Power Company
Who are the most influential people determining the fate of Texas—and what do they want?
Oldgus2 says: Far right and super far right flat earth Republicans will each take a meataxe of their choosing to public education, mental and child health, the environmental needs, infrastructure, and to redistricting. It would be a hoot hearing them fulminate against good sense--if it were not so sad and destructive (January 23rd, 2011 at 10:07pm)
This list marks the fourth time TEXAS MONTHLY has sought to identify the state’s most powerful players. The first was in 1976, when one of “the secret capitals of Texas” was at Houston’s Lamar Hotel, in Suite 8F, the archetypal smoke-filled room. The power brokers at the time were legendary figures whose era was coming to an end: George R. Brown, the co-founder of Brown & Root; John Connally, the former governor and U.S. Treasury Secretary; Leon Jaworski, the prosecutor of Richard Nixon; Allan Shivers, the former governor and University of Texas regents chairman; Erik Jonsson, the Dallas mayor and Texas Instruments co-founder. These men ran the state by exercising power in all three sectors that count: politics, business, and civic affairs. There is nobody on the 2011 list who even remotely resembles them.
The very thing that made this establishment powerful proved its undoing: oil. Our 1987 story declared that the old power structure was a casualty of the oil bust. “No one in the business and political leadership of Texas even mentions the establishment anymore,” we wrote. Instead, it had been replaced by a small group of wealthy movers and shakers with ideas, people like Ross Perot, who promoted education reform. And oilman George Mitchell, an early proponent of sustainability. And San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros, who preached the importance of economic development and diversity. These new players differed from the old ones in that they set out to change the arena in which they operated without the expectation of immediate profit.
Our next list came in 2005, two years after Republicans won control of the state House of Representatives for the first time since Reconstruction and elected Tom Craddick, their longtime legislative leader, as Speaker. The 2005 power list was unlike any previous list. Gone were titans of business like Perot and T. Boone Pickens. Lawmakers, lobbyists, consultants, big Republican donors, and key staffers and advisers dominated the list. Power was almost exclusively Republican (and remains so today).
Which brings us to the 2011 list. Why compile another? Because we stand on the cusp of the most important legislative session of our lifetime, when those with power will make decisions that affect Texas for decades to come. This list reflects who will wield influence during this session—and how they’ll use it. But it also demonstrates the incredible pace of change. The past six years have brought an unprecedented transformation in the distribution of power in Texas, none more important than the rise of the grass roots, epitomized by the emergence of the tea party, which, for all its disorganization, is a force to be reckoned with. The tea party groups have benefited from the way the Internet and social media have revolutionized politics, empowering anyone with a BlackBerry and a mailing list to drive issues and influence elections. Yet, for all the ways that power has changed in the past 35 years, in one way it remains the same. Power is still an insider’s game, where the decisions are made behind closed doors. Let’s have a look inside the room.
The Purse Strings—Steve Ogden and Jim Pitts
As lawmakers gird themselves for a session in which the state’s budget crisis is by far the most pressing issue, these two longtime legislators are at the center of the storm. Ogden, a Republican from Bryan, has been chairman of the Senate Finance Committee since 2004; Pitts, a Republican from Waxahachie, will chair the House Appropriations Committee for the third time in the past four sessions. Each will prepare a version of the budget, which, according to tradition, will be numbered Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 1. They will have the biggest say about who gets how much funding.
Their power is not absolute. Both chairmen are dependent on their committee members to provide the votes to send a budget to the floor for debate, and both must heed the priorities of their presiding officers, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst in the Senate and Representative Joe Straus, the front-runner to be reelected Speaker of the House at the time of this writing. But for the most part, the buck—or lack thereof—stops with Ogden and Pitts.
Both have had long careers: Ogden served six years in the House before winning a Senate seat in 1996. Pitts first won election to the House in 1992; he challenged Tom Craddick for Speaker in 2007 but came up short. Ogden contemplated retirement after the 2009 session. It would surprise no one if this were the last session for each (all the more reason for them to wield power). Both regard the budget as a moral document. Ogden almost caused a meltdown in 2009 by insisting on a rider that prohibited the expenditure of state funds on stem cell research (he yielded), and during the same session Pitts took on the governor’s office for its questionable manipulation of funds for a $50 million grant to Texas A&M, Governor Rick Perry’s alma mater.
The problem for these two legislators is that without money, power doesn’t mean much. They must find a way to pay for public schools, universities, health care, roads, and law enforcement in a year when new revenue is next to nonexistent—a 7 percent increase at most, Pitts says. Ogden believes a budget deal can be reached. “Texas will be bruised up but probably won’t be permanently harmed,” he told us. Pitts warned that in the first version of the budget bill, “every number is going to be pretty scary.” Even so, he said, “some people would be ready to vote for it on day one.”
What To Watch For: Ogden wants to spend some of the Rainy Day Fund and pass a constitutional amendment to raise more gasoline tax revenue for highways. Pitts will likely propose delaying some payments—to school districts, for example—until the next budget cycle.
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TEAM PERRY
Eternal Governor of the Spotless Mind—Rick Perry
Four years ago they were writing his epitaph. Perry polled just 39 percent in 2006, good enough to limp across first in a four-person governor’s race but still the lousiest total for a winning candidate since 1861. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison smelled blood in the water and opted to run for governor in 2010. But Perry, who has never lost a race, is nothing if not a survivor. He took a right turn in the primary—beginning with his now famous secession remark—and never looked back. Now it’s Hutchison’s career that is on life support, while a reinvented Perry rides the anti-Washington wave sweeping the country to . . . where? Not a 2012 presidential campaign, he says, but his recent endeavors speak otherwise: a profile-raising post as the head of the Republican Governors Association; a new book, Fed Up!, that reads like a tea party manifesto; and a national publicity tour, which included a stop on The Daily Show, where he came across as genial, smooth, and, it has to be said, electable.
For years, the knock on Perry was that he was just not very good at being governor: His use of the veto has frequently been ham-handed, while other ideas he threw his weight behind—like mandatory HPV vaccines for teenage girls or new privately owned toll roads—seemed ill-considered, not to mention politically disastrous. Yet after a record-setting ten years in office, he appears to have finally learned what power is and how to use it. His extended network of political appointees in state government and staffers-turned-lobbyists has given his operation a reach and scope not seen since Bob Bullock.
What To Watch For: President? Vice president? Governor for Life? Whatever it is, getting there requires Perry to oppose any tax increase this session.
The Fixer—Jay Kimbrough
If the Texas governor’s office were a law firm, Kimbrough would be the fixer, that one indispensable attorney who has a knack for making problems go away, though you don’t always want to know how he does it. In 2007 Perry named Kimbrough conservator of the Texas Youth Commission, which oversees the state’s youth lockups, after a sex abuse scandal left the agency in disarray. The plainspoken Vietnam veteran rode his Harley to far-flung TYC facilities for personal inspections. He was blunt about which heads had to roll—quite a few—and reporters ate it up. The former judge of Bee County has been fixing broken agencies—and hurting feelings—since 1997, when Governor George W. Bush recruited him to reform the troubled Texas Commission on Private Security. After that, it was rescuing the bankrupt Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, reining in rogue drug task forces as the head of Perry’s criminal justice division, and cleaning up a scandal at the biodefense lab at Texas A&M. “He is essentially a one-man shadow government,” a Democratic senator told us—and, he added, an extremely effective one.
Last July, Perry detailed Kimbrough to his biggest challenge yet: restructuring the hidebound Texas Department of Transportation, which has been battered in recent years by one public relations disaster after another, from the billion-dollar accounting error that left highway projects across the state in limbo to the politically disastrous Trans-Texas Corridor private toll road scheme. State auditors and a private consulting firm recommended sweeping changes. The sheer size of TxDOT—12,000 employees and an $8 billion budget—meant that everybody had a stake in this fight, and Kimbrough, normally a lone wolf, was asked to work with a committee of three, the other two hand-picked by the lieutenant governor and House Speaker. The committee’s recommendation, however, was classic Kimbrough: Fire the head honchos and start over.
What To Watch For: Kimbrough’s biggest task will be convincing fed-up legislators that TxDOT is moving in the right direction—before they file yet another slew of hostile bills.
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