intransigence. This much is certain: With around fifty Democrats sworn to bring him down, and at least a dozen longtime enemies inside the Republican caucus looking for a chance to do the same, it will take a defection of only fifteen or so GOP lawmakers to reach the 76 votes necessary to unseat him. In a Robespierrean twist, the Speaker, once the hero of the revolution that brought the Republicans to power, is looking more and more like the villain.
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