The Best and Worst Legislators 2009

by Paul Burka and Patricia Kilday Hart

(Page 2 of 5)

Best Legislators

Senator John Carona
53, Republican, Dallas

Senator Robert Duncan
55, Republican, Lubbock

Craig Eiland
47, Democrat, Galveston

Rob Eissler
58, Republican, The Woodlands

Brian McCall
50, Republican, Plano

John Otto
60, Republican, Dayton

Jim Pitts
62, Republican, Waxahachie

Senfronia Thompson
70, Democrat, Houston

Senator Kirk Watson
51, Democrat, Austin

John Zerwas
54, Republican, Richmond

Senator John Carona

Say “Carona” around the state capitol and people immediately think of Mexican beer, but not the brand you’d assume. This session, Carona was the Most Interesting Man in the World, just like the debonair star of the Dos Equis commercials.

Cue the sexy guitar solo:

His reputation is expanding faster than the universe . . .

When his fellow Republicans advocated changing Senate rules to permit passage of the voter ID bill with a simple majority rather than the two thirds required of every other bill, Carona foresaw partisan furor. He voted no, even though he supported voter ID. Changing the rules to win? Not his style.

He once had an awkward moment, just to see how it feels . . .

Despite vociferous opposition from antitax ideologues, Carona sponsored a bill giving local governments authority to raise taxes for transportation projects. When Perry and Dewhurst threatened to kill it, Carona marched the lieutenant governor to the governor’s office for a confrontation. He prevailed in the Senate but ultimately lost in a last-minute power play. In defeat, he was both defiant and resolute, chastising both the governor and lieutenant governor for failing to address transportation funding needs.

He lives vicariously, through himself . . .

At one point, the Senate appeared poised to reject an amendment for more funding for supervision of foster children until Carona pronounced it a good idea. On went the amendment. As chairman of the Transportation Committee, Carona was collaborative but brooked no nonsense. When an irate witness threatened committee members, he promptly had him removed.

After his local tax option failed, Carona vowed to return next session “tougher and smarter.” To which we say, “Salud.”

Senator Robert Duncan

He’s a walking, breathing argument against term limits. A member of the Legislature since 1996, Duncan brings his accumulated knowledge and wisdom to bear on a colossal agenda of real consequence. This session, there was hardly an issue—the budget, eminent domain, health care reform, college tuition—that wasn’t improved by his intellectual rigor and deft touch as a mediator.

Some lawmakers become hardened after too many years in office; Duncan has become more independent. He broke rank with advocates of tort reform, his old allies, because he believed recent court decisions misinterpreted laws involving the injured and the ill. And he should know: He wrote them. Drawing from a deep well of respect, he persuaded his Senate colleagues to make concessions for workers afflicted with mesothelioma, an asbestos-related illness. The normally invincible tort reform lobby beat a hasty retreat to the House to kill the bill there.

A perennial lament in the Legislature is the dearth of nationally recognized research universities in Texas. Duncan crafted an ingenious road map for emerging schools to win additional funding by meeting elevated scholarly criteria. While critics griped that the criteria were skewed in favor of his alma mater and hometown university, Texas Tech, he firmly opposed efforts to water down the bill.

Duncan’s low boiling point served him—and the Senate—well when he presided over the contentious hearing on the voter ID bill, gently admonishing lawmakers when they began speaking past one another. Having spent so many years in the Senate, he has a stake in preserving the dignity of the institution.

Craig Eiland

In a normal session, he would have had a wide-ranging legislative program involving insurance reforms and other consumer issues, but this was not a normal year for him or his storm-ravaged hometown. Not surprisingly, most of the bills he passed dealt with hurricane recovery efforts, such as waiving a deadline for paying ad valorem taxes in the event of a disaster.

All members try to direct state money to their districts, but for Eiland and Galveston, doing so was literally a matter of survival. Notwithstanding the economic crisis and the reluctance of conservative lawmakers to tap the Rainy Day Fund, he was able to get more than $400 million to help rebuild the coast. Amid the chaos of the last weekend of the session, a colleague allowed Eiland to attach an authorization for $150 million in construction bonds for the University of Texas Medical Branch to a related bill, and his work seemed to be done. No, it wasn’t. Off he went to negotiate a crucial bill to reestablish the state windstorm insurance fund so that money would be available to pay future claims.

Now Eiland could turn his attention to presiding over the House as speaker pro tem. This job, largely honorific, turned serious when the House became locked in a bitter partisan struggle over which bills should be debated in the closing days and in what order. Day after day, he made difficult parliamentary rulings in a soothing voice that managed to take the edge off the partisan enmity. Then a Republican freshman went to the microphone in a way that suggested he wanted to confront Eiland. “Is the chair aware,” he demanded to know, as the House held its breath, “that he is doing a great job?”

Rob Eissler

This was the best session for the public schools in years, and he was the main reason. Even though his modus operandi is “When in doubt, pun”—the nickname he coined for Representative Cook, whose first name is Byron, is “Get One Free”—don’t think he isn’t a serious legislator. The chair of the Public Education Committee shows a lot of class. He takes his critics to school. He’s been tested. And he sticks to his, er, principals.

The Legislature passes hundreds of bills every biennium, but those that actually make a difference are rare. Eissler’s reform of the state’s public school accountability system will have a significant impact on the lives of countless families. It lessens the consequences for third-graders who perform poorly on the high-stakes TAKS test. It allows all students to take career and technology courses, which Eissler hopes will reduce the dropout rate. And it loosens the course requirements so that students can choose electives tailored to their interests.

Underlying Eissler’s success is his close relationship with Scott Hochberg, of Houston, his Democratic vice chair. It was the model for the nonpartisan approach to lawmaking that characterized much of the session, and it allowed his committee members to produce a flurry of good legislation, including a $1.9 billion school finance bill—which passed without controversy, something that is almost unheard of—and the first steps toward a statewide prekindergarten program. If you were to ask Eissler about their joint efforts on education policy, he might respond with the groaner he offered to reporters before presenting a bill dealing with dyslexia: “[We] know it backward and forward.”

Brian McCall

He was an essential member of the insurgent Republican coalition—known as the ABCs, for “Anybody but Craddick”—that joined with the Democrats to unseat Speaker Tom Craddick. Until Craddick conceded defeat to Joe Straus, the ABCs’ choice to replace him, it appeared that McCall, a longtime Craddick critic who had twice sought the speakership himself, might never have the opportunity to put his manifold talents to use. For most of Craddick’s tempestuous six-year reign, McCall was relegated to legislative purgatory, so far from the center of the action that he had ample time to write a book about how recent Texas governors have exercised power. By the time he was finished, so was Craddick.

In the postrevolutionary House, McCall emerged as chairman of the Calendars Committee, the most important position after the speakership. Calendars is the gatekeeper committee, with life or death power over all bills; nothing can cause more resentment and turmoil than the perception that Calendars is treating members unfairly. When McCall got his assignment from Straus, the first thing he did was contact nearly every living former chairman of the committee to ask his advice. In a House with 76 Republicans and 74 Democrats, he made sure that he set equal numbers of Republican- and Democratic-sponsored bills for debate. Calendars generated less controversy than it had in years, restoring the expectation of fairness for all House members.

McCall and his fellow insurgents did not seek power for themselves; most are nearer the end of their legislative careers than the beginning. Rather, they sought to demolish the authoritarian, partisan model for the speakership that Craddick had created and replace it with one that was based on fairness rather than fear, on shifting power from the Speaker’s office back to the membership. A remarkable thing happened: It worked.

John Otto

Politicians love to hold forth about the big picture, but when state spending approaches $200 billion every two years, it is just as important to have lawmakers who worry about the little picture and keep an eye out for problems that others may have missed. Otto whacks away at Gordian knots like the state budget and the property appraisal system, which threaten to snarl everything. He’s the Legislature’s premier fiscal watchdog.

The burly accountant is anything but flashy—he has the stolid look of a subject of a Rembrandt portrait—and he frets about problems most of his colleagues don’t even know exist. You could go for years without hearing about the constitutional ceiling on debt—except that this obscure benchmark happens to be one of his foremost concerns. As the chief number cruncher on the House Appropriations Committee, he questioned the Legislature’s increasing reliance on issuing bonds ($9.25 billion in 2007) to pay for purposes ranging from cancer research to building highways. Otto warned that if revenue collections continued to fall short of expectations, the ceiling could be exceeded in 2011, and his fellow House budget writers responded by cutting their reliance on bonds to a level far below the Senate’s.

His biggest achievement of the session was property appraisal reform, a contentious issue that has confounded lawmakers—and the public—for thirty years. One of his proposals would prevent appraisal boards from raising the value of a residence based on nearby commercial development. The best measure of the respect Otto has earned is that his reform package passed the Senate on a calendar that is reserved for uncontested legislation.

Jim Pitts

His daunting task as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee: to write a state budget in the throes of an economic crisis that adequately meets the state’s needs and wins approval in a chamber almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. Oh, and one more thing: Don’t even think about dipping into the nearly $7 billion stashed away in the Rainy Day Fund, because, notwithstanding the forecast of imminent precipitation, conservatives will rebel.

One of the assets Pitts brings to the job is a personality that leads his colleagues to want him to succeed. He is dignified but not aloof, and it’s a rare moment when he is not wearing a smile. Beware of such moments, as representatives of the governor’s office learned when Pitts questioned them about a $50 million grant to Texas A&M that, in his view, had not followed prescribed procedures. Nor did he find anything to smile about in a Senate rider banning embryonic stem cell research.

Shortly before the budget debate, Pitts asked to speak to the Texas Conservative Coalition. He emphasized that the House was proposing to spend $4 billion less than the Senate and would leave the Rainy Day Fund untouched. When the budget bill reached the floor, Pitts told the House, “This is a conservative bill that reduces general revenue spending, but not at the cost of essential programs and services. . . . It is not full of special items, earmarks for specific members.” After eighteen hours, the time came to vote. Astonishingly, every light on the scoreboards at the front of the chamber flashed green—an unprecedented vote of confidence in the chairman.

Senfronia Thompson

In a lackluster session that produced few worthy achievements, it is fitting to honor as a Best legislator a member who is universally loved and respected, not just for what she does but also for who she is. For nineteen sessions, Mrs. T, as she is known to all, has stood near the dais at the front of the House chamber during debate, acting as a guardian angel of the process, checking amendments as they are proposed to make sure that nobody tries to pull a fast one. The words no member wants to hear are Mrs. T’s disapproving “Now, looky here . . .”

Do not interpret Thompson’s appearance on the Best list as akin to an honorary Oscar awarded to a director who is too old to make films anymore. She was at the top of her game as chair of the committee that schedules uncontested bills for debate. This is a position that is rife with the potential for abuse. Previous chairmen have come to grief over charges of punishing one’s enemies, rewarding one’s friends, and using the position as leverage to win support for one’s own bills. Indeed, a row over just such shenanigans landed Thompson’s predecessor on the Worst list. This session, there wasn’t a peep of protest.

But then, there wouldn’t be. Nobody crosses Mrs. T. One senator, explaining why he had done her bidding, said, “She called me and said, ‘Baby, I need your help,’ and so Baby helped.” Machiavelli said that it is better for a prince to be feared than loved, but he never reckoned that a politician could be both.

Senator Kirk Watson

He’s the Galápagos penguin of the Texas Legislature. That rarest of birds—an effective liberal—Watson has adapted, Darwin-style, to the inhospitable habitat of the Republican-dominated Senate. This session he emerged as the thoughtful leader of the loyal opposition, armed mostly with a pragmatic survival instinct.

In the battle over reforming the state’s insurance regulatory agency, Watson used the Democrats’ ability to block debate long enough to win crucial consumer-oriented concessions. Stealth attacks by Senate leadership against his solar energy legislation proved no match for his vigilance.

A former state Air Control Board commissioner and former Austin mayor, he has the self-assurance to act independently. When Perry appointed Republican political operative Deirdre Delisi to the Transportation Commission, Watson chose not a knee-jerk option (using senatorial privilege to block her confirmation) but a counterintuitive one: He met with Delisi and found common ground on how to improve the controversial agency. When the chair of the Finance Committee, Republican Steve Ogden, of Bryan, launched an effort to ban state-funded embryonic stem cell research, Watson joined his effort to create a state database on the endeavor. The more information, he reasoned, the better.

Occasionally, Watson fails to keep his political ambitions in check, giving long-winded speeches more appropriate to the campaign circuit than the Senate floor. Still, his work ethic, intellect, and negotiating skills ensure his continued success.

John Zerwas

At the meeting in which Zerwas learned he was going to chair the Appropriations subcommittee on health and human services issues—the most contentious part of the budget—Speaker Straus told him, “You’ve got your work cut out for you.” Translation: Your five-member panel has a Democratic majority. What others saw as an obstacle, though, Zerwas saw as an asset: “If there is any place that you need diversity,” he says, “it’s in dealing with health and human services.”

As a practicing anesthesiologist and former chief medical officer of the Memorial Hermann Hospital System, Zerwas approached health care issues pragmatically. He understood the problems of the uninsured, so he backed a controversial expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program to include families whose income is up to 300 percent of poverty level. The biggest battle he fought was over a Senate rider to prohibit embryonic stem cell research. Although Zerwas personally believes that embryos are living tissue that need a body of laws giving parents authority over their use, he urged removing the rider because, he said, “I don’t think the appropriations act is the place to be debating something as serious as embryonic stem cell research.” He prevailed.

This résumé would have been more than enough to earn Zerwas a place on the Best list, but in fact his greatest challenge would lie ahead. In mid-May, a colleague, Edmund Kuempel, suffered a massive heart attack in a Capitol elevator. Zerwas rushed to the scene. Published reports said that Kuempel was unresponsive, not breathing, and without a pulse. Zerwas performed CPR until EMS arrived, and a defibrillator was used to shock Kuempel eight times. Kuempel is recovering. Said House Administration chair Charlie Geren, “John Zerwas was the hand of God.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5   next>>