The Chronicle is reporting today the results of a straw poll at the Tea Party Patriots’ “national policy summit” in Phoenix this weekend. The voting occurred in two categories, “live” and “online.” The winner of the live poll was pizza magnate Herman Cain with 21.98% of the vote. The winner of the online poll was Ron Paul, with 49.6% of the vote.

The results of the live poll:

Cain 21.98%

Pawlenty 15.87%

Paul 15.04%

Palin 10.08%

Romney 6.45%

Bachman 5.62%

Gingrich 5.29%

Huckabee 4.63%

Daniels 4.46%

Trump 3.14%

Perry 1.82%

Barbour, Huntsman, and Santorum brought up the rear.

The winner of the online poll, by an overwhelming margin, was Ron Paul.

Paul 49.65%

Cain 12.46%

Palin 8.92%

Huckabee 5.88%

Gingrich 4.76%

Pawlenty 4.76%

Romney 4.46%

Bachmann 3.65%

Daniels 1.82%

Perry 1.01%

Barbour, Huntsman, and Santorum received less than 1%.

# # # #

The thing that I find most interesting about this poll is that the Tea Party is marginalizing itself. No organization that chooses Herman Cain and Ron Paul as its favorites for president is going to play a major role in choosing the Republican nominee.

The Chronicle’s take on the poll is “good thing he’s not running.” I would say: What makes you so sure he isn’t running? Maybe not for president, but why not the number-two spot on the ticket?. Perry is positioning himself to come out of this legislative session with the credential of having closed Texas’s budget gap with $27 billion in cuts when other states have raised taxes. That is going to be a powerful message. Add to it Perry’s ability to stir up crowds, as a former Aggie yell leader. He fits the job description for a vice-president: intensely partisan, ideologically unyielding, unrestrained in his criticism of an opponent, looks good on TV, knows how to fire up a crowd, won’t upstage the nominee.

The discussion of what to do about the problems facing the state of Texas shifted from the Capitol to the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library on Wednesday night, when a panel of state legislators gathered for a Future Forum, sponsored by Texas Monthly, on the subject of, “What is the most important issue facing the state?” The participants on the panel were Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio; Eddie Lucio III, D-Brownsville; Walter “Four” Price, R-Amarillo; Mark Strama, D-Austin; Van Taylor, R-Plano, and James White, R-Woodville.

Not surprisingly, the panelists agreed that budget issues are dominating the session. Castro opened the discussion by warning against allowing the budget deficit to devastate what he called “the infrastructure of opportunity,” which he defined as public education and medical care for the indigent. Rather than balance the budget through cuts, Castro called for the Legislature to change the tax system to eliminate the structural deficit in the state’s revenue stream.

Lucio related that hundreds of concerned teachers and Medicaid clients have called his office, begging him to oppose the cuts laid out in HB1. “We have historically been underserved,” he said of his district, as he pointed out that the Rio Grande Valley is the only region of the state without an interstate highway. Education programs like public pre-kindergarten are the mechanism by which poor communities try to catch up to their more affluent counterparts. “If drastic budget cuts are passed,” he said, “We’re going to feel it first, and harder than anybody else. We’re just going to fall further down the rabbit hole.”

Price, one of the three freshmen lawmakers on the panel, along with White and Taylor, if you count Taylor as a freshman (he was sworn in to fill the vacancy left by Brian McCall’s retirement after he won the Republican primary last spring), expressed concern about community colleges in his district, but he reserved his greatest alarm for the proposed Medicaid cuts. His district runs all the way to the state line at the top of the  Panhandle, through sparsely populated counties with significant elderly populations. Care for the elderly is one of the biggest sources of jobs in his district, he said, and the Medicaid cuts would leave hundreds of workers unemployed, perhaps forcing the closing of rural hospitals and severely damaging the local economy. Price opposes the cuts and lay-offs but also expressed opposition to new taxes. Like Castro, he believes that the state’s tax system needs restructuring.

Strama told how the citizens of Pflugerville have begun to wear raingear on days with clear skies. They gather on the city’s main roads for rush-hour rallies, their garb symbolic of their desire for legislators to tap into the Rainy Day Fund to ease the state’s budget crisis. He agrees that the Rainy Day Fund should be tapped to close the funding gap. Strama works in the private side of the educational business (Sylvan Learning Centers), and his experience has reinforced his belief that the more education dollars one invests, whether in the private sector or the public sector, the greater the grade-point yield. “The point of getting more bang for your buck should be more bang and not less bucks,” he said.

Van Taylor championed smaller, no-new-taxes government in the face of job layoffs and reduced public spending. His Plano constituents evidently feel the same way, because he told of sending out a survey, to which a hefty majority of them responded that they opposed raising taxes to combat the state’s $27 billion budget shortfall. Taylor believes that even if there are layoffs, public-sector to private-sector jobs shifts have historically encouraged economic growth, as was the case, he said, in post-World War II America. Despite the state’s budget woes, Taylor said, Texas will continue to spend large sums of money on its citizens. “Seventy-seven billion,” he said, “is still a lot of government.”

White, a teacher, is “not ready to fret” over reduced education funding. Texas’s education system is anachronistic, according to White, who views the budget cuts as an opportunity to remodel the system. The East Texas representative believes a portion of the Rainy Day Fund could be used supplement lost revenue, but does not advocate raising taxes for fear of stunting post-recession economic growth

* * * *

I was the moderator for the panel. I had very little to do, just introduce the panelists and get out of the way. The original plan was to let each panelist speak for ten minutes, but Strama suggested three. This proved to be an inspired move, as the panelists engaged with each other and a lively discussion ensued. To conclude the evening, I asked each panelist to relate  what they were hearing from people back home. Price was the only panelist to mention redistricting. The concern about losing influence is very strong in West Texas.

[This report is based upon notes taken by intern Katherine Stevens.]

After U.S. trade representative Ron Kirk spoke to the House yesterday, I had the opportunity to catch up with him for a short interview.

Ambassador Kirk, who is naturally gregarious and optimistic, painted a gloomy picture of what it is like to carry an unpopular message to skeptical folks in shrinking industrial America.  “A lot of people are suspicious of me,” he said. “They say, “You guys only care about the new age economy.” In addition to going abroad, he spends a lot of time in the Rust Belt preaching the administration’s message. “We’re lucky if five people show up,” he said. “We [the administration] had a tin ear,” he said. “Most of the people I talk to think Ross Perot was right [about NAFTA].” Still, as he pointed out, Canada and Mexico are America’s two largest trading partners.

“The public believes that we play fair, but that other nations don’t. Seventy percent of the people I talk to think trade is bad for America,” he said. “They don’t think we have a policy that is designed to open up markets. They want us to enforce our trade agreements and to focus on job creation.”

There are a lot of misconceptions about trade, he pointed out. The benefits of trade are that it lowers the cost of imports, but people in areas where the pain is localized, where jobs have been lost, don’t see it that way. A few dollars saved on clothing hardly balances the jobs and the paychecks that have disappeared. Trade is not really the culprit, he insists. “For every job that is lost to trade,” Kirk said, five are lost to increased productivity and innovation.”

Kirk was upbeat about recent trade agreements that have been reached with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. At the end of our interview, I threw in a question about birth rates, worldwide, and how it was affecting trade. Much to my surprise, that really lit him up. “Agriculture!” he said. “That’s the future of trade. Birth rates in Latin America are high. Brazil especially can be a great market. No other nation can come close to us when it comes to feeding the world.”

I had a brief conversation earlier today with House redistricting chairman Burt Solomons. He agreed with what I wrote yesterday, which was that to pair Democrats in minority districts would violate the Voting Rights Act. Since the six Democrats in Dallas County are all either Hispanic (Anchia, Alonzo) or African-American (Davis, Mallory-Caraway, Johnson, Giddings), Republicans cannot pair Democrats without eliminating a minority seat. Theref0re, the two seats that Dallas County is expected to lose can only be Republican seats. Solomons confirmed that my post was right.

Since a couple of commenters had written that the House maps were already drawn, I asked Solomons about that as well. He scoffed at the idea. The data from the Census Bureau hasn’t been around long enough for people to have drawn maps.

The previous map, drawn by the Legislative Redistricting Board in 2001, allowed for sixteen seats. It now appears that, due to population loss, Dallas County will qualify for only fourteen seats. Two members are going to lose their seats. The problem for Republicans is this: Four seats belong to African-American Democrats (Helen Giddings, Eric Johnson, Barbara Mallory Caraway, Yvonne Davis). Two seats belong to Hispanics (Rafael Anchia and Robert Alonzo). If Republicans draw the map to eliminate two Democratic seats, by pairing, say, Giddings and Johnson, or Anchia and Alonzo, so that six minority districts are reduced to four, such a solution would likely be regarded as a regression under the Voting Rights Act.

The remaining ten members of the Dallas County delegation are Republicans, and four of them are going to be paired–with other Republicans. There is no way around it. The two seats that Dallas County is going to lose are odds-on to be Republican seats. This is where, shocking as it may seem, politics could get involved. Redistricting reflects the lyrics of that favorite Christmas tune: “He’s making a list and checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.” When redistricting chairman Solomons starts making his list, he will remember that Kenneth Sheets and Cindy Burkett, both Paxton supporters, have been naughty. Dan Branch, Solomons himself, and probably Will Hartnett are are going to be on the “nice” list.

The Dallas districts are going to be dicey to draw in any event. Huge population losses in the county will leave GOP members fighting each other for  whatever Republican areas they can find — mainly the affluent area around White Rock Lake. Several of the Dallas County Republican members are in the same situation as the Democratic WD-40s used to be: occupying forces in enemy territory. (The term WD-40 is likely to disappear from the institutional memory, as the WD-40′s themselves have vanished, so I had better define it: “Rural white Democrat of middle age.”) Their names were Farabee, Homer, Hopson, Ritter, King, McReynolds, et al. All represented districts that voted Republican at the top of the ticket but might vote Democratic down-ballot. Now the situation is reversed. Several north Dallas Republicans are occupying seats that used to be enemy territory, seats that flipped Democratic in 2008 and Republican in 2010. Some of the new incumbents are going to be hard to protect–Rodney Anders0n, for example, won by couple of hundred votes in the best Republican year since 1994. In towns beyond the Dallas city limits, where the population is increasingly Republican, Driver (Garland) and Button (Richardson) should be safe, but Harper-Brown (Irving) will probably find herself fighting for survival, as usual. And you know what the tiebreaker will be whenever there is a close call: Naughty? Or nice?

[The original version of this article has been edited to make corrections involving the number of minority Democrats (six) and the names of certain members.]

Walter Lippmann was the foremost pundit of his time, which was the fifties and sixties. In 1955, he published a book called The Public Philosophy. It is a dark and gloomy treatise, more despairing than cynical, about the inherent flaws of democracy and government’s inability to act wisely. I first encountered it as a freshman at Rice, and I probably hadn’t thought of it in fifty years, until I went to the Article II Appropriations committee yesterday. Here were a group of decent people–legislators, bureaucrats, staff–all wrestling with the problem of the lack of funding for Medicaid, and all of us knew that it was totally futile, that little or nothing would be, could be, accomplished. The House proposed budget contains $2.9B in savings that can be used to draw down federal funds. After that, well, Commissioner Suehs mentioned various possibilities for saving money–$20 million here, $4.5 million there, and other minuscule amounts. Do you know how many twenty millions you need to get to a billion dollars? Answer: fifty.

And now, a voice from offstage. The voice belongs to one Horacio Aldrete-Sanchez, a credit analyst for Standard & Poor’s,  a well known bond rating house. “We believe,” wrote Aldrete-Sanchez, about Texas’s approach to its budget woes, “that a balanced approach that includes both revenue enhancements and expenditure cuts has a higher potential of success in preserving the state’s long-term structural budget balance than a strategy that relies solely on expenditure cutbacks.” Why should anyone care what S&P thinks? Here’s why: As we all know, rather than raise revenue, Texas in recent years has gone on a borrowing spree. Bonds for highways. B0nds for equipment. Bonds for curing cancer. Unfortunately, the day comes when debt service on those bonds must be paid to the bondholders. If the bond rating agency doesn’t think much of the way a state handles it finances, it downgrades the state’s bonds, which usually means that the cost of debt service goes up.

Aldrete-Sanchez is clearly right. The refusal of Texas’s leaders to raise revenue is imperiling the state’s fiscal stability. We raise money only by the most expensive means–borrowing. Our revenue and tax structure is untenable. We have a nonperforming business tax that has created a permanent structural budget deficit, and our state leaders, who have known about this since 2006, when they paid no heed to the comptroller’s fiscal note, continue to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

What does all this have to do with Walter Lippmann? It so happens that The Public Philosophy contains a well known passage that seeks to define the malady that afflicts modern government:

With exceptions so rare that they are regarded as miracles and freaks of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men, They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good, but whether it is popular–not whether it will work well and prove itself, but whether the active talking elements like it immediately. Politicians rationalize their servitude by saying that in a democracy, public men are servants of the people.

This devitalization of the governing power is the malady of democratic states. As the malady grows, the executives become highly susceptible to encroachment and usurpation by elected assemblies; they are pressed and harassed by the higgling of parties, by the agents of organized interests, and by the spokesmen of sectarians and ideologues. The malady can be fatal. It can be deadly to the very survival of the state as a free society if, when the great and hard issues of war and peace, of security and solvency, of revolution and order, are up for decision, the executive and judicial departments, with their civil servants and technicians, have lost the power to decide.

This is all too accurate a description of Texas politics today, particularly the first paragraph. I have never seen so many lawmakers so scared. Insecure and intimidated men (and women) indeed. Republicans in particular live in fear of their own base. I have seen so many members who I respected in the past fall all over themselves to sign on to immigration bills, abortion bills, anything to defend themselves from the pack that is howling for red meat. So great is the fear and the fretting that the Legislature would rather cut spending for public education, something that has not happened in modern times, than raise new revenue. It would rather let federal matching funds for Medicaid stay in Washington than raise revenue. Lan Bentsen, son of the late senator, representing the Children’s Defense Fund, proposed to the House Article II subcommittee a two-cent increase in the sales tax for two years, to be sunset thereafter, to fund Medicaid. Members studied the console in front of them in silence, knowing what is going to happen. Nursing homes will close. Babies will die. Sick people will go to the emergency rooms for treatment, the burden will fall on the local property taxpayer, and lawmakers will congratulate themselves on not having raised state taxes and snookering the public again.

I would prefer that Texas not raise taxes. Who wouldn’t? But when new revenue is off the table and the budget is permanently burdened with a structural deficit that will increase every year, and school districts across the state are having to close schools, the course we are on is crazy.

Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw testified before Senate Finance today, sharing his concern that crime in Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio is very much connected to Mexican drug cartels, operating though the potent prison gangs Texas Syndicate and Texas Mafia.

For most, that’s not particularly “new” news. But McCraw also shared some statistics that gave his audience great pause: Last year, law enforcement agencies operating in the Rio Grande Valley apprehended what they refer to as 287 OTMs (other than Mexicans) — illegal immigrants from countries with active Al Qaeda cells or Taliban activity. Places like Yemen, Iran, Pakistan, etc. Even more startling was a federal General Accounting Office statistic that law enforcement’s net catches only about 6.5 percent of the criminal activity coming across the border. In the hearing, Sen. Dan Patrick suggested that we could extrapolate that the 287 potential “terrorists” represents only 6.5 percent of the total threat.

McCraw gave the Finance Committee solid reasons to believe that investment in border security operations reaps dividends. Last year, thanks to an additional state-funded DPS presence on the border, drug seizures increased 124 percent and cash seizures jumped by 137 percent.

Neither the Senate or House proposed bills cut too deeply into DPS border operations, but my prediction is that this is one area of the budget that won’t be trimmed.

The fastest-growing counties in Texas were suburban counties near the big Metro areas: Collin and Rockwall east of Dallas; Williamson and Hays, which bracket Travis County on the top and bottom; and Montgomery and Fort Bend, which bracket Harris County on the north and southwest. These six counties experienced growth rates of 55.0% t0 81.8%, the highest of the Census Bureau’s brackets for Texas.

Collin, Rockwall, and Montgomery are solid red counties. Fort Bend is in transition to becoming a purple county, possibly the first Democratic suburb. (Obama narrowly missed carrying the county in 2008.) Hays has been a blue county, but the spread of affluent subdivisions suggests a transition to red is occurring. Williamson is solid red in the north but has a lot of blue in the south.

East Texas did not keep up with the growth of the state. All of East Texas east of the Trinity had low population gains at best (0.0% to 24.9%), except for Chambers County, historically a sleepy, isolated rural county wedged between Houston and Beaumont. I drove into Anahuac, the county seat, on the return leg of a trip to New Orleans earlier this year, and it showed few signs of economic activity. Apparently Chambers has been discovered since my side trip, because its growth rate was between 24.9 and 54.0%, the second-highest grouping for the state. Chambers was the only county in East Texas–that is, east of I-45 and north of I-10, to post a significant population gain.

Growth seldom extended more than one county from a metro area. In the Tarrant County area, Denton, Ellis, and Parker counties, all contiguous to the big county, posted big gains; Johnson and Wise did not. Even on the interstates, the rural counties did not grow. On I-45, Montgomery posted big gains. But the next three counties, Walker (Huntsville) and Madison (Madisonville) increased in population by less than 10%. The suburbs are booming, the exurbs less so.

Eighteen House districts grew by more than 30%. The biggest gainer of these belonged to erstwhile Speaker candidate Ken Paxton (79,44%), followed by  Callegari (+57.74%), Zerwas  (+57.29%), Laubenberg (+51/50%), and Fletcher (+50.56%). Other members with high-growth (+30%) were Eissler, Schwertner, Reynolds, L. Gonzalex, Parker, Crownover, Solomons, Quintanilla, Zedler, Truitt, Geren, Garza, and Larson.

Not surprisingly, Rick Hardcastle’s sprawling rural West Texas district showed a large population loss of 31,695. What was surprising was the population declines in Harris County. Hernandez-Luna is 40,256 people short of ideal population. Other districts in traditionally Hispanic areas suffered similar shortfalls: Alvarado is short by 34,907; Walle by 28,362. What is happening? I think it’s brown flight: families deserting the inner city for the ‘burbs, especially the Cypress-Fairbanks school district. A similar story is taking place in El Paso. Marquez and Gonzalez are short 35,070 and 34,922 respectively. Pickett is short by 20,465. Obviously, major demographic shifts are taking place in Hispanic communities across Texas. In Dallas, Anchia’s district is a whopping 50,291 short of the ideal population; Alonzo’s district is down by 35,737. I think we are seeing in Dallas what happened in Houston, and that is minority move-outs from the central city. Dallas has to lose a seat, and it could be the result of the dispersal of the Hispanic population.

I was sitting in the Senate gallery yesterday, listening to the debate over the sonogram bill, when Dan Patrick said something that got my attention. He said that he had asked Speaker Straus to recommend someone to carry the sonogram bill, and Straus had recommended Geanie Morrison. He repeated this during the course of the debate, two, maybe three times.

This didn’t ring true to me. At the Republican state convention, Morrison had worked with former RPT vice-president David Barton to undermine Straus. During the speaker’s race, Morrison had been aligned with the Paxton forces. Why would Straus suggest an adversary  to carry the bill–especially after Sid Miller, a Straus ally, had stepped forward to put his name on a new sonogram bill with a low (that is, priority) bill number? For that matter, why would Straus get involved in telling any senator whom to choose as the bill’s House sponsor? That decision belongs to House members. It would have been out of character for Straus, who is a hands-off speaker.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought that Patrick’s comment was strange, because e-mails from members started coming into the speaker’s office. After talking to various sources in the House–not including Straus–here is what I think really happened. Sometime last year Patrick went to Straus and told him he would be carrying THE sonogram bill and Geanie Morrison would be the House sponsor. The most likely scenario is that Patrick didn’t ask Straus to recommend a sponsor; he told him who it was going to be. I can’t explain why Patrick repeated the story about Straus suggesting Geanie Morrison as a sponsor during the debate, unless he did it to put pressure on Straus to let Morrison carry the bill. I don’t think it’s going to work.

Tagged: dan patrick, david barton, geanie morrison, Joe Straus

Wendy Davis just read a letter from the Texas Medical Association opposing the sonogram bill as a violation of the patient-doctor relationship. Dan Patrick is claiming there is no patient- doctor relationship, based on the testimony of Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood employee profiled by Texas Monthly.

Under questioning from John Whitmire, Patrick says that his assertion that there is no patient-doctor relationship is based on testimony from Planned Parenthood. I think he is describing Abby Johnson’s testimony, not Planned Parenthood’s.

Patrick says the TMA was neutral on the bill, but the letter read sounded negative to me. Patrick makes the point that TMA did not
testify against the bill.

Whitmire talks about women who have been abandoned by family and boyfriends and says Patrick’s bill is creating more pain and hardship. Patrick responds: “I dismiss that” the bill creates a hardship.
Patrick: what would you say if all those aborted souls were in our gallery right now?