Snake Oil

Patrick Michels

Gov. Rick Perry helps kick off this year's National Day of Prayer

Rick Perry came before a devout crowd this morning, relaxed, well-dressed and in good spirits, to kick off a nationwide campaign with a prayer gathering in Texas.

That much may sound like a scene from nine months ago, but it happened just this morning.

Instead of the tens of thousands fasting at Reliant Stadium last summer, Perry spoke to a crowd of 600 who scooped up scrambled eggs in an Austin Doubletree Hotel ballroom. This time, the campaign is the National Day of Prayer, a 61-year-old tradition in which Perry has played a recurring bit part.

Perry’s star may shine a little dimmer now in some circles after his brief slapstick dance across the national stage. But, today, he was among friends.

And his message hasn’t changed much either since the day he joined in prayer to restore God’s place leading the nation.

“I pray for America to go through another period of enlightenment,” Perry said. He prayed that America will be able to look back one day on the times we’re living in and see, “that’s the ‘oops’ moment.”

He stuck with it for a bit, departing from his prepared speech to really drive home that image of a regular guy, prone to screw-ups like the rest of us, seeking forgiveness from above.

“Every one of us has ‘oops’ moments every day,” Perry said. “America may not forgive you for it, but God will.”

Judging by the warm reception he got from the crowd, this was one room that didn’t want to hear his apologies.

“Without God in your life, what a hollow existence it would be,” he said.

But the day wasn’t just about putting God in your life, but in the life of everyone else, too: your neighbor, sure, and your local school principal, your taco purveyor, commanding officer, newscaster, you name it. This was not about the ecumenical “National Day of Prayer” passed by Congress in 1952, but a narrower event promoted by the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a group led by Shirley Dobson, with ties to Focus on the Family and other big-name conservative evangelicals. The task force’s prayer day efforts were embraced by Ronald Reagan and both presidents Bush. Like Bill Clinton, President Obama has opted for more inclusive national prayer days, leaving the group feeling snubbed.

They pray that the “seven centers of power” will fall into God’s hands—a slight variant of the “Seven Mountains” of society approach used by the New Apostolic Reformation movement—the folks that threw such support behind Perry and The Response last fall.

Nick Vujicic, who was born with no arms or legs, delivers a call for fellow Christians to win their neighbors’ souls for God.

Perry got a warm enough welcome, but even he couldn’t compete with the morning’s big speaker Nick Vujicic, the 29-year-old Australian preacher born without arms or legs. Vujicic has built a motivational ministry around his own story of finding purpose in God—and made tabloid headlines earlier this year when he was spotted on the beach with his wife on their Hawaiian honeymoon.

This morning, he considered the plight of this nation, and that of his birthplace.

“Australia is an atheistic country,” he said. A few in the audience gasped. He lives in Los Angeles now, and he says even that’s a step closer to holiness. “Here, I think there is something going on, a stirring of hearts I’ve witnessed across the nation.”

Vujicic took Perry’s line about the hollowness of a godless existence, and did him one better. “You can have the best economy in the world, yet have a hollow existence.” We must pray, he said, “that the keys to this nation get given back to the Lord Almighty.”

That was the idea all the way through. The audience shouted the words “UNDER GOD” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Ed Horne, CEO of Wilshire Homes, emceed the prayer event, which closed with a round of prayers for all seven centers of power, led by a representative from each.

“We’re blessed to live in a country where capitalism allows us to own and operate businesses,” offered Rudy’s Bar-B-Q and Mighty Fine Burgers owner Ken Schiller in a prayer for the business realm.

Pflugerville High School principal Kirk Wrinkle prayed for the schools. Williamson County Commissioner Cynthia Long—who hasn’t exactly cultivated a reputation for compassion—prayed for officials in government. More prayers followed for family, church and the military.

“I just pray for celebrities, Father, everyone in the media who is high profile,” offered Kevin James, who works in the San Antonio Express-News’ advertising department. He prayed that journalists may find truth and that celebrities won’t scandalize the rest of us too badly by carrying on the way they do. “Let us not be offended by those who are not believers and do not know you and do not know truth,” he said. “They do not know. They are blind people bumping into walls.”

Tomorrow, the National Day of Prayer roll-out will extend across the country, including big Texas rallies in Hidalgo County and the Bell County Expo Center.

As he has in the past, Perry declared the first Thursday of May a “day of prayer” in Texas. While he was at it, he made Vujicic an honorary Texan, presenting the speaker with a giant framed proclamation.

Onstage, Horne welcomed the Australia-born California-dweller into our loving family at last: “You’re in God’s country now.”

Perry joined Great Hills Baptist Church’s David Kehrer and Central Texas NDP coordinator Evelyn Davison for “God Bless America,” to close out the prayer event.

In some ways, Tatum ISD is a lot like any other rural East Texas school district. About 2,000 students attend its schools 20 miles southeast of Longview, where livestock and football are big news. But because Tatum is also home to the Martin Creek Lake Power Plant, with an appraised value of nearly $1 billion, Tatum is among the richest districts in the state.

So, like the wealthy enclaves of Dallas’ Highland Park and San Antonio’s Alamo Heights, Tatum ISD sends a portion of its local tax revenue to the state under Texas’ “Robin Hood” plan. Like a handful of other districts, Tatum sends more than half its local tax revenue to the state to fund poorer districts.

School districts also employ another tax—one used to cover the school bonds that typically pay for new construction. That tax is called “interest and sinking”—I&S to those who deal with this stuff—and thanks to a legislative compromise, I&S isn’t subject to Robin Hood recapture.

That creates an incentive for wealthy districts like Tatum to cover their costs through bond issues and avoid sending the money to poorer districts. 

Over the last 12 years, the district says, it has avoided $52 million in recapture payments by issuing bonds. The Tatum school board approved a new bond package in February that will “maximize” funding by avoiding recapture on $5.5 million in technology, transportation and maintenance expenditures. “The $29,990,000 cost of this bond would cost approximately $57,670,000 in M&O revenue, avoiding sending $27,680,000 to the State,” the district announced in a press release in April. It goes before voters later this month.

Avoiding recapture is good news for Tatum residents who want to see their money spent on their own kids. 

But to poorer districts that could never raise so much money on their own, it looks like a cheat—particularly, some school finance watchers say, because rich districts are increasingly skilled at squirreling away their costs in recapture-proof bonds.

“In the past, I&S expenditures have been considered long-term building supplies, tables and chairs when you’re building a new building, but not tables and chairs that you need to replace in the course of normal maintenance and operation,” says Ray Freeman, deputy executive director of the Equity Center, an advocate for poor districts.

State law says I&S money can be used for the “construction, acquisition, and equipment of school buildings in the district”—and “equipment” can mean many things. So far, rich districts have been stretching the definition unchallenged. Eanes ISD, encompassing the wealthy Austin suburb of Westlake, bought iPads for its high school students with bond money.

That’s why the Equity Center has gotten so interested in the trend right now. It may challenge this loophole in court. The richer the district, they’ve found, the more the district tends to rely on bond money. The Equity Center contends these tax swaps are just another way the system lets rich districts gain an advantage on poor ones.

SpaceX/Roger Gilbertson

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket with Dragon capsule, on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

A lot more people will know the name “SpaceX” by the end of this month, after the Southern California-based rocket builder becomes the first private company to launch a rocket on a mission to dock with the International Space Station.

It’s an unmanned resupply mission, but it’s one more big step for a company that’s quickly becoming the big fish in the private spaceflight movement, charging past a handful of other well-funded rocket startups, and even aerospace giants like Boeing. The decade-old industry represents not just the promise of a cheaper space shuttle replacement, but of indulging new ideas about why we go to space: zero-gravity science, space tourism and mineral production in space. (As early as next Tuesday, we might learn that Ross Perot Jr. is getting into asteroid mining.)

As with privatization in other arenas, much of this is about really rich folks hoping to become fantastically wealthy. (SpaceX is run by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. Other big NewSpace entrepreneurs include Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, video game mogul John Carmack and Sir Richard Branson.) But even that’s a healthier driving force than the international arms races that have fueled NASA so far.

Managing the space program has also been about which states get the jobs, and Texas has been pretty lucky on that count. Earlier this week, we found out SpaceX might be throwing a little more work Texas’ way: They’re looking at building a commercial spaceport a few miles from Brownsville, where they could launch up to 12 times a year.

The FAA is beginning an environmental impact study on the Brownsville launch site, which could take a few years. While Cameron County has beaten out other Texas spots hoping for the company’s business, it’s still just one of three locations SpaceX is considering, along with Florida and Puerto Rico.

So local boosters hoping to seal the deal want to see Texas make a strong play for the company’s affections—both at the local level, where some homeowners feel blindsided by SpaceX’s plans, and in the governor’s economic development office.

Gilbert Salinas, executive vice president of the Brownsville Economic Development Council, says it was the governor’s office that first tipped him off to SpaceX’s interest in launching out of Cameron County, about a year ago. He says they’ve been busy getting to know the private space industry since then.

“We’re newcomers when it comes to the aerospace industry. We had never worked these kinds of projects,” Salinas says. “Brownsville and Matamoros, we’re a manufacturing hub, traditionally. … Once we found out what the project was and what they’re trying to do, it made perfect sense.”Half a century ago, Brownsville was in the running to be NASA’s main launch site, before Cape Canaveral got the nod.

“Life kind of came back full circle—here we are a little over 50 years later, looking at the possibility of another launch site again,” he says. “We are living in extremely exciting times at the moment, and this project is what we call a game-changer. It could totally change the face of our community.”

SpaceX, which already has a test facility 20 miles outside Waco, would launch suborbital missions from the Brownsville site, and Salinas says it would be the country’s first private commercial launch site.

The FAA could still pull the plug on the Cameron County plans—Salinas says he knows protecting the local sea turtle population could be a concern, though launch sites on Florida have dealt with those concerns before too—but barring environmental concerns, the decision will come down to where SpaceX wants to launch.

“We are in stiff competition” with the two remaining finalists, Salinas says. “Florida being Florida, they won’t want to let this one go, because this is what they do—and they don’t want to lose this to Texas.”

That’s why Texas has to sweeten the deal for SpaceX, says Rick Tumlinson, a long-time evangelist for private spaceflight, and founder of the Texas Space Alliance.

Tumlinson says too much political energy is spent on protecting Texas’ old space interests, more focused on securing more jobs and federal contracts than on science and exploration. He says lawmakers see space startups as a threat to their short-sighted goals.

“Commercial spaceflight activities are happening in Texas in spite of the actions of officials at the state and our representatives in Washington,” he says. “The congressional delegation from Texas are still fighting for the rights of blacksmiths in the period of the automobile.”

The governor’s office won’t comment on pending negotiations, but Tumlinson says the state hasn’t made a priority of competing for space business, and you can tell because just one person in the economic development office is tasked with recruiting space business. He says it’s tough to compete when Florida funds a multimillion-dollar entity to grow that state’s space community. Virginia just committed state funding to a private spaceport.

“There needs to be an anteing up. We put together packages to try and expand airport packages, other sorts of economic or transport sorts of hubs. It only makes sense that we do that for what will be the future transportation hub. You’ve got to look big here, and to me it’s sort of ironic that Texas isn’t doing that here.”

The Texas House Redistricting Committee spent Tuesday considering one of its interim charges: whether 15 seats are enough for the State Board of Education.

Committee chair Burt Solomons is concerned that such a small board makes for districts that are far too large. Today, each member represents about 1.7 million people in their decisions about curriculum and textbook standards.

“You need to do something so there’s a sense that you’re representing the people in your district and the children in the school districts and the parents of school children,” Solomons told the San Antonio Express-News’ Gary Scharrer.

Scharrer does a great job explaining the debate, and it’s one that’ll be with us for a while since the next round of redistricting isn’t till 2021. State Rep. Mike Villarreal tells the Express-News that the small, two-thirds white board doesn’t allow enough minority participation, while firebrand blogger Donna Garner says that the push to expand the board is really about trying to water down the power of its Real Conservative members.

Board members are split on the move, he writes, but outgoing member Terri Leo speaks for a majority of board members:

Terri Leo, R-Spring, is retiring after 10 years. She is against board expansion because, she fears, more members will make it harder to reach decisions on complicated issues with limited time and “too many chiefs at the table.”

“The Legislature has months to deliberate on an issue,” Leo said. “With plans to have the SBOE meeting only four times a year, for only two or three days — and one of those days reserved for public testimony — I don’t see how in the world we could reach a consensus on a multitude of issues in that short time frame with more members.”

The State Board of Education once had 27 seats “and failed for that very reason,” Leo said.

The decision to shrink the SBOE came in 1984, part of one of the most sweeping public education reforms in Texas history, led by a Select Committee on Public Education created by Democratic Gov. Mark White and led by Ross Perot. Shaking up the SBOE was just one of their recommendations, and far from the most controversial.

The committee’s recommendations—including a new state testing regime for grades three, six and 12, a 22-student cap for early elementary grades, and the “No Pass, No Play” policy for extracurriculars—ended up in a sprawling reform bill that year. Though the package also included a pay hike for teachers, it was a costly fight for Mark White, who was bumped out of office after just one term.

As Leo suggested, the SBOE was a mess in the early ‘80s.

An ungenerous New York Times editorial on the Perot commission suggested that “even Texans are beginning to wonder if an education centered on football and fundamentalist obscurantism is the best way to prepare their children for life in the 21st century.”

The Times pointed out the board’s zeal in shielding tender young eyes from anything remotely titillating. “It hasn’t approved a dictionary since 1969 because Merriam-Webster refused to purge its publications of words the board deemed offensive,” the Times wrote. The SBOE also didn’t require biology texts to mention Charles Darwin, but did insist they discuss “alternative theories of evolution.”

One of Perot’s most enduring zingers came at the SBOE’s expense: “Go to Austin and sit in on a meeting,” he said. “It costs you $5 to see a movie that funny. They got people on that board who think the earth is flat.”

How far we’ve come.

At Perot’s suggestion, the Legislature abolished the 27-member SBOE—which had been elected along Congressional district lines—and replaced it by a 15-member board, which for a short time was appointed by the governor.

“Some of the dynamics that we had during that time—they’re very similar to now, in that the board had fallen into kind of the hands of the religious far-right,” says Linda Bridges, president of the American Federation of Teachers’ Texas chapter, who watched the 1984 reforms unfold. “The appointed [board] was nothing more than an attempt to try to move away from elements that had taken over the elected body.”

Former U.S. Energy Secretary Charles Duncan, who sat on the Perot commission, was one of the appointees to the new board. Speaking from his Houston office Tuesday, Duncan said there was no science behind the new number of districts. “We thought 15 would be a good number,” he says. “We had a difficult time on some issues, even with 15.”

Four years later, Texas voters decided to do away with gubernatorial appointments for the SBOE and return to a directly elected board, but the 15 big districts remained.

“I’m not sure that the number was that big a deal—they didn’t want too many. Most of the debate was, you don’t want it too unwieldy,” Bridges says. “The restructuring that went on was really more about trying to negate the impact of the folks that had taken over the board—which is much like the debate today.”

Except that today, the Legislature’s looking at reforming the board by making it bigger.

“I think it’s not so much the size of the board, as it is how the board operates and who’s on the board, and what authority they have,” Bridges says. “The main power the board has today is about curriculum, and that becomes the battleground. We should be talking about, what are the rules they have to follow on input, instead of negating the experts” and making calls on curriculum based on ideology.

“To me,” Bridges says, “that’s probably more important than the number on the board.”

Portrait of Ross Perot by Allan Warren/Wikimedia Commons

When the Legislature reconvenes next year, some of the questions before lawmakers will include the following:

• whether they’d prefer to report more or less of their personal finances to the state;
• whether those details should be easier or harder for the public to access;
• and whether they’d rather face lighter or tougher penalties for their financial misdeeds.

That’s all because next session the Texas Ethics Commission is up for sunset review, the once-every-12-years process that puts state agencies under the microscope and lets lawmakers restructure them as they see fit.

It’s a sweet deal for members of the Legislature: they get to name the terms by which they’re policed. They get to decide what does and doesn’t make them corrupt.

The first big step in the Sunset process wrapped up on Tuesday, when Sunset commissioners got a look at their staff’s evaluation of the Ethics Commission. Now, members of the Sunset commission—five members of the Senate and five from the House—get to review and edit the staff’s work before releasing the final Sunset report in early June. Next session, some version of those recommendations will turn up in a Sunset bill for the agency, which lawmakers can tweak before finalizing the changes.

The Ethics Commission, charged with policing office-holders and candidates’ finances, already operates with questionable backbone, as a report from the Center for Public Integrity detailed last month: There’s no separate division dedicated to investigations and enforcement, and tough decisions are ultimately left to political appointees.

Still, not much of that is addressed in the Sunset Commission staff report on the agency, which was presented to commissioners at the Capitol on Tuesday. That report, and the hearing around it, focused on the complaint that the Ethics Commission spends too much of its time penalizing lawmakers for clerical errors and not enough time pursuing major ethical breaches—the oft-repeated shorthand of that complaint is that they’ve been “going after the minnows instead of the sharks.”

Other suggestions from Sunset staff include updating the Ethics Commission’s strained and outdated tech infrastructure, and making its data more searchable and user-friendly.

The Sunset Commission members—five House members and five senators—generally supported changes suggested in the report, but they were particularly sympathetic to the worry that leaving one little line on a form blank can suddenly get a candidate branded as a scofflaw.

State Rep. Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton, the Sunset chairman, worried that making ethics complaints totally public during the height of the campaign season could leave members open to baseless attacks.

“It’s a complex issue because there’s a right to free speech,” Bonnen said, but we must not forget a candidate’s right avoid getting smeared.

“Sometimes you can endanger some people by making some things so public,” agreed Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, the commission’s vice chair.

While the Sunset commissioners debated the merits of throwing their books wide open, a succession of citizens’ groups made the case for giving the Ethics Commission room to get much, much tougher on enforcing its rules.

Fred Lewis of the Texans Together Education Fund said there’s a basic structural problem with the Ethics Commission, something more serious than what software they use or how they display reports: mounting any investigation requires approval from six out of eight politically appointed board members.

“Frankly the problems we hear today are exactly the same problems that we heard in 2003,” Lewis said, referring to the Ethics Commission’s last bout with Sunset. “There is no civil enforcement agency that looks like or functions like the Ethics Commission, and the reason it doesn’t function is that it’s structurally incapable of functioning. It’s not that it lacks the power; it’s structurally incapable.”

Craig McDonald, executive director of Texans for Public Justice, made that case Tuesday at the Capitol as well. Now, he says he still can’t tell how interested the commission was in what he had to say.

“No one totally played their hands at the hearing,” he says. “If anyone was observing them on Tuesday, you’d think they were pretty much supportive of, at least, the staff recommendations.”

Legislators might happily suggest the Ethics Commission needs to pay less attention to minor infractions and focus on major investigations—to leave the minnows alone and go after the sharks. That works great for lawmakers if they all get to be minnows. “The question,” McDonald says, “is who’s a minnow and who’s a shark.”

Lawmakers won’t be as thrilled about giving the Ethics Commission more power to subpoena people for their investigations, or to conduct random audits. “They don’t want that,” he says. “There’s an undercurrent in the Legislature, they don’t want to give them any more power. They want to take power away.”

“Our solution is get the commissioners out of it. They shouldn’t be judging these people,” McDonald said. “I don’t know that anyone on the commission sat up and said that’s a good idea. I don’t think I heard that.”

“I think a lot of people in the Lege, they don’t like that this stuff is out there, even though it’s public information,” McDonald says.