The Texas Observer

Just before Christmas I spoke with Rep. Pat Haggerty (R-El Paso), the most recent candidate to announce for speaker of the Texas House. Haggerty represents HD 78 and says the number-one reason members should put him in the big chair is that he will honor the “process” of the lower body.

“I have a strong belief in process,” Haggerty said as the reason why members might support him. He said the kinds of problems that have cropped up lately would never have surfaced “when the process is allowed to function the way it is supposed to function.”

What exactly Haggerty means by process is not completely clear, but he did mention the calendar — the sometimes arcane process by which a bill gets heard, and one that Speaker Craddick has manipulated to reward friends and punish enemies. The House Rules (3.86 MB) are full of such ‘processes,’ but observers will note that in the 80th Session (like previous sessions), the rules were suspended almost as often as they were in force.

“This is a process that is designed by geniuses to be run by idiots,” Haggerty said. He said that Speaker Tom Craddick demonstrated last session that “he can just put a bill on the calendar, or not…” That, Haggerty said, represents “a total corruption of the system.”

Behind Haggerty’s talk of process lies the implicit promise that as speaker he would not let partisan impulses get the better of a member’s right to vote his or her district — the mantra of former Speaker Pete Laney.

“Every member should have a right to represent their district,” Haggerty said.

Asked why he decided to run — and why he is announcing in December 2007 — Haggerty pointed to Democrat Dan Barrett’s victory in a runoff in an erstwhile-solid-GOP district in southwest Fort Worth on Dec. 18. The Republicans in that race found themselves in disarray, thanks, chiefly, to disputes over whether or not Craddick should continue as speaker (as well as a couple of dirty tricks). Barrett also ran as an anti-Craddick Democrat and by all accounts benefited from that message.

“After the fiasco in House District 97 the other night, I thought the only way to offer an alternative is to run for speaker,” Haggerty told me. “It was pretty much just a referendum on Tom Craddick… It was a real slap in his face…”

I pointed out that the folks over at the Burnt Orange Report were floating a notion that Haggerty should change parties and join Texas Democrats, a la Kirk England, but Haggerty dismissed the idea, after asking what exactly BOR was.

“Tell ‘em not to hold their breath,” Haggerty said.

As the El Paso Times mentioned when it reported Haggerty’s filing, he is the only Republican representative of a district along the Texas-Mexico border. And for those Democrats who hoped Haggerty’s proximity to the Rio Grande would soften his stance on illegal immigration, don’t get your hopes up.

“We’ve got to close our borders,” Haggerty said, admitting that immigration will probably be the number-one issue in his re-election effort in the GOP primary in his northwestern El Paso district. He faces El Paso businessman Dee Margo. The winner of the HD 78 GOP primary will likely face Democrat Louis Irwin, a University of Texas at El Paso biology professor — although Irwin had not yet filed with the Texas Democratic Party as of Dec. 27. Chances are Irwin is really teeing up in case the opportunity arises to face Margo. It’s thought the district trends Democrat but voters would give Haggerty a pass because he has represented them for so long.

“We’ve got to do everything we can to stop the flow [of immigrants],” Haggerty said. “To stop any further bleeding… It is the law. It’s wrong. I think there is a problem of national security. If this comes down the way it should, it’s going to result in some sort of guest-worker program.”

Haggerty says the proposed “fence” along the border is a federal initiative and he says it’s a federal issue, but he says he has no illusions. He does expect the immigration issue to play heavily in his district as well as nationally in 2008.

According to the Texas Ethics Commission, Haggerty now joins five others who have officially announced for Texas Speaker for the 81st Legislature: Delwin Jones (R-Lubbock), Senfronia Thompson (D-Houston), Sylvester Turner (D-Houston), Jim Keffer (R-Eastland), and Tom Craddick (R-Midland). Both Reps. Brian McCall (R-Plano) and Jim Pitts (R-Waxahachie) had filed for speaker in the last session, but have not updated their forms at the commission indicating the intent to run in January 2009.

Of course, the speaker’s race now, more than ever, vitally depends on which party controls the Texas House when the chips fall in November.

Leaders at the Texas Education Agency are so squeamish about evolution that they even considered avoiding the term on a new biology end-of-course exam to be offered to Texas high school students next year, agency emails obtained by the Observer show. “We are a bit concerned about the label and description used for objective 3 based on the recent news events concerning evolution,” wrote Julie Guthrie, TEA’s director of math and science assessments in a December 3rd email to Cyndi Louden, a student assessment staffer. “Please work with your team to see if you can come up with a different label and description for objective 3.”

At the time of the email, an educator advisory committee made up of science teachers had drafted five objectives for the biology exam to cover as part of an exam “blueprint.” Objective 3 was entitled “Genetics and Evolution” and consisted of 12 test items “sufficient to represent the relative importance of this objective.”Evidently TEA quickly decided against obscuring the evolution section. On December 12, Guthrie sent another email to Louden stating “no change should be made to the biology blueprint.” After reviewing the state standards for biology, Guthrie wrote that she had concluded, “the current language for the biology end-of-course assessment blueprint which includes evolution simply reflects the language in the curriculum adopted by the State Board of Education.”

Why did Guthrie consider deviating from the state’s official position on evolution in schools? After all, the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) - the foundation for what Texas kids are taught and tested - plainly require that a student “knows the theory of Biological Evolution.” Her December 3rd email alludes to concerns surrounding “recent news events concerning evolution.” The recent evolution news in Texas has been centered on the termination of TEA’s director of science curriculum, Chris Comer, for promoting a talk by an anti-creationist author.

“I think that there had been such an outcry over this recent situation [over the Comer firing], it caused [Guthrie] to look at the language and wonder if it needed to be changed,” said Debbie Graves Ratcliffe, a TEA spokesperson, “but the more she thought about it and looked at the curriculum standard that the test covered she decided it wasn’t an issue, it didn’t need to be changed.”

Even using the term “evolution” in standardized test questions represents “progress,” said Steven Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science and a long-time defender of evolution. “They avoided it for years,” Schafersman said. “They would use euphemisms - adaptation, change, change through time. They wouldn’t sue the ‘e’ word. And they never, never talked about human [evolution].”

That TEA backed off watering down the new biology test is good news and shows that common sense can still prevail at the deeply troubled and highly politicized agency. But still… the fact that a high-level TEA staffer thought “evolution” was such a toxic word that it needed to be scrubbed is sort of incredible.

Apparently, (big surprise) good fences do not make good neighbors after all. In California, Border Patrol agents are regularly lobbing tear gas and firing high-powered rifles filled with pepper spray bullets over the border fence into Mexico. And they may do the same in Texas once the wall gets built here.

In San Diego, Border Patrol agents have fired the tear gas and pepper spray bullets into neighborhoods in Tijuana in an escalating battle with smugglers. Families, including elderly grandparents and children, are caught in the crossfire, according to a December 17th Associated Press story. Residents of Colonia Libertad have evacuated their homes several times because of tear gas and pepper spray explosions.

Border Patrol agents complain that smugglers are pelting them with rocks, sticks and other debris from the Mexican side of the fence.

Since October, Border Patrol agents in San Diego and Arizona have been using the FN303 Less Lethal System manufactured by FN Herstal, a Belgian arms manufacturer. The FN303 is a high-powered air rifle that can shoot a pepper spray bullet up to 328 feet.

Andrea Zortman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency in Washington D.C., says the agency bought between 750 and 1,000 of the FN303’s which cost about $800 each from FN Herstal.

Zortman says they’ll expand the use of the FN303s at a later date in Texas. “We plan to roll them out to the Southwestern region,” says Zortman. “But we don’t have a set date yet.”

The tear gas is still lobbed (the old fashioned way) over the fence rather than shot with any type of projectile device, according to Zortman.

Is it our imagination, or is the U.S.-Mexico border increasingly starting to feel like the West Bank?

The recent opinion issued by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has once again got people thinking about just how to make sure a Texas House Speaker’s fate is not decided by the Texas Senate.

Abbott basically said he believed a court would likely conclude that the Speaker is a state officer and therefore subject to impeachment — a process which would begin in the Texas House and end in the Texas Senate. Plenty of observers and interested parties agree that having the upper body determine the leadership of the lower body is in no way what the Texas Constitution intends.

In footnote 22 on page 23 of Abbott’s opinion, it is noted that “The Speaker contends that ‘nothing in the Constitution requires an impeached Speaker to be tried by the Senate.’… The Speaker’s assertion does not comport with article XV or chapter 665 of the Government Code…”

I’ll admit I’m pretty dazed and confused by much of the legal mumbo-jumbo, but it sure seems to say here that an impeached Speaker would be tried by the Texas Senate (and who in hell decides exactly what these maniacs decide to capitalize anyway?)

Of all the smart people that have weighed in on what Abbott’s ruling means, I found a statement from Rep. Garnet Coleman (D-Houston) to be the most instructive so far.

It turns out that the one area on which Abbott (wisely) refused to speculate involves the Rules of the Texas House — their interpretation as they stand, and how they should have or could affect a speaker’s removal.

“If you want different rules, then you need a different speaker… If members want the ability to remove their presiding officer for cause… pass rules that say that is the case,” Coleman said. “That’s what I would recommend to members.”

There’s a weirdness to this post-opinion debate. The players are all still arguing about the same issues. Nothing is resolved, while Craddick declares victory.

The real fight over whether Craddick has the right to ‘absolute authority’ over recognition will play out at the beginning of the 81st Legislature — in January 2009 — when the House chooses a speaker and when members adopt the House Rules.

Meanwhile, QR reports Jim Dunnam (D-Waco) is questioning why the AG’s office said the opinion would be issued in the early evening Friday and ended up being issued at roughly 10:15 p.m. I suggested it was just a shameless attempt to deflect press attention, but Dunnam seems to think there may have been some last-minute edits — and he says he’s asking for all documents and correspondence between Craddick and Abbott’s offices. Craddick’s spokeswoman said the speaker would make the material available to Dunnam.

Darn it. I got my Henrys confused. My apologies. Victor Morales actually ran against Ciro Rodriguez and Henry Cuellar (now both Dems serving in D.C.) in the 2006 Democratic primary for the remodeled CD 28 — not in the November 2006 special election against Ciro (the current Rep. from CD 23) and Henry Bonilla (the former Republican Rep. from CD 23).

Here are the results from the Texas Secretary of State:

March 2006
U. S. Representative District 28
Henry Cuellar (I) DEM 24,256 53.09%
Victor Morales DEM 2,943 6.44%
Ciro D. Rodriguez DEM 18,484 40.46%
———–
Race Total 45,683

November 2006
U. S. Representative District 23
August G. “Augie” Beltran DEM 2,647 2.13%
Rick Bolanos DEM 2,564 2.07%
Henry Bonilla (I) REP 60,175 48.60%
Adrian DeLeon DEM 2,198 1.77%
Lukin Gilliland DEM 13,728 11.08%
Ciro D. Rodriguez DEM 24,594 19.86%
Craig T. Stephens IND 3,341 2.69%
Albert Uresti DEM 14,552 11.75%
———–
Race Total 123,799

Ciro won that one in the December runoff. Once again, sorry for the foul-up.

Quite a conversation is going on over at the Burnt Orange Report about Dawnna Dukes, Las Vegas, and the fact that the East Austin Democrat will face challenger Brian Thompson in the March 4 primary.

Thompson, a 27-year-old Austin lawyer, says he will file Tuesday for Texas House District 46. Dukes is the incumbent. She is a ‘Craddick D’ — which as you know means she is one of the dozen or so Democrats that helped Speaker Tom Craddick (R-Midland) overcome multiple attempts on his chair in the last regular session.

BOR Editor Matt Glazer and Dukes Campaign spokesman Colin Strother spent most of last Wednesday trading arguments and accusations after Glazer posted on BOR that Dukes had missed a Medicaid Reform and Legislative Oversight Committee meeting so she could play slots in Vegas (and the post came complete with a camera-phone image of Dukes at a slot machine). Strother and Glazer have posted the majority of the 37 comments to the original article, and the Austinist this weekend picked up the thread, using the gotcha tease, “State Rep. Dawnna Dukes caught playing hooky in Vegas.

It turns out the “gotcha” wasn’t exactly true. Dukes missed the committee meeting because of a prior engagement — attending a National Conference of State Legislatures convention in La Jolla, California. According to Strother, Dukes stopped over in Vegas on her way back, on her own dime. She was in La Jolla when the meeting was held on Thursday, and she was in Vegas on Saturday. An NCSL representative confirmed she was at the conference.

Glazer admits in the thread that he took the picture on Saturday, but he insisted that the incident indicates “a pattern” when taken with Dukes’ unbelievably poorly timed vacation to France in 2005 (which allowed once and current Speaker candidate Jim Pitts (R-Waxahachie) to cast the deciding vote for Rick Perry (and John Sharp’s) property tax cut/school finance plan). Hmmm. This is definitely truthiness at work. Interesting standard for an information source…

Here are a couple of excerpts from Glazer and Strother’s unhappy dialogue:

Strother: I know you don’t like Dukes or approve of her vote for Speaker, but I’m shocked that you would use incorrect information, supposition, and baseless conjecture to say “I don’t like Dawnna”. Maybe it is because you… have an interest in her opponent. I don’t know. I would tell you that you are well respected as a blogger, but not for garbage like this.

Glazer: Why don’t you talk about why she voted for Speaker Craddick. As the chief spokes person for Turner, Pena, Flores, Dukes, and other Craddick D’s what is the reason all of them voted for the ultra-conservative Craddick? Was it because nobody in their district knows who Craddick is or because they don’t care what their constituents think? Our readers would like to know.

BOR contributor ‘Pedro’ makes a decent plea in the midst of the back-and-forth between Glazer and Strother:

You guys gotta grow up a little too. Legislators miss committee meetings all the time. You can ding someone for it. But you can’t act like it’s the most vile betrayal an elected official has ever perpetrated on his or her constituency.

Strother says Glazer recruited Thompson to run against Dukes, and he notes the facts that HD 46 is a majority African-American district and Dukes is literally the only African American representative from Travis County, while Thompson is Anglo.

“We can’t control who gets conned into filing against her,” Strother told me last week. He called Thompson “a young, impressionable guy” and said Thompson had been “sold a bill of goods.”

Glazer says Dukes’ support for Craddick along with missteps like the vacation to France are examples of her poorly serving the district. Thompson told me last week that he believes Dukes’ support for Craddick was ample reason for the voters in HD 46 to turn her out of office.

“I believe every minority group deserves representation, with one exception — Craddick Democrats. I believe being a Democrat and supporting Tom Craddick are mutually exclusive,” Thompson said.

Strother, a former campaign manager and staffer for U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Laredo), has something of a reputation for being rough and tumble with his quotes — but he also has been associated with winning — which generates its own kind of respect in political circles. There is even a list of memorable Strother quotes.

Look for more fireworks from HD 46 between now and March.

For those Texans that never quite got enough of watching Phil Gramm get pushed by an unknown schoolteacher who ran a shoestring campaign and traversed the state in his pickup truck — testing the limits of grassroots politics in the face of a mammoth political machine — guess what? Victor Morales is back. And this time he’s aiming for a seat in the Texas House.

Morales says he expects to file for House District 4 just after Christmas, and this time he has in his sights Rep. Betty Brown (R-Kaufman).

Morales described Brown as a cog in Craddick’s machine.

“She pretty much does what Tom Craddick and the Republican Party tell her to,” Morales told me over the weekend.

HD 4 is just southeast of Dallas and includes Kaufman and Henderson counties along with the communities of Kaufman, Terrell, and Athens. Morales says he knows the district leans Republican — but he noted that plenty of Republicans are “very upset with Betty. ‘She doesn’t do anything, Victor,’” he said one Republican recently told him.

Morales said despite his two failed bids for U.S. Senate and a 2006 attempt against Ciro Rodriguez and Henry Bonilla in a special election for the U.S. House, he wants to test the water again.

“Is that energy still out there? I’m going to find out,” he said. “I’ll start by talking to a lot of people that Betty will never meet.”

At one point (after his primary loss to Ron Kirk), Morales denounced the Democratic Party and said he was an independent. But it appears liberals like Charles Kuffner are ready to forgive him (and Kuff points out what is perhaps a widespread sentiment within the party, that the Texas House might have been a better place for Morales to start anyway).

Morales said shortly thereafter the GOP tried to woo him.

“The Republicans came at me and said, ‘What would it take, Victor?’” he said. He said there was nothing the GOP could do to make him join ranks behind George W. Bush. “The idea that I would have to take a picture with George Bush… Oh, man. I won’t even go there.”

Morales said he was angry just after the loss to Kirk because he felt the state party tried to cheat him. He still proudly talks about his independence — and he’s still refusing money from political action committees (and he’s still teaching — he’s in his fifth year at a school in Kaufman).

“I still love what I do,” he said.

On some issues Morales comes down to the right of many Democrats, which may well make him competitive against Brown in HD 4. But he points out that his positions have not changed, and he scoffs at politicians he says just stick a finger in the air “to find out which way the wind is blowing.”

He says he believes the Constitution protects the right to own a gun, although he supported the Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban passed under Clinton.

“I own a gun,” he said. “I’ve got the second amendment memorized.”

And Morales said he is “leaning” toward a pro-choice position, although “there’s too many abortions… Roe v. Wade is the boss. I would not have the government tell the woman what to do with her own body.”

Morales says he does not expect a challenger in the Democratic primary, and when the time comes to go toe-to-toe with Brown, he expects to be able to make inroads with what he called “common-sense Republicans” in the district.