ustxtxb_obs_1992_03_27_50_00024-00000_000.pdf

Postmaster: If undeliverable, send Form 3579 to The Texas Observer, 307 West 7th Street, Austin, Texas 78701 POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE V IT’S NO SECRET. The Wall Street Journal didn’t name names in a twosentence, front-page “Washington Wire” item claiming that “Texas GOP leaders plead with George BuSh’s.son George W. to urge his father to fire budget chief [Richard] Darman.” But Republican Party National Committeeman Ernie Angelo of Midland said although he didn’t know of any organized effort to go through George W., he did know that a number of Texas Republicans would like to see Darman go. “[Congressman Dick] Armey isn’t saying it on the floor in Congress but he has said it in group meetings,” Angelo said. “And I don’t think I’ve been quoted in public, but whenever reporters ask me I tell them we’d be better off if Darman and [Treasury Secretary Richard] Brady go.” It’s not only Texans, Angelo, a longtime party activist and leader said. He said that Tennessee Republican Party Chair Ted Welch has also called for Darman’s resignation. Texas Republican Party Chairman Fred Meyers, however, said that he had no interest in any campaign to dump Darman or Brady. “I don’t get involved in that sort of thing,” Meyers said. “My job is to try to get Republicans elected in Texas.” V IT’S A SECRET. That’s what investigators for the General:Accounting Office were told when they set out determine how national security directives are used to make and implement U.S. policy, and whether Congressional committees have received copies of NSDs which discuss policy in the committees’ areas of jurisdiction. “Because the NSC [National Security Council] did not give us access to the directives, we could not analyze NSDs iss,ued by the Bush Administration,” wrote GAO investigators. They did determine that 51 were issued through the fall of 1990 but stated that the Bush administration had declassified none of them. The GAO also determined that no Congressional committee had received NSDs nor been asked to review them before release. The GAO also succeeded in defining NSDs: they are “orders issued by the President and may impose general or specific responsibilities on subordinates…” Bush’s NSDs, according to the study, involve matters like nuclear weapons, strategic forces and arms-control negotiations. V HE ‘LIED,’ THEY ERRED. The San An-tonio Express-News retracted it’s endorsement of Universal City Republican Alan Schoolcraft after their editorial board discovered that in public statements, Schoolcraft, who on school finance almost always devises the extreme right’s most viable plan, had lied about the voting records of two’ of his opponents. In a Senate campaign against two fellow conservative House members, Schoolcraft, according to an endorsement retraction printed in the Express News, claimed he was the only candidate in the race to have voted against the so. called “Robin Hood” school-finance plan. The Express-News cited the April 11, 1991, House Journal to document that Republican representatives Jeff Wentworth and George Pierce had both voted against Senate Bill 351. Schoolcraft has to have known bettert all three of the candidates are cut from the same cloth, often huddled together on the southwest corner of the house floor, and are from the San Antonio area. V NO ROBIN HOOD. According to the Texas Research League, an Austin-based, business-oriented public policy think tank, there has been very little tax redistribution as a result of the 1991 school finance scheme. “The fact is that in the vast majority of districts, local schools were able to spend the amount of tax raised in the district.” In other words, tax revenues from wealthy districts were not spent in poor districts. The exception, according to the Research League study were the “balancedbudget” districts. There are 92 balanced-budget districts among the state’s 1,045 school districts, many of which, according to the TRL, include “disproportionate property wealth, ‘large mineral deposits, industrial complexes, retirement or vacation communities, or high-value residences in relation to the number of students in school.” School tax increases are not a local response to lost local tax revenue. They are a local response to the loss of state aid which has been redirected to property-poor districts, according to the TRL study. What is becoming more and more obvious is that there is not enough money to shift around. V DOWN AND DIRTY, is the way Austin American Statesman political columnist Dave McNeely predicts the Railroad Commission campaign between Republican Barry Williamson and Democrat Lena Guerrero will go. According to McNeely, Williamson’s campaign strategy has already been devised by Republican political consultant Karl Rove, who has worked for Phil Gramm and Rick Perry and who will “paint Guerrero as a pinko liberal and … castigate her incessantly for hustling campaign contributions from the industries she regulates.” This from a man whose clients include Phil Gramm, who has raised at least $12 million as an incumbent U.S. Senator. Williamson also is the son-in-law of President Bush’s old pal and big-time fund-raiser, Bobby Holt of Midland. V CAROLE RYLANDER, the former mayor of Austin and author of The Mayor’s Diet now out of print but once a hot item at HEB stores finally seems to have lost more elections than she has lost pounds. The elections were lost by following the Kent Hance electability formula jumping from the Democratic Party and then running for disparate state and federal offices as a Republican. The weight was lost it seems, though it’s been a while by drinking only diet soft drinks and eating only Lean. Cuisine. In the end, though, it was the weight of past association with ‘Democrats like George McGovern that slowed Rylander down in Republican circles. V DEMETRIO RODRIGUEZ, the first plaintiff to sign on with the 1968 school finance lawsuit which advanced through the federal system to be overturned in the Supreme Court in the early ’70s, is still hoping that some court will provide the equity in funding he filed suit for 24 Continued on pg. 22 24 MARCH 27, 1992