After Governor Perry blamed Senator Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, for the failure of the sanctuary cities bill, the Senate Republican caucus issued a statement of solidarity dated June 28 (yesterday). The text of the statement follows:

On Saturday, June 25, the Senate Republican Caucus convened to discuss the issue of possibly merging sanctuary cities issues into S.B. 1. After a lengthy discussion of the issues, the caucus encouraged Senator Duncan and the Republican Senate conferees on S.B. 1 to keep the issues separate, as combining them would put them both at risk of not passing. S.B. 9 was a strong bill that would have delivered significant reform to Texas citizens. Senate Republicans unanimously supported and passed S.B. 9 nearly two weeks ago on the Senate floor.

* * * *

And so, at the very end, somebody stood up to the governor. Perry was unwise to push for sanctuary cities. It ran into problems during the regular session and there was substantial opposition to it in the
Senate, including Perry allies. House members, ever groveling to the Tea partiers, wanted the bill so they could have an immigration vote in their quiver, even though they got one during the regular session.

Could the fate of sanctuary cities legislation come back to haunt Duncan? It is possible that one of the House members in the Lubbock area–Landtroop? Charles Perry?–might be able to make an issue of sanctuary cities in an area of the state where tea party strength is robust. Duncan could also be vulnerable as a spender, for coming up with money for the budget.

A different scenario is that the Tea parties may be too busy focusing on defeating Obama (or electing Rick Perry, perhaps) to get involved in state races. This is one of the unknown factors of the 2012 cycle.

Tagged: rick perry, robert duncan, sanctuary cities

The 20th edition of the “Best & Worst Legislators” story is complete. Yesterday we posted, on Twitter and on this blog, the names of the ten Best, the ten Worst, the Bull of the Brazos, and the Rookie of the Year. Today the write-ups for all of these 22 members are available online. The full story, including honorable and dishonorable mentions, furniture, and the very special features that mark the 20th edition of the story will be available in the magazine, which will begin reaching subscribers this weekend, and on our website next week.

I have been involved in nineteen of the twenty previous articles, and I cannot recall a more difficult year when it came to selecting the members on both lists. This was a session without heroes. All the usual jokes about naming 5 Bests and 15 Worsts were on point, for a change. The budget dominated everything, with the result that there were few major bills. I count three: Truitt’s effort to regulate payday loans; Ritter’s attempt to get funding for the state water plan (one of several occasions on which Perry could have exercised leadership for the state’s future but did not); and Keffer’s bill regulating hydraulic fracturing in shale formations. The rest was noise. Particularly cacophonous was the governor’s “emergency” agenda, which consisted of nothing but red meat for Republicans. Republicans got to vote on abortion, immigration, voter fraud, tort reform, and, shades of the fifties, state’s rights. Democrats got to vote no a lot. Even the major Sunset bills didn’t seem to generate any interest. You could look out across the House floor during any debate and see few members engaged.

The House Republican caucus was a curious organism. Its members preferred to vote as a block, as if they lived in fear that their age-old enemies, the Democrats, might perhaps be resuscitated to offer a scintilla of opposition. The group-think voting was reminiscent of the refrain sung by the “Monarch of the Sea” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore: “I grew so rich that I was sent/by a pocket borough into Parliament/I always voted at my party’s call/and never thought of thinking for myself at all.” The anemic Democratic caucus, meanwhile, mustered up occasional resistance, mostly with parliamentary maneuvers, but the D’s were so outnumbered, and so demoralized by their election rout, that they never seemed to have a leader or a plan. Not that it would have made any difference. (more…)

Tagged: best and worst legislators, jim keffer, John Zerwas, judith zaffirini, rick perry, robert duncan, Steve Ogden, vicki truitt, wendy davis

This post has been revised since its initial publication.

1. The Tom Schieffer candidacy.

Patricia Kilday Hart and I interviewed Tom Schieffer about his race for the Democratic nomination governor. Interestingly, Schieffer asked to go off the record before the interview to discuss the events that led to his being named one of the Ten Worst legislators in 1975. That was my first year to participate in the writing of the story, along with my then-colleague, Griffin Smith. The writeup was one of the toughest that we have ever written. It was full of anonymous quotes, which we seldom use today. Nowadays, the writeups are largely based on the public record. Schieffer was involved in one of the session’s biggest fights, an effort to authorize Texas’s first presidential primary in order to aid U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 1976. The Texas Democratic party in that era was split into liberal and conservative wings, and Schieffer was a conservative Democrat. The liberals were fighting him hard all the way, including my former mentor, Babe Schwartz, and I am sure that that influenced the writeup. The ink was hardly dry on the issue before I began to have second thoughts about whether Schieffer really deserved being on the Worst list. The bill did pass, and Texas did have its first primary–not that it helped Bentsen, who was overwhelmed in his home state by Jimmy Carter.

Schieffer has gone on to have a successful career as an oil and gas operator, as president of the Texas Rangers baseball team, and as ambassador to Australia and Japan in the George W. Bush administration. He should be considered a legitimate candidate for governor. The Ten Worst article was 34 years ago. There are lot of obstacles in the path of a Schieffer candidacy, but that article shouldn’t be one of them. The main obstacles, of course, are Schieffer’s association with Bush and his well motivated, but ultimately self-defeating, unwillingness to distance himself from his friend and former Rangers’ business partner; his reluctance as a candidate, including the question of whether he will put his own money into the campaign; and–how do I put this?–a question of whether he has a feel for contemporary Texas politics. I had the feeling, talking to him, that he has one foot in the present and one foot in the seventies, when conservative Democrats ran the state. He still talks about Lloyd Bentsen and John Connally. Connally and Bentsen and Hobby were giants in their day, and they ran things a heck of a lot better than the Republicans have, but Schieffer so far seems like he is just putting his toes in the water. He needs to jump in.

2. The transportation stimulus package.

Transportation is one area where the stimulus package can produce real jobs and have real economic benefits. So why is the amount so small–just $2.5 billion overall, and $1.2 billion in the first installment? One of the reasons is that Obama wants to invest in high-speed rail rather than roads. I think this is a mistake.

I’d like to see more of the money go to highways and less to high-speed rail. High-speed rail requires total grade separation. For rural Texas, it will make the Trans-Texas Corridor battle look like a walk in the park. I ran some numbers back in the early nineties, when the idea of a bullet train was first floated, and to break even on the project’s then $6 billion cost, trains had to run 97% full between Houston and Dallas 24 hours a day. Like it or not, the most efficient method of getting people from point A to point B is one lane of freeway. In an hour, it carries six times the number of people as rail, and the cost is approximately the same.

Politically, the most important aspect of the transportation funding battle was the continuing hostility between TxDOT and the Legislature. TxDOT froze lawmakers out of the discussion of which projects should be funded, with the result that 70% of the money will go to toll roads. Legislators did not cover themselves with glory either, as some took the opportunity to lobby for projects in their districts. The level of mistrust of TxDOT is as high as it has ever been–thanks to Commissioner Ted Houghton, who decided to do a little bomb-throwing of his own at the March 5 meeting of the Texas Highway Commission, calling one of the witnesses and the organization he represents “idiots.” Senator Hegar fired off a letter to Houghton, which included the following observations:

(more…)

Tagged: john corona, robert duncan, scott hochberg, ted houghton, Texas governor, texas public policy foundation, Tom Schieffer, trans-texas corridor, txdot, voter ID

There is a lot to say about the state of the judiciary; unfortunately, Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson did not say it. His remarks to the Legislature were mainly feel-good comments about task forces that the Court has formed and a plea for merit selection of judges, echoing previous calls for reform by his immediate predecessors, John Hill and Tom Phillips. You can link to the speech here.

Is merit selection a good idea? Certainly it has been successfully implemented in other states. The way merit selection works is that when a vacancy occurs on an appellate court, a nonpartisan commission proposes the names of several judges whom they have deemed worthy and sends them to a decider, usually the governor, who selects the new replacement from the list provided. At the end of his term, the replacement judge, if he desires a second term, faces an election in which the issue is whether he should be retained. This process raises the tricky issue of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — Who shall guard the guardians? Maybe this is not a problem in other states where politics is polite and gentlemanly, but Texas politics does not fit this description. We play hardball here. It is likely that the commission will be chosen by other politicians, that it will not be nonpartisan, and that the decider will try to influence its selections. I find this prospect sufficiently worrisome that I believe that merit selection legislation should have a sunset date — say, twelve years — in case the process is compromised by politics.

The reason why merit selection has never come to pass is that the whichever party is in power has no interest in changing the rules of a game that they are winning. These days, Republicans win all the statewide races, and Democrats win the urban courthouses and gain seats on regional courts of appeals. Justice Jefferson lamented the sweeps of urban courthouses (in Dallas in 2006 and Houston in 2008) and Republicans, who have been the party that has killed merit selection in the past, applauded. I read the bill that Robert Duncan has filed, and it applies only to appellate judges, but it could be amended to apply to district judges. I agree with the Chief Justice that the urban sweeps, driven by straight-ticket voting, are a problem, but Republicans lived happily by that sword for many years and have only considered it a problem when they are dying by it.

The irony of Jefferson’s speech is that the biggest problems of the judiciary are exemplified by his own Court. It is biased in favor of defendants; it has a poor record of clearing its docket; and it has several judges who are facing ethics complaints. It is apparent that judges gamed the campaign finance rules by claiming reimbursement for unsubstantiated “campaign trips” that are really commutes to their residences. The Legislature could eliminate this problem by allowing judges to be reimbursed for travel from funds appropriated for the purpose.

Both the Dallas Morning News and the San Antonio Express-News have criticized the Court for its backlog of cases. The most extensive study was compiled by Texas Watch, a judicial watchdog organization. Some of its findings:

* The Court took an average of 852 days (2.3 years) to dispose of a case in the 2006–07 term, an increase of 24 percent from the 2004–05 term.

* Justices took an average of 416 days to write an opinion after the Court heard oral arguments, a 31 percent increase from 04–05 to 06–07.

* The Court’s backlog has steadily increased from 14 in fiscal year 2000 to 60 in fiscal year 2007, an increase of 328 percent.

* The Court has left 72 cases pending for more than a year. An additional 31 cases have been pending for more than two years.

Will merit selection solve these problems? One could argue that the current method of electing judges does a better job of providing accountability because foot-dragging and other problems are more likely to come to light during the course of a campaign.

I realize that the chief justice could hardly use the occasion of his speech to criticize his own Court. Nevertheless, the Court is symptomatic of the problems of the judiciary. As Republicans face increasing challenges from Democrats, issues like judicial selection are going to come to the forefront as the GOP looks for ways to hold onto power. Whatever the merits of merit selection might be, it is inevitably going to be seen by Democrats as a way of keeping their party on the outside looking in.

Tagged: chief justice wallace jefferson, merit selection, robert duncan, state of the judiciary, texas appellate court

Dallas billionaire Robert Rowling, chairman of the UTIMCO board, today abruptly resigned while under heavy fire from members of the Senate Finance Committee about $2.3 million in bonuses paid to fund managers for the University of Texas System and Texas A&M System’s endowment, which has declined 27 percent this year.

“I spend half my life on UTIMCO. You can have this job. I resign,” Rowling told the committee. “We did what we thought was right.”

Rowling, owner of the parent corporation for Omni Hotels and Gold’s Gym, gave his resignation as a retort to an emotional upbraiding (rant?) by Sen. Kevin Eltife, who voiced the frustration of the committee by blasting the bonuses.

“We are in uncharted territory,” Eltife said, referring to the U.S. economy. “And state government gave $2.3 million in bonuses to managers of a fund that lost 27 percent. It shatters trust in government. Every one of us is going to take the blame for this.”

Rowling, who also serves on the UT board of regents, defended the compensation of UTIMCO managers, noting that the bonuses were paid according to a compensation package which compares the Texas fund performance to its peers, i.e. other university endowments with over $2 billion in assets. The bonuses covered the year ending in June 2008, when the Texas fund was up by two percent at a time when other funds, like Harvard’s, had lost ground. “To change it (the bonus arrangement) would be to go back on our word,” he said.

Not good enough, responded Finance committee members. The bonuses were unanimously approved in November, at a time when both the Texas fund and the entire U.S. economy was tanking. Chairman Steve Ogden questioned Rowling’s argument that UTIMCO was under a contractual obligation to pay the bonuses, particularly a $1 million bonus granted to UTIMCO’s chief investment officer, Bruce Zimmerman. (Only $700,000 was paid this year, with the remainder contingent on future performance.)

“He got the absolute max,” Ogden said, noting that he believed the board could have considered the downturn in the economy in its decision.

Rowling acknowledged that “the world has changed” and said UTIMCO planned to review its compensation packages “going forward.”

But, when Ogden asked him to return in 30 days “if you decide not to resign” with a plan for a less risk-based compensation plan, Rowling stiffly responded: “I am sure the new chairman will be willing to do that.”

“Thank you for your service,” Ogden said.

Ogden, as well as senators Royce West and Robert Duncan, also expressed a concern about a recent change in the UTIMCO ethics policy which allows directors to invest a small percentage in funds in which UTIMCO also holds an interest. The Finance chair urged UTIMCO to consider changes in what he sees as flawed ethics standards.

The Bryan Republican recessed the meeting by holding up a copy of today’s Wall Street Journal and reading a quote from President Obama about capping the pay of executives seeking public bailouts for their companies. The public, Obama said, does not want publicly subsidized executives “rewarded for failure.”

“I think that’s relevant to this hearing today,” he said.

Tagged: gold's gym, omni hotels, robert duncan, robert rowling, royce west, senate finance committee, senator kevin eltife, Steve Ogden, utimco

I know I really shouldn’t pass along gossip, really I shouldn’t, and I wouldn’t do it if I were still a serious journalist instead of just a blogger, really I wouldn’t do it, honest, but a lobbyist just called to say that at a hearing Duncan is having at the Senate there was talk among lobbyists that Dan Gattis had, or would, file for speaker.

UPDATE: Two filings for speaker today, but no Gattis. Tommy Merritt and Pete Gallego.

Tagged: dan gattis, pete gallego, robert duncan, texas speaker race, tommy merritt