Houston, We Have a Problem
October 25th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Garnet Coleman and Sylvester Turner have much in common. They’re both African-American Democratic state reps from Houston. They’ve both been players in the Texas House for years. They agree on most public policy issues. They should be allies.
Yet they’ve fought an increasingly nasty proxy war with each other for months.
The latest escalation came recently when Turner reportedly used a public speech to openly encourage a primary opponent against Coleman.
The growing animosity between the two reps — who seem so similar from a distance — is a result of the political tumult roiling the Texas House.
As chair of the Legislative Study Group, and as a Democratic leader, Coleman believes his function is to oppose the Republican Speaker, Tom Craddick (R-Midland) — and that includes whoever his lieutenants may be.
As a leader of the so-called Craddick D’s and speaker pro tem, Turner has been a key ally of Craddick’s, a stance that has at times alienated him from fellow Democrats. Coleman believes Turner still stands by the speaker’s side, despite Turner’s own announced candidacy for the big chair.
Coleman says Turner has been trying to recruit a candidate to mount a primary challenge in Coleman’s House District 147, a solidly Democratic slice of Central Houston. Coleman said that overtures have been made to Democrats in public in the district.
“All’s fair in love and war… We all have to live with what we do,” Coleman told me. He said he has not attempted to recruit a primary challenger for Turner. “Like I say, I sleep well at night.”
When asked why not, Coleman said, “It’s just a waste of time… Sylvester is very strong in his district.”
Turner didn’t confirm that he had sought an opponent for Coleman. “I’ll let him speculate on that,” he said by phone on Thursday. “Instead of focusing on me, he needs to focus on the people in his district…. No one gets a free pass.”
Oddly, one flash point between Coleman and Turner has been CHIP — the Children’s Health Insurance Program — which they both support. Of course, CHIP has been a hot issue in Texas ever since 2003, when Craddick’s newly installed Republican majority slashed CHIP and other programs that help the poor.
Many Democrats blame Craddick Ds like Turner for enabling cuts to programs like CHIP.
Turner says he led the fight to restore CHIP last session — although he admitted at the time that the restoration was only partial. His speech on the bill was one of the most memorable of the 2007 session. Turner was brought to tears at the front microphone of the House as he told members that the fight over the speaker’s chair wasn’t worth throwing away the restoration of 100,000 Texas children to the ranks of the insured.
Coleman, who helped pass CHIP in 1999 and has long been closely associated with the program, watched as Turner took the lead on restoring some of the CHIP cuts last session. He voted for the bill, but has criticized it for not going far enough.
“A lot of the work that I did was reversed in 2003,” Coleman said. He said the fact that 100,000 kids were put back on the rolls this session after 200,000 were removed “and say it’s whole? It’s not whole. It’s an inoculation … They know it’s a political liability.”
Turner, meanwhile, credits his support of Craddick as pivotal to passing even a partial CHIP restoration. “If it was up to Garnet Coleman, the CHIP bill would not have passed,” Turner said.
Two Democrats with two different approaches to the Craddick speakership. It’s getting increasingly ugly between them.
