The Texas Observer

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.

Mikal Watts has announced that he is dropping his bid to take on John Cornyn for the U.S. Senate. One has to wonder if the scandal over Mauricio Celis had anything to do with it.

Here is a statement courtesy of the Quorum Report:

“For the last five months I have been exploring a race for the United States Senate because I believe that our junior senator, John Cornyn, has let Texas down and is more concerned with his cronies and friends in Washington than with what’s best for Texas.

“It is hard to express the gratitude I feel for all the support my family and I have received as we have pursued this effort. I know that our vision for the future of Texas is one that all of our friends and supporters share. It’s been one of the greatest blessings of my life for their faith in me, and for all of their hard work over the past months. While the decision not to seek the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate has been a difficult one, I know that it is the right one for my family at this time.”

The White House has declared this third week of October as — warm up your sense of irony — National ‘Character Counts’ Week, 2007.

“During National Character Counts Week, we underscore our dedication to promoting values for our young people and encourage all Americans to demonstrate good character,” reads the White House statement. “In the community, we all can set good examples and demonstrate the virtues of leadership.”

Ah, yes, those elusive virtues of leadership. How we’ve missed them so.

We won’t subject you to a complete rehash of the many virtues of leadership exhibited by the Keytsone Kops of Character that populate the Bush administration.

But a few of our favorites so far:

One senior aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, sentenced to 30 months in federal prison on four counts of perjury. The dearly departed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales lying to Congress, and lurking over a sick man’s hospital bed to gain approval of a massive illegal eavesdropping program on American citizens. Oh, and lest we forget Vice President, Dick “go f#$k yourself” Cheney, who shot a man in the face, but did eventually emerge from the undisclosed location long enough to issue a public apology after only a day or two.

Not to mention the tortur…oops, we meant the “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

As Harvey Keitel’s character Winston “The Wolf” Wolfe said in Pulp Fiction, “Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character.”

Immediately after his announcement that he was endorsing Rudy Giuliani for president, criticism started pouring in from traditional Republican stalwarts that one normally sees lined up alongside Gov. Rick Perry. From Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson to Operation Rescue’s Randall Terry, the GOP’s cultural conservatives and several of his erstwhile allies excoriated the governor.

Warren Mass over at the John Birch Society took issue with Perry’s sincerity and motives, picking up on the analogy Perry used to explain how he could possibly endorse a pro-gun-control, pro-choice, pro-civil-union candidate like Giuliani. Perry reportedly said he wouldn’t refuse to buy a pickup truck just because it had a part or two he didn’t like.

Mass exclaimed: Lacking respect for the dignity of human life isn’t the same thing as missing chrome wheels, it’s more like missing an engine! (Mass can’t seem to understand why Perry didn’t support fellow Texan Ron Paul.)

Patterson asked Harvey Kronberg’s Quorum Report, “What happened to conservative principles as the first measure of who to support for any office?”

He continued: Is this the same governor who upstaged Arnold in (California) with a message that Republicans need to return to their conservative roots if they expect to win elections? I guess the red meat he was serving in (California) was ‘rare’ as opposed to ‘well done.’ (See the Observer’s take on the speech here and here.)

The wild-eyed anti-abortion activist Randall Terry, not known for his subtlety, delivered perhaps the most scalding attack, comparing Perry to Judas Iscariot:

So-called ‘pro-life Republicans’ that are endorsing Rudy—like TX Governor Rick Perry, or NY (sic) Representative Pete Sessions, are typical treacherous politicians. They have betrayed innocent blood to support a child-killer; we can only wonder what 30 pieces of silver they are seeking.

We noticed when Giuiliani brought Sessions out a few weeks ago. Now Sessions and Perry are being lumped together. Curiously, however, Terry really gets to the point at the end of his diatribe. He says a Hillary Clinton victory in 2008 would be far better for the pro-life movement than Giuliani.

An enemy outside your camp makes you vigilant; an enemy in your tent makes you dead. Hillary would unite us, and she could be defeated in 4 years; Giuliani would destroy the cohesion of the right wing.

There’s something vaguely Freudian about the right’s obsession with Hillary. They keep saying they have to move heaven and earth to stop her, but deep down, they really, really need her. I know, it sounds like bad psychoanalysis—but I’ll just let Randall Terry have the last word:

As horrifying as it seems at first blush, Hillary Clinton would probably be a better president for the Pro-Life movement (and the innocent children we seek to protect) than Rudy Giuliani.

Is there a war on children in this country? When we’re not denying them health insurance or leaving them to wallow in feces, we’re telling them that they have to suffer the sins of their parents - in prison.

Eye on Williamson County turned us onto a video of Williamson County Commissioner Cynthia Long explaining last week why she’s not overly concerned about the morality of the for-profit T. Don Hutto family detention center in Taylor. Long thinks the immigrant families, babies and pregnant women included, at Hutto got it good.

“The conditions at the facility are light years better than what many of these people have come from,” Long said to an audience packed mostly with employees of prison operator Corrections Corporation of America. One guy unironically held a sign that read “T. Don Hutto is the American Way.”

In fact, the conditions have improved recently. But that’s only because the ACLU and the UT Immigration Law Clinic successfully sued the government and people raised hell. Before, conditions stunk.

But do go on, Ms. Long: “The thing we forget is the adults that are being detained have broken the law, and unfortunately as children sometimes we have to suffer with the sins of our parents,” Long continued, digging her hole deeper. “Those children are probably not there by choice. But their parents have made a choice for their family, and they have to deal, they have to be — or suffer, if you can call it that, because of their parents’ choices. But I think the worst choice would be to take that child away from their parents and put them to a situation that would be even worse.”

Is this what Republicans mean when they talk about family values? Is this what Williamson County means when it talks about “gittin’ tuff on crime”? Where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?

Long says the kids “probably” didn’t choose to be at Hutto. They might have, though. One day they woke up and said, “Mommy, let’s go to America so we can be in jail at the T. Don Hutto detention center. Please, mommy, please.”

Aside from being asinine and fairly calloused, Long doesn’t really have her facts straight. The immigrant detainees at Hutto haven’t in fact broken any criminal law. At worst, they have violated civil immigration code. And many of them are asylum-seekers, including Chaldeans fleeing persecution and war in Iraq. If these families are sinners, as Long would have it, then blessed be the sinners. We should be grateful such brave people come to America.

Let’s return now to our discussion of the 16 proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution that will be on the ballot November 6.

Several of the props are bond issues. It’s rare that any off-year proposition to amend the Texas Constitution fails, but bond issues, in particular, almost always pass. That’s a sad statement, I must say, about the process and the Texas Constitution, however…

As painful as the process is, these bond props have to be looked at individually. Rep. Scott Hochberg (D-Houston) has put together the most comprehensive site for evaluating each proposal. Hochberg, while not opposing or endorsing any of the issues except Prop 3 (which he wrote), said he hopes voters will weigh each bond proposal separately.

Proposition 4, if passed, would authorize the Texas Public Finance Authority to issue up $1 billion in bonds to build a new Texas Youth Commission facility, crime labs for DPS, provide funds for the School for the Deaf, School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and the Texas Historical Commission — as well as authorizing the construction of three new prisons for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Scott Henson over at gritsforbreakfast has a post that discusses the weaknesses of Prop 4.

As Henson notes, this proposition is way too broad and authorizes money for things that frankly ought to be paid for in the budget. While the DPS crime labs may be needed, it doesn’t make any sense to authorize such a big lump sum and just leave it to the discretion of the Legislative Budget Board and others on how to spend it.

Texas has too many prisons already. Authorizing three more in a package that is densely packed with money for an assortment of agencies is just unwise. This proposition needs extra scrutiny, and it may be one place where Texas voters should tell their legislature, sorry, but no. Please go back to the drawing board — and if you want to build new prisons, be honest about it. Don’t sugar-coat it by lumping it into a catch-all bond proposal.

Sure the Children’s Health Insurance Bill got vetoed. But at least our leaders in Washington debated this important issue with the utmost intelligence and respect.

To wit, we give you U.S. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), who had this to say today before the House’s unsuccessful attempt to override the president’s CHIP veto: “We don’t have the money to fund the war or the children, but you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement.“

Subtle.

The liberal group Campaign for America’s Future, which breathlessly sent out a statement immediately after the vote that read in part, “156 House Members declared themselves enemies of children and families.” Very subtle.

Not to be outdone, some Republicans have been flinging misleading assertions like fleeing crooks dropping banana peels.

The White House keeps insisting the CHIP bill it vetoed would have opened the program to families earning as much as $83,000 a year. Not true. No state offers CHIP to families with incomes that high. New York did try — asking the feds for an income waiver, but the administration turned them down. OK, counters the White House, but a future administration could approve the waiver.

The word “could” is a marvelous device, isn’t it? Justin Timberlake could be the next president and, sure, he could approve the New York waiver. But none of that has anything to do with the CHIP bill.

Then there’s our own Texas Rep. Joe Barton, who said today that the CHIP bill could cover illegal immigrants. There’s a tiny, almost minuscule problem with that statement: the bill specifically bars illegal immigrants from accessing CHIP.

No matter, says Barton, it’s so easy to obtain a fake social security number that thousands of illegals would obtain CHIP coverage, even though it’s not allowed. Fool proof, Joe.

If it’s that hard to determine who is a citizen, then we have bigger problems, don’t we Joe?

All which makes us think the elected folks in Washington are the ones acting like children… children with excellent health coverage.