The Texas Observer

All over the state tomorrow, Democrats will gather for state senatorial district conventions. Here is an “unofficial” list from the state Democratic party of their locations.

This is the second stage in a three-tier process to determine the distribution of 67 delegates. Here’s a refresher on the process. On caucus night as many as a million Democrats participated in Texas. Here are unofficial results from the caucus by senatorial district.

Winnowing down a million to 67 is akin to shoving a donkey through a garden hose. The March 4 caucuses weren’t always pretty and tomorrow promises more potential for ugliness.

After asking and being refused a delay in the conventions, the Clinton campaign assured reporters that they would not be conducting systematic challenges to delegates. Not so much. Daily Kos reports that they are systematically challenging Obama delegates, particularly in Dallas. The Clinton campaign is saying they are just helping their partisans.

More than likely, rather than top-down shenanigans from the campaigns, we will witness more of the run-of-the-mill disorganization and individual bias that has marked this process so far. Our crack team of Observer reporters will be giving you the blow-by-blow from a number of locations tomorrow.

Here’s a taste to get you started:

Tarrant County

In Tarrant County, party officials are trying to work through numerous logistical entanglements before tomorrow’s county and senate district conventions. The biggest problem is that the Senate District 10 convention in Fort Worth has way too many delegates signed up to attend – as in 800 too many. The district is allocated roughly 3,700 delegates. But somehow on election night, the caucuses in Fort Worth named nearly 4,500 delegates. Many precincts just named too many delegates. That means 800 folks can’t get seated at tomorrow’s convention. The credentials committee has been meeting on Friday to figure out how to resolve the problem by tomorrow morning. The two main proposals are allowing the disputed precincts to re-caucus tomorrow morning. Or the credentials committee can simply cull through the delegate list to pick the folks who can get seated. Either way, it doesn’t sound like a fun Friday night for the volunteers on the credentials committee.

Bexar County

Angie Garcia, temporary chair of the Democratic Bexar County convention in Senate District 26, said that there will be a few challenges to delegates at her convention but she couldn’t name how many. “Mostly the challenges will be based on procedure – that something wasn’t done right during the caucus,” she says. “We are pretty clear on the delegates though. We are going to have the delegates for Hillary.”

Garcia said the credentials committee will meet tomorrow starting around 8:30 and will sort out any challenges that have already been presented or that come up during the sign in process. Garcia cited a precinct on the west side of San Antonio that turned in its delegate counts for Obama but not for Clinton. “The Clinton people were there but they met in a separate location and now nobody can find the Clinton list,” says Garcia. “ Obviously we will have to figure that out at the convention. We may have to have a mini caucus.”

Ian Straus, temporary chair of the convention in Senate District 25 in San Antonio says he expects at least 2,000 people to show up. “In previous conventions I chaired we had 50 people and in the last one 30 people,” he says. “We’ve never had anything like what we are expecting tomorrow.”

Straus says there will be some contested delegates and that the credentials committee has already started meeting on those delegates. “They won’t adjudicate until tomorrow, however,” he says.

Straus says his main fear is that people will lose their patience with the process which could take all day. “I don’t want people to think they can drive up at 1:45 p.m. then sign in and participate,” he says. “First of all there is nowhere to park. The building was built before there were cars. That’s why I am encouraging people to get here early,” Straus says.

On the positive side, he says the convention is better organized than in previous years. “We are going to have 10 times the people we are used to so we started early,” he says. “Now we really need to look ahead and try to keep some of these people who come to the convention involved in the Democratic process. We really need to take the state back from the Republicans,” says Straus. “For me it’s going to be a very exciting event.”

If you plan on going to any of the conventions check the Bexar County Democratic Web site for any last minute changes.

Harris County

The folks over at the Harris County Democratic Party have been working overtime the past few days. They don’t have a full grasp of the challenges to delegates so far. This is what they told us:

SD 4: No challenges but about 20 people were removed for non-qualification.

SD 7: Had fewer than 20 challenges.

SD 11: Had about 8.

SD 15: Had 40.

SD 17: Had fewer than 20.

Information is still missing on two important districts: SD 13 (Sen. Rodney Ellis’ delegate-rich district) and SD 6 (where Clinton got closest to Obama on election night in Harris County).

(Update below)

We don’t usually write about rumors but this one has too many implications for what remains of our civil liberties to ignore. We have received a few emails and calls today about the possibility that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff may post notice in the Federal Register Friday that he is going to waive all environmental rules to build the border wall in South Texas. The waiver may blanket Texas or the entire Southern border from California to Texas in a giant mega-waiver.

Chertoff has that ability thanks to Congress and the Real ID Act of 2005. He has already waived environmental rules in California and Arizona to put the border wall on the fast track. His goal is to have 670 miles of fence built along the Southern border by December 31, 2008. In an Observer blog last week, we wrote about lawsuits filed by Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife challenging Chertoff’s imperial powers.

We called Homeland Security in Washington D.C. in an attempt to get confirmation on the waiver. A spokesperson for the agency Amy Kudwa would not confirm a waiver in the pipeline, and said Homeland Security had no announcements today about a waiver.

Next we called Noah Kahn, a refuge program manager for Defenders of Wildlife, in Washington D.C.. Kahn said he had heard several credible rumors swirling around D.C. in the last few days about a waiver in the pipeline.

“It would not surprise me if there is a Real ID waiver coming soon because Chertoff has a history of waiving laws and it’s no secret that the border wall is not appropriate for a wildlife refuge,” Kahn says. “We have heard the waiver could be coming Friday which is a day typical for these kinds of press announcements since it is the end of the week and the press won’t be paying as much attention.”

Kahn says he thinks a waiver in Texas is more likely than a sea-to-shining-sea waiver from California to Texas. “That would be an even more unnecessary abuse of power,” he said.

The current mood in Congress is lukewarm when it comes to stopping the construction of the border wall. “It’s not politically palatable to oppose the border wall in an election year,” he says. “Those in Congress who are against the wall are remaining silent about it, because as long as it is linked with illegal immigration they don’t want to touch it.”

While the Real ID act allows Chertoff to waive federal laws, it will be interesting to see how the waiver impacts constitutional law. Dr. Eloisa Tamez and several other Texas landowners are currently fighting to keep their land from being condemned by Homeland Security. They assert that Chertoff is violating their right to due process under the fifth amendment of the Constitution.

Update

No sign of a waiver being filed today (Friday) in the Federal Register. A good source in Washington D.C. shared some important information that language was passed in the appropriations bill restricting any funding for the fence until 15 days after notice is published in the Federal Register.  We’ll keep you posted if we hear anything from Washington. Also, thanks to Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr, of Border Ambassadors for sounding the alarm about the possibility of an impending waiver in the pipeline.

Buddy Garcia, Gov. Perry’s pick to head the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, apparently thinks everything is fine and dandy with Texas’ air quality.

“When the Environmental Protection Agency announced its new ozone standard, critics across the state jumped to the conclusion that the air we currently breathe is unhealthful,” Buddy wrote in an op-ed yesterday in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

So, Texas’ air is healthy then? Garcia never answers that question directly but he does tout the strides Texas has made in reducing air pollution. True enough - there have been sizable cuts of some pollutants - but that doesn’t mean we now breath clean air. His argument is kinda like the two-pack-a-day smoker who cuts back to one and declares victory.

The statistics Buddy cites to prove his point are misleading, if not specious, according to Matthew Tejada, executive director of the Galeston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention (GHASP). For example, Garcia claims nitrogen oxide emissions from industrial sources in Houston have dropped from 479 tons per day in 2000 to 157 tons per day in 2009. “There aren’t any number out there that would justify that [claim] other than industry’s own self-reported statistics,” said Tejada. Houston has managed to modestly reduce nitrogen oxides, smog-forming gases, but that’s primarily from more efficient vehicles on the road, Tejada said.

Where Buddy really gets into trouble is when he starts bashing the EPA’s decision to reduce the ozone standard from 85 parts per billion to 75 ppb.

Garcia wrote that he was opposed to the reduction. “It’s not that we don’t want further air quality improvements,” he wrote, “but the health benefits of lowering the current standard are debatable… If the yardstick by which we judge air quality is based on anything other than clear-cut scientific proof, we are using the wrong measurement.”

While it’s true that it is next to impossible to quantify exactly how many lives are saved from lowering a smog standard, the EPA’s scientific clean air panel estimated that a standard of 75 parts per billion would prevent 1,300 to 3,500 premature deaths a year. However, the panel members unanimously urged at least a 65 ppb limit, which would prevent an annual 3,000 to 9,200 deaths. The EPA administrator Stephen Johnson ignored the experts’ consensus and decided, somewhat arbitrarily, to go with 75ppb.

In short: There is no scientific debate on whether reducing ozone would save thousands of lives, especially those of the young, ill, and old. It would. There is a policy debate to be had about the trade-off between saving lives and hampering industry. But Buddy, it seems, is more concerned with the latter:

As emission limits become more stringent, control costs rise. Unnecessary regulation costs jobs and raises the price of all kinds of goods and services. The people most adversely impacted are not the wealthy but those who live paycheck to paycheck, or lose their jobs, or never get the jobs that would’ve been created if not for additional, burdensome regulation.

This is the kind of anti-regulatory, pseudo-populist claptrap that people at industry-funded think tanks are paid six figures to come up with, but, hey, Buddy does it for free. While the presidential candidates are talking about creating millions of green-collar jobs, here’s Garcia worrying that asking Texas polluters to clean up their act will be too “burdensome.” The really biting irony is that the clean air improvements Garcia wants us to be proud of are the fruits of hard-nosed regulation, not the munificence of big business.

“What motivated him to write this op-ed?,” asks Tejada, who has submitted his own rebuttal piece to the Startlegram. “It doesn’t achieve any policy purpose… What is he trying to achieve other than trying to mislead the public?”

So maybe step No. 2 in the Texas Democratic prima-caucus won’t be so combative after all.

The leaders of the Hillary Clinton campaign in Texas held a conference call with reporters this afternoon to discuss what they expect from this Saturday’s county/senate district conventions. They struck a remarkably positive and conciliatory tone.

It was just last week that the Clinton campaign asked party officials to postpone the county conventions — the second in the three-tiered caucus process that will award 67 delegates — due to alleged fraud and confusion. Party Chair Boyd Richie said no.

“If I were dictator for the day, we would postpone the conventions for a week,” said Garry Mauro, who’s heading Clinton’s team in Texas. “I am not dictator. The chairman of the party made the decision that the current process could deal with all the confusion. We are dealing with the confusion very well.”

So everything is hunky dory? Not so much. In recent days, Hillary’s campaign rattled off emails calling all lawyers across the nation to converge on Texas and volunteer their time to scrutinize the county conventions.

But, Mauro said the Clinton campaign will not contest the convention process in any broad way, and won’t challenge the seating of any delegates at the county conventions. Individual Clinton supporters may file isolated challenges with each convention’s credentials committee. But, Mauro said, “We won’t be raising any [challenges]. There is no systematic approach that we are taking to challenge anybody on any level.”

He also said the he was comfortable with the party’s actions and that it was unlikely the Clinton campaign would file a lawsuit against the process. The biggest headache will be handling the crowd. “It’s organized chaos. The biggest problem will be somebody will show up at a meeting place and the electricity isn’t turned on. Somebody will show up at another place and the doors won’t be unlocked. This is a huge undertaking on a massive scale using all volunteers. So I think the only problems you’re going to have is the scale of the number of people participating.”

The campaign estimates it has about 45,000 delegates (and 30,000 alternates) at the 250 conventions to be held Saturday. The Barack Obama campaign has at least that number, and perhaps more. Despite news accounts that Obama won the caucus, the process isn’t finished, Mauro pointed out. Who wins the most delegates out of the caucus half of the Texas two-step will largely depend on which campaign ushers the most supporters to the county conventions on Saturday.

Said Mauro, “By Saturday, we should have an 85-90 percent certainty of how the delegates split out.”

The mysterious and sometimes convoluted democratic process continues in Texas Saturday with the Democratic county conventions. We plan to fan out again across the state to see the process firsthand. Most party long timers say this will be the biggest turnout they’ve seen in decades — if ever. In some places like San Antonio, it looks like the sign in process could take awhile since they expect at least 2,000 delegates to show up. Their sign in starts at 8:30 a.m. but the actual convention doesn’t start until 2:30. Luckily, the weather is supposed to be nice this weekend, so bring your sunscreen.

Here are some helpful Web sites if you are looking for the who, what, when and where for this Saturday. Predictably, you have to gather bits of information from various sites to get the whole picture. Or you can always just show up and see where the day leads you. Increasingly, I am more inclined to the latter. I just want to show up and drink in the Democratic-ness of it all. On the Texas Democrats site you can click on “Party Rules” on the menu bar then go down to article VII. This lays out how the delegates are chosen for the state convention in Austin June 6-7 and the national convention in Denver August 25 - 28, 2008.

Daily Kos has a good round up.
The Texas Democratic Party info. Harris County Dems have useful info too.

Observer readers, perhaps more than most, are accustomed to reading the ugly truth, but never let it be said that our writers don’t enjoy making stuff up, too. Case in point: The Truth, the debut novel by former Observer editor and current contributor Geoff Rips, who also happens to sit on the board of the Texas Democracy Foundation, which publishes the Observer, but who has never, ever looked over our shoulder as we pecked out a blog post promoting his book. Honest.

Rips will be signing copies at Austin’s BookPeople (603 N. Lamar) on Thursday, March 27, at 7 p.m., then again next month at San Antonio’s The Twig (5005 Broadway) on Wednesday, April 30, at 5 p.m.

Want a taste before committing your precious time? Check out the excerpt we published in our January books issue.

You know these are heady days for Texas Democrats when there’s a heated primary fight to serve on the Texas Railroad Commission. In recent years, Democrats were lucky if they fielded even one candidate for down-ballot statewide races such as Texas Supreme Court and Railroad Commission.

This year there were three candidates. The two top finishers will compete in a runoff on April 8 for the right to face GOP incumbent Michael Williams in the fall.

The unusually crowded Democratic field wasn’t the only peculiar aspect of this race. Democratic voters eschewed the (relatively) bigger names and backed the low-budget, populist candidate: Mark Thompson, a former Austin cop who works as a disabilities rights advocate and therapist for blind children. In a distant second was Dale Henry, who has a wealth of industry savvy and campaign experience. Art Hall’s slew of big-name endorsements led to a third-place finish.

Hall, an investment banker and a former San Antonio city council member, gathered the endorsements of Henry Cisneros, Dolph Briscoe, and several daily newspapers, but still came in third, with 466,758, or 24 percent of the vote. Henry, a former Republican and industry professional, placed second with 539,300 votes — nearly 28 percent.

But it was Thompson, whose ethics commission filings show he only spent all of $150 on his entire campaign (through Feb. 24, anyway), drew 940,722 votes statewide — just over 48 percent and a mere two percent shy of winning the nomination outright. Henry and Thompson will face each other in the runoff.

So what happened?

Maybe it was the the heavy turnout or the Obama/Hillary dynamic. Or maybe it was simply voter ignorance. Most people just don’t know and don’t give much of a damn what the Railroad Commission does (hint: it ain’t trains).

But Observer readers know that the three-member commission has a hold on several important levers of power and responsibility, including regulation — and we use that term loosely — of the oil and gas industry in Texas. Commissioners enjoy a six-year term and occupy an office that even the late, great Bob Bullock once craved, at least according to biographers Dave McNeely and Jim Henderson.

Thompson says that voters responded to his message. “What happened was I was talking about the issues,” he said. “Art Hall and Mr. Henry just talked about themselves.”

Thompson said before the election he did some amateur polling and was told by voters that they were supporting him because of his call for reform — and, he added, because they didn’t want an investment banker (Hall) and they feared Henry was too close to the industry. There’s also the fact, which Thompson didn’t mention, that Henry first ran for the commission in the Republican primary in 2004.

“None of these candidates are right on the issues,” Thompson said. “Those guys… They forgot one thing. They forgot the people… I supposedly had no knowledge, but what did I do? I fought for the people.”

Henry proudly talks about his campaign to unseat GOP Commissioner Elizabeth Ames Jones in 2006 (as a Democrat). Jones beat Henry by 12 percentage points.

“It just thrills me to death that Mark has done as well as he has,” Henry said. But he said that he stopped in Thompson’s hometown of Hamilton, Texas, on a recent campaign swing and noted that nobody he talked to seemed to know who Thompson is. “This is back to the Obama phenomenon,” Henry said, suggesting that the huge turnout among “young folks” helped Thompson.

Henry is 76, but, he notes, “I look about 55.” He said his age should not be a concern to voters and added he could see himself serving two terms. Thompson is 48.

Thompson said what matters about Henry is not his age necessarily, but the fact that in two previous elections he has failed to win the office.

“He’s already been beat twice,” Thompson told me.

The one thing both candidates agree on? They both think GOP incumbent Williams is vulnerable.

“Williams has sold out to the industry,” Thompson said.

“He’s vulnerable,” Henry says, “because Democrats are coming out to vote.”

Maybe so — but first they’ll have to make up their minds in this curious statewide runoff.