On the Lege

PANCAKES TO GO!

The re-redistricting map currently headed to the Senate floor leaves largely untouched the current District 17 (including Abilene and San Angelo), represented by Democrat Charlie Stenholm, elected in 1978, and District 19 (including Lubbock and Midland), represented by Republican Randy Neugebauer, elected this past June by only 500 votes. But that map is set to collide with the House's "pancake plan," which pairs Lubbock and Abilene in District 19 -- a race many observers expect Stenholm would win -- and puts Midland (hometown of House Speaker Tom Craddick) and San Angelo together in a new, vacant District 11 that would stretch all the way to Boerne.

We got maps.

The House passed its congressional re-redistricting map in the wee hours of Sept. 17, following an extraordinary Tuesday in which it convened, adjourned, reconvened, recessed, and reconvened in order to lay out bills for discussion on the "three several days" required by the Texas Constitution. That is, there were not exactly three several days, but there was precious little discussion either, so perhaps it did not matter much that Speaker Tom Craddick gaveled the chamber back to order a little after midnight in order to pass out the map, HB 3, officially sponsored by Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford, and passed previously in special called sessions No. 1 and No. 2. (Seven rural Republicans voted bravely against the plan; two Democrats voted for it.) The map has acquired the nickname "The Pancake Plan," after the stack of congressional districts it piles up in West Texas in order to accomplish the speaker's goal of basing one in his hometown of Midland.

Midnight sessions are a commonplace at the end of a session, but highly unusual in the first week. But the speaker is in a hurry -- ostensibly to evade any maneuvers House Democrats may have planned for him, but more significantly right now to outpace the Senate. Should the Republicans remain deadlocked on the West Texas districts, Craddick will presumably be able to point to his ready stack of pancakes and say, "Here's your order, Mr. DeLay." Lubbock Sen. Robert Duncan, who stands in Craddick's way, dismisses any pressure as well as the notion that, should redistricting fail, he is being set up to be "the fall guy." Accordingly, on Friday, after additional public testimony before Duncan's Senate Jurisprudence Committee, the committee approved on party lines (4-3) the map authored by Todd "Fair and Balanced" Staples, R-Palestine, which cobbles at least three new Republican districts out of East Texas but essentially leaves West Texas, and especially Lubbock, in its rearview mirror. It's good to be the chairman.

The House Redistricting Committee dispensed with the formality of public testimony altogether this time, no doubt because it gets tiresome to hear witness after witness denounce what one fully intends to do regardless. Instead, the House saved time and consternation by voting to pretend it had heard testimony, by means of House Resolution 43, which declares that in its earlier sessions the committee had "held public hearings throughout the state" regarding congressional redistricting and that the latest plan is "substantially identical" to those passed in the first two special sessions. Unfortunately, as Waco Democratic Rep. Jim Dunnam pointed out acerbically and Rep. King acknowledged grudgingly, under this definition "throughout the state" did not include South Texas beyond San Antonio; in any case the committee had heard no testimony on the map that it had actually passed. "This House should not be passing into law statements that are not true," said Dunnam. Along party lines, 83-54 (with the exceptions of Democrats Ron Wilson of Houston and Vilma Luna of Corpus Christi), the House disagreed with him.

That was not quite all the business before the House. A dozen other bills were rammed through, most of them organizational and fiscal cleanup matters bungled or left hanging in earlier sessions, although they also include even more loosening of environment protection under the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (HB 36) and the continuing transfer of state agency power to the governor's authority via "re-org" (HB 7).

The Senate was preoccupied with sorting out the sanctions on the Texas 11 (see "Capitol Chronicle") and its redistricting hearings, and passed no bills last week. Both chambers did pass some 97 resolutions, most of them honoring favored industries, notable wedding anniversaries and birthdays, or newly hatched Eagle Scouts. Still quietly gathering support is House Concurrent Resolution 10, by Wayne Christian, R-Center, that would designate the East Texas What-a-Melon Festival as the Official Watermelon Festival of the State of Texas. (Folks in Falfurrias are rumored to be furious, which may account for the delay.)

Also furious is Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who appeared before the Senate Finance Committee Wednesday to defend her agency from SB 2, which would transfer the comptroller's authority to audit school districts and conduct the "e-Texas" government performance review to the Legislative Budget Board, which in recent years has been a rubber stamp for the governor. Strayhorn's fellow Republicans are increasingly annoyed at her rhetorical potshots at the Legislature for spending first too much and then too little, and they were royally chapped when, during the first session meltdown, she briefly refused to certify the budget as balanced.

The bill's author, Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, had taken some heat for an error in a transportation bill that temporarily misplaced some funding (that's one of the cleanup bills passed by the House), and in the hearing he told Strayhorn her agency's budget estimates are wonky and she needs to return to her "fundamental duties." Strayhorn responded that all she does is "tell the truth," and that Ogden's bill is an attempt to punish taxpayers for her agency's diligence. The exchange grew heated enough to move Chairman Teel Bivins to ask the adversaries to "just chill," not a locution heretofore native to Amarillo. Bivins left the bill pending, which could mean many things -- including that the Senate has its hands full right now with more pressing matters, and can't yet attend to the governor's revenge.

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A Half-Order of Pancakes?

Following Monday's Texas House session, Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford, announced a new "compromise" congressional redistricting map -- actually, half a map, of the state west of I-35 -- that he said is being "shopped" by the governor's office in an attempt to resolve the deadlock between House Speaker Tom Craddick, R-Midland, and Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock. King told reporters that the new map would still create an open district that could be won by a candidate from Midland, but -- unlike the "pancake plan" that has now passed the Texas House three times -- it would no longer pair newly elected U.S. Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-Lubbock, against 13-term veteran Charles Stenholm, D-Abilene, which is Duncan's main objection to the House map.

King said the map creates the possibility of four West Texas seats, and that Craddick considers it an acceptable compromise. King declined to discuss the map's ramifications on the rest of the state, but said he believes, "Once West Texas is settled, we can go to conference committee, and the rest of the state will roll out." But even Duncan says he's not quite satisfied with King's efforts, and other senators -- particularly Waco's Kip Averitt (who called the King compromise "offensive") and Amarillo's Teel Bivins (whose Panhandle environs would be split into two far-flung districts) -- are not thrilled. It would appear that, to keep Neugebauer and Stenholm separated, the compromise would threaten Central Texas seats belonging to both Republicans and Democrats.

Needless to say, the Dems don't like it either. Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, denounced the proposal, saying, "This map sends a clear message that the governor thinks Tom Craddick is more important than hundreds of thousands of Texans whose communities are being ripped apart. ... The 80 percent of the population of this state that lives east of I-35 is treated as an afterthought to be filled in later after Tom Craddick and Rick Perry carve up West Texas."