The Best and Worst Legislators 2009

by Paul Burka and Patricia Kilday Hart

July 2009

(Page 3 of 5)

Worst Legislators

Wayne Christian
58, Republican, Center

Yvonne Davis
54, Democrat, Dallas

Jim Dunnam
45, Democrat, Waco

Allen Fletcher
54, Republican, Tomball

Kino Flores
50, Democrat, Palmview

Senator Troy Fraser
59, Republican, Horseshoe Bay

Senator Mario Gallegos Jr.
58, Democrat, Houston

Richard Peña Raymond
48, Democrat, Laredo

Debbie Riddle
59, Republican, Tomball

Senator Tommy Williams
52, Republican, The Woodlands

Wayne Christian

Once upon a time the Texas Republican party produced conservatives who came to the Capitol to govern: Ed Emmett, Lee Jackson, Kenny Marchant, David Sibley, Bill Ratliff, Teel Bivins. That was before social conservatives like Christian took over. The president of the Texas Conservative Coalition, he is emblematic of the problems that have enveloped the party nationwide and have it teetering on the edge of irrelevance.

Christian’s legislative program could serve as the social conservatives’ playbook. No scholarships for illegal aliens. Drug testing for everyone who receives financial assistance from the state, such as Medicaid, with draconian penalties for those who test positive. Abolition of all property taxes. Restrictions on the teaching of evolution. None of these proposals stood a chance of becoming law, and so Christian’s defenders could say “no harm, no foul.” But there is harm: These litmus-test issues stir up ideological constituencies and fracture the GOP.

The strangest aspect of Christian’s program was his hostility to ethics reform. He unsuccessfully tried to cut all funding for the prosecutorial unit that oversees state ethics laws and shift the responsibility to the attorney general. Later, when a fellow Republican proposed to close a loophole that allows a shady campaign practice known as sham electioneering, Christian objected. “Have you seen the tea parties?” he asked his colleagues. “Have you seen the people rising up across the state saying they’re tired of doing things like Washington has been doing things and they want to do it like Texans do it?” Alas, we have.

Yvonne Davis

Her nickname around the Capitol—“Why, Vonne?”—says it all. Why, when she was one of only sixteen Democrats to be named a committee chair, did she fly into a rage and threaten to reject the offer before relenting? Why did she treat her vice chairman like a leper by not allowing him to occupy the customary seat next to the chairman? Why did she persist in killing the local bills of colleagues she perceived had done her wrong?

The common theme of these and other Davis tantrums is an overweening sense of entitlement. She had sought the chairmanship of a powerful committee, but someone with her experience should have known she was aiming too high; in a Republican-majority House with a Republican Speaker, she wasn’t going to get either. She attempted to kill two local bills by Republican Lois Kolkhorst, of Brenham, the chair of the Public Health Committee, because she hadn’t gotten a hearing on a bill she wanted to pass—but Kolkhorst had given her hearings on three other bills. She hasn’t learned a fundamental lesson of politics, as expounded by the Rolling Stones: You can’t always get what you want.

Don’t mistake lack of restraint for lack of talent. When the co-authors of a major transportation bill lost control of the floor debate, it was Davis who stepped forward to blow the whistle. But her best moments are undone by her worst, leaving a familiar question hanging in the air: Why, Vonne?

Jim Dunnam

The Democratic leader was the dominant figure of the session from start to finish. Hard to admire but even harder to ignore, he is the rare member who can scale the heights one moment and crash to earth the next. There was never any question that he would make the list—but which one?

The case for Dunnam as a Best: He united the Democratic caucus in a way no one else could to provide the votes that ended Craddick’s speakership; he swallowed his disappointment when he and his party did not get the influential positions they hoped the new Speaker would deliver and turned his lemon of a consolation prize—the chairmanship of the temporary committee to oversee how federal stimulus funds might be used—into lemonade; and he forged a relationship with Republican caucus leader Larry Taylor, of Friendswood, that kept the House mostly free of partisan rancor.

But the case for him as a Worst is stronger. Years of fighting Craddick have taken their toll on Dunnam, and at times the old warrior seemed to be suffering from parliamentary post-traumatic stress disorder—never more so than when he killed a bill that was to be named in honor of an Austin policewoman who had died in the line of duty because the bill’s sponsor was holding up one of Dunnam’s bills. (And the slain officer’s family was in the gallery!) The main reason Dunnam is on the Worst list, though, is that he was the Democratic counterpart of Senator Tommy Williams: He destroyed the session over voter ID. Under his leadership, the Democrats adopted delaying tactics that killed hundreds of bills, wiping out the good work they had done all session and opening deep divisions in their caucus. It wasn’t worth it.

Allen Fletcher

Never let it be said that we are without compassion when it comes to choosing members for the Ten Worst list. We understand that the ways of the Legislature are mysterious and that freshmen should be judged differently from veterans. A freshman has to be awful, really awful, to be named a Worst. Fletcher cleared that high bar with room to spare.

There are two things that even the rawest rookie must not do. One is to bring shame upon the body. This Fletcher did when he and several business associates became ensnared in a stock-manipulation investigation initiated by the Harris County district attorney’s office, which later turned the probe over to the U.S. Department of Justice. A federal complaint alleged that press releases quoting Fletcher and touting his political prominence had helped inflate the value of the stocks that were involved. (No charges are pending in the case.)

The other no-no is neglecting your homework before you try to pass legislation. Fletcher, an ex-cop, offered a bill that he described as “trying to catch the bad guys for identity theft.” Good idea, but a keen-eyed member noticed that it had been drafted so that it actually deleted the laws, such as a prohibition against possessing or duplicating a phony driver’s license, that made identity theft a crime. By this time, the lamb was ready for the abattoir. The House sent Fletcher a message by killing his bill with the meanest parliamentary maneuver in the rule book, a motion to reconsider and table. In short: Go away.

Kino Flores

Interviewed for a TEXAS MONTHLY story about his 2008 race for reelection, he boasted, “There is no other rep like me.” Thank goodness; two would be unbearable. Flores represents the last vestiges of the patrón system, the kind of pol who would run an opponent against his own aunt if she stood between him and control of a school board. This is not a hypothetical example. She did. And he did.

No sitting member has brought more discredit upon the Legislature. He has been investigated for bribery and for accepting free travel on a private airplane in violation of state ethics rules. Clients of his consulting practice have received lucrative state contracts. (No charges have resulted from these investigations.) A Travis County grand jury probing his transactions was so frustrated by lax state ethics laws that the panel issued a report urging the Texas Ethics Commission to tighten its disclosure requirements.

Normally Flores operates below the radar, but this session he made repeated trips to the microphone to demand passage of his bill giving disabled veterans a homestead tax exemption. He interrupted a debate over cockfighting to make a parliamentary inquiry about whether cockfighting was more important than veterans and why trivial bills were being scheduled ahead of his bill, and he had an in-your-face confrontation with the chairman of the committee that schedules bills for debate—all this for a bill that had no opposition and was certain to pass. This was vintage Kino: ever the bully, ever acting as though the established rules and procedures didn’t apply to him. They never do.

Senator Troy Fraser

When assessing Fraser, it’s tempting to simply say: See TEXAS MONTHLY’s “Best and Worst Legislators,” July 2007. His performance this session has such a forehead-smacking déjà vu quality that we’re certain we’ve already written this story: worked brilliantly during the interim on the side of consumers, sabotaged by his own insatiable ego when the Legislature convened.

But we must give Fraser his due. This session, he plumbed new depths of self-absorption. Consider this exchange with Democratic freshman senator Wendy Davis, of Fort Worth, during the voter ID debate. Speak up, he exhorted her: “I have trouble hearing women’s voices.” Jaws were still agape when Democratic senator Royce West, of Dallas, who is African American, asked whether Fraser had discussed the bill’s impact with any minority voters. “I don’t want to get cute with you,” Fraser replied, “but you are an ethnic minority, and you and I have had a conversation about it.”

As chairman of the Business and Commerce Committee, Fraser insisted on authoring a critical windstorm insurance bill, but his solution was so extreme he couldn’t even get it to the floor of the Senate. As in previous sessions, the lieutenant governor had to wrest an issue away from him. Democratic senator Kirk Watson overcame Fraser’s opposition to liberate a solar energy bill from Business and Commerce, which then won easy passage on the Senate floor despite a Fraser counteroffensive. To prove he wasn’t a sore loser, Fraser congratulated Watson. And then, true to form, he reminded everyone that the bill’s core elements were originally his idea.

Senator Mario Gallegos Jr.

Last session, Gallegos was sidelined by a debilitating illness, narrowly averting death thanks to a liver transplant. Now he looks better than he has in years. In fact, you could say the old Mario is back.

We don’t mean this in a good way.

When Gallegos makes the trip to Austin every two years, he packs his bags with old scores to settle and tucks in a few schemes to help his friends. The Houston Rodeo books alternative Latin music, rather than the Tejano bands that Gallegos prefers? He’s got a bill for that: an outlandish requirement that the charitable organization follow state bidding laws. An old opponent runs for Houston City Council while serving on a community college board? A Gallegos proposal would have required her to resign her board position. Houston firefighters, on the other hand, have their own personal representative on the floor of the Texas Senate. Gallegos, formerly one of their ranks, filed a bill requiring sports authorities operated by the City of Houston and Harris County to hire only City of Houston firefighters—to the exclusion of county and suburban forces. Then there was the bill to ban large trucks from parking overnight in driveways of residential areas. You guessed it: He had a problem in his own neighborhood. Thanks to the vigilance of Gallegos’s colleagues, most of these bills were sent on permanent vacation. Considering his recent health ordeal—and his track record in Austin—we believe Gallegos deserves the same, and more: a long, happy retirement. Soon.

Richard peña Raymond

He has spent a career on the legislative docks, waiting for his ship to come in. Sure enough, there it was on the horizon, sails set to the wind, in the form of a plum appointment as vice chairman of the Appropriations Committee. Eagerly, he jumped on board, took the helm—and charted a course for Davey Jones’s locker.

The problem here is the gap between ambition and talent. One is present (he ran for land commissioner against Dewhurst in 1998), and the other isn’t. Raymond has never learned how to play with others on the playground. On the budget conference committee with the Senate, he kept creating problems that colleagues had to undo, as when he told the media that he intended to close two Texas Youth Commission facilities in other members’ districts. It didn’t stand. He insisted on establishing a $5.5 million regional emergency operation center in Laredo. That didn’t stand either. But he did get a $6.9 million Department of Public Safety crime lab that the agency didn’t ask for. He wanted to be the person other members came to with their requests but wouldn’t tell his fellow conferees what the supplicants wanted, presumably because he hoped to hog the credit. He complained that his fellow House negotiators didn’t respect him while never grasping that respect must be earned.

Raymond engaged in the controversial Democratic strategy of killing voter ID by “chubbing”—House parlance for dilatory debate—other bills. But he failed to realize that most Democrats had lost their appetite for the maneuver; instead, he went rogue and forged on, a shipwreck waiting to happen.

Debbie Riddle

“Lead, follow, or get out of the way” goes the adage. To these directives, Riddle adds a fourth: Provide comic relief. “Where did this idea come from?” she famously asked about public education in 2003. “It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.” Equally inscrutable was her assertion this session, in opposition to a shield law for the media, that the bill would give journalists more rights than the pope. This drew giggles, but nothing as rib-tickling as her “who’s on first” routine. While engaged in debate with Democrat Rafael Anchía, of Dallas, over literacy, she called him Mark Strama, the name of a Democratic member from Austin. After Anchía cracked that he was really Jose Menendez, a Democrat from San Antonio, she started calling him Menendez. As laughter rippled across the floor, a clueless Riddle rebuked her colleagues: “This is a serious bill and I have a serious question.”

If only she would restrict her activities to resolutions honoring constituents, she could bumble in obscurity. But she won’t accept her own limitations, so her incompetence ends up doing real harm. Through some inexplicable miscalculation, she was named chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Criminal Justice. The top priority of legislative budget writers has been to fund programs that allow nonviolent inmates to be released, thereby alleviating the need to build new prisons. But Riddle shifted money from these programs to items that weren’t requested, such as $20 million for new cars for the Department of Public Safety. Everything she did had to be undone by more-knowledgeable members. If she won’t get out of the way, she should at least get out.

Senator Tommy Williams

“Be gentle,” he said, as he sat in his Capitol office a few days before sine die, telegraphing his tacit understanding that he would be on the Worst list for his contribution to the deadly voter ID debacle.

It was Williams, after all, who unleashed the malicious partisan germ that went viral in the last weeks of the session. Had he not changed the Senate’s two-thirds rule to permit debate on the contentious issue, House Democrats would not have locked down the Legislature and killed essential legislation in the session’s waning days.

The Senate’s claim to thoughtful deliberation rests with its 21-vote rule, which requires lawmakers to convince colleagues representing other philosophical, political, and geographical interests that a particular bill should be debated on the floor. It weeds out bad bills and allows the entire body to determine which issues deserve priority. Williams argued that the 21-vote rule had been skirted before, but past departures either involved pressing state business or ended badly. Voter ID is an issue ginned up by political consultants; modern-day instances of voter impersonation are rare.

In the final week of the session, grief consumed the Capitol for all the waste of work. And let us add: waste of talent. Williams possesses both natural leadership abilities and a bright mind. In 2007 we acknowledged this by naming him to the Best list. This year he squandered those attributes for partisan reasons—much to the state’s detriment.

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