Snake Oil

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.

King Street Patriots attorney Brock Akers joined the group's founder Catherine Engelbrecht Monday night.

Indiana lawyer James Bopp, the legal mastermind behind Citizens United, has made it his quest to inject corporate money into state-level politics too, after his success at the federal level.

Last week, his efforts in Texas suffered a setback when Travis County District Judge John Dietz upheld the Texas election law against corporate contributions to candidates, ruling that the Houston tea party group King Street Patriots behaved more like a PAC than a nonprofit group. In 2010, the group worked with Republicans to train poll watchers, and hosted forums for Republican candidates without inviting Democrats.

(Texas elections may not always look like grassroots affairs, but our longstanding law against direct corporate contributions to candidates and officeholders is still on the books.)

The Campaign Legal Center—a New York-based group tracking efforts to open elections to corporate influence—called Dietz’s ruling “the latest in a string of victories against an aggressive nationwide litigation blitz aimed at overturning a host of state campaign finance laws” after Citizens United. The Houston Chronicle ran it under the headline, “Judge rules tea party group a PAC, not a nonprofit.”

But inside the King Street Patriots bubble, needless to say, that’s not how the story got told. Days after issuing a statement pledging to appeal, the group’s Liberty Institute-provided counsel was in Houston Monday night, to tell the gathered Patriots just what the ruling meant.

For starters, said their lawyer Brock Akers, it didn’t mean much. Joined by KSP’s founder Catherine Engelbrecht, he told the crowd this sort of claptrap is just the sort of thing you’d expect from a liberal judge in Austin—but that everyone knew all along that this case would be decided in appeals.

This may have been one silly little battle, but make no mistake about it, Akers said, the stakes in this war remain mighty high.

“This is God’s work here, and God, I believe, ultimately honors the notion that freedom loving people need the opportunity to speak freely and to live in a free society that does not clamp down on their opportunity to say, ‘Hey, that’s not right,’” Akers told Engelbrecht. “So that’s ultimately our risk. that’s where we’re going.”

“What we’re trying to establish in a more clear way than the Citizens United decision was able to establish is an atmosphere for groups like yours,” Akers said, “to participate effectively and proactively under the guise of making sure that everything is up and up in the election process.”

If Dietz’s ruling holds, he said, the Patriots would indeed have to create a PAC to handle their political activity. “That isn’t an entirely negative thing but there are different limits on a PAC that we would prefer not to impose on ourselves, because that’s not what we are.” Chief among those: disclosing where their money’s coming from, which they’ve managed to avoid so far.

By losing, Engelbrecht said, “We could have made vulnerable one of the greatest rebirths of patriotism in the history of our country.”

Engelbrecht said she’d been hearing from all kinds of confused supporters who’d seen the Chronicle headline and took it to mean that the group had suddenly lost its nonprofit status. Folks were wondering about the damages Dietz ruled the group owes the Democrats—twice the value of the group’s illegal political expenditures.

She didn’t sound surprised. Once again, she said, the “mainstream” media was showing its hand. “We saw it in the Trayvon case with MSNBC,” she said, and in recent coverage of President Obama. More than anything, she said, “It’s been a study in the way the narrative is told.”

Patrick Michels

It's tough to get pumped about school finance in Texas these days.

If last year’s Save Texas Schools rally was a show of force—10,000 activists uniting to fight for education—its follow-up at the Capitol last weekend was, well, something else.

There were far fewer people at the group’s second annual rally at the Capitol on Saturday than in March 2011. The ones who did turn up were treated to a program that ran long, veering wildly at times away from school funding. Front-loaded with Democratic lawmakers warning of a partisan onslaught—or warnings that Republicans are turning school funding into a partisan issue—the rally petered out slowly after more than two hours, ending with a long tail of parents and students on the bill to share war stories with a few dozen stragglers.

Since the Legislature cut $5.4 billion from public education last year, Save Texas Schools volunteers have fanned out across the state, holding workshops on school finance, and preparing parents and teachers to hold legislators accountable for their record on education. That’s where they’ve been most active in the past year, and of course, it’s harder to draw teachers and parents back to an empty Capitol, especially just days before STAAR testing in high school.

Saturday’s program began with lawmakers recalling how the Legislature stymied their attempts to put more money into schools. San Antonio Rep. Mike Villarreal and Sen. Leticia Van de Putte both decried the way Republican lawmakers bent to pressure from fiscal conservative groups and then tried to suggest they put more money into the school system, not less.

Van de Putte said there’s no excuse for lawmakers who hide behind tricky math instead of fixing the broken system. “They’re worried about the report card from these little groups when they should be really concerned about the report cards that our kids bring home,” she said. “You see, they don’t like teachers ‘cause they don’t really believe in the job that teachers do, ‘cause they don’t value children.”

State Sen. Wendy Davis recalled her filibuster of a school spending bill that sent the Legislature into a special session last year.

Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, recalled how quickly Gov. Rick Perry dismissed the idea of calling a special session on spending some of the state’s Rainy Day Fund on schools. “Governor Perry recently said, and I quote, I would be stunned if there is an outcry from the people of this state,” Davis said, drawing some of the day’s loudest cheers. “We are crying out, Governor Perry. We believe in opportunity and we are demanding that it come.”

Organizers said they counted more than 4,500 in the crowd over the course of the rally (they counted by handing out one colored dot sticker to each person who came), but Capitol police pegged the attendance at around 1,000 people. (That’s about what I figured for the crowd, at its peak.) Americans for Prosperity Texas’ Peggy Venable was live-trolling the rally on Twitter, and put the attendance at around 500.

After the rally, its organizer Allen Weeks told me he’d figured the crowd would be smaller this time around, now that the enthusiastic multitudes have run headlong into the harsh, unfeeling reality of life at the Lege.
“Last year, it was the shock,” Weeks said, that drew so many demonstrators. “I think also, people thought, ‘Oh if I just come out, it will cause them to change.’ … I think anyone who’s been out here knows, once the machine starts, it’s in motion till the next election.”

“These people are exhausted, and we’ve got people coming in from Alpine and Corpus. So I think you saw 5,000 really hardcore, motivated parents, students, teachers,” he said—the battle-scarred few who still haven’t had enough.

Save Texas Schools leader Allen Weeks

The crowd also included campaign workers drumming up interest in candidates like Congressman Lloyd Doggett, Austin mayor Lee Leffingwell and challenger Brigid Shea, and folks circulating petitions for emergency medical workers’ causes. The rally included a designated time slot for Occupy Austin to lead a callback “mic check” chant, including a call for “justice for Trayvon” and a few minutes on the plight of state-funded higher education.

The popular backlash against state testing was in full effect as well; one of the most quoted lines was Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott’s remark last month that testing has become a “perversion.” State Board of Education member Thomas Ratliff was among the speakers who said the stakes of school testing are simply too high. Some signs in the crowd urged parents to boycott state testing altogether. Texas Parents Opt Out of State Tests director Edy Chamness was in the crowd interest in her cause. “Even if we’re broke, why does everything get cut except for the testing budget?” Chamness asked. “That’s my tax money, in a tube straight to Pearson,” she said, referring to the company with the $500 million contract to handle Texas school exams.

Weeks said he was encouraged by all the satellite causes drawn to his group’s rally.

“Whether they be budget cuts or testing, I think they all have kind of a common sense that there’s been somebody in charge of the agenda, and it hasn’t been us,” Weeks said. “Who decided cuts were best for Texas, that somehow a very wealthy state doesn’t have the money to fund education?”

“Teachers are tired right now because this has been a really stressful year—I mean they’re feeling the cuts,” Weeks said. “But we know, we just have to get to May 29th, and if 30 percent of teachers normally vote, if we can just have 60 percent of teachers vote, everything changes.”

Weeks greets SBOE member Thomas Ratliff at the podium, at the height of the rally.

A failing report card for Gov. Rick Perry in the crowd.

By the time the last speaker took the podium, most of the crowd had already hit the road.