Sitting Down With Your Senator

In the midst of a fiery legislative session, the inner bowels of the Capitol have plenty of foot traffic. Lots of suits and black high heels moving briskly. Down one quieter corridor, you’ll find the office of state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, where people dress more casually and colorfully.

She is a woman born into a deep-rooted Texas political legacy – her ancestors include congressmen and U.S. and state senators. For much of her life, she chose a different path. She studied theatre, later law. Then she was a prosecutor and mother of two. Her father, a longtime member of Congress representing Houston, thought she’d make a good legislator, but she didn’t pursue political office until several years after his 2001 death. Even then, she opted for a humble local government position. In 2006, she became a Travis County commissioner. In 2015, she was elected Travis County judge, leading the Commissioners Court. In 2020, when then-state Sen. Kirk Watson chose to leave the Senate (before his latest round as Austin’s mayor), Eckhardt stepped up as his successor.

Today, her office in the Capitol looks like it could have been hers for decades. It’s not cluttered, but it’s full of little insights into her personality and upbringing: photos of her family, a prayer candle with a saintly Michelle Obama, a painting of a longhorn, a mug full of highlighters that says “this might be bourbon.” This is where we met on Monday, March 31. The conversation covered legacy, womanhood, democracy, and keeping Texas running with a gutted federal government, before she speed-walked off to the Senate Chamber. Here is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Becoming Sarah Eckhardt

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The Austin Chronicle: Let’s start with what makes you tick. Your father represented the Houston area in Congress starting when you were a toddler in 1967 to 1981. And your mom was a very active politico, and also an aide to LBJ when he was a senator. How did they shape your understanding of the world of politics? You must’ve had political ideas at an early age.

Sarah Eckhardt: That’s how you participated in the family. So, policy was the religion and politics was the Sunday football. I mean, my mom’s first husband was a novelist who also worked for LBJ as a press secretary, so there were just a lot of people involved in politics in the house at all times, whether they were journalists or judges or elected officials or political consultants. So I was privy to a lot of conversation at a young age about why it matters and what you can do. Why it matters is the policy, and then what you can do is the politics.

Chronicle: So do you feel at home in politics?

Eckhardt: I ran away from it pretty hard. I’m the only one of the seven siblings who went into the family business, as it were, because it’s hard work and it’s sometimes dangerous work. I mean, my dad was born in 1918. So being a white liberal in the South, he saw a lot of strife. And then my mother, being a Fifties girl – she came of age in the 1950s – like so many other women and minorities, the only way she could exert political power was through a sympathetic white male.

Chronicle: It’s clear I think that beliefs about women’s roles are where conservatives and liberals are often most bitterly divided. And I think your experience and your mother’s experience are really interesting. You being an attorney, a mother, having been divorced, your mother having had two divorces, writing about them openly – a beauty queen turned politico. There’s a line in her memoir where she dryly describes herself as somebody who was married to “two semi-famous Texas men.” She concluded that each separation occurred at the peak of each man’s career. She said, “I left each marriage at the time that each husband was reaping the rewards of our mutual dedication and hard work. I didn’t know how to achieve for myself, only for others, and I felt ripped off and empty.” Given your experiences, and your mother’s experiences, what does it mean to be a righteous woman? And what makes for a good family?

Eckhardt: Wow, okay, that is a deep question. It is still very, very hard to be a woman in public service. It’s difficult to get noticed. After I was elected Travis County judge [in 2014] – and I was the first female county judge – one of my opponent’s supporters, who shall not be named, told me the better man had won. And I said, “What are you saying?” He was very intentional in saying that. So it’s still really difficult to be a woman in elected public office. There’s still a sense that it’s an inappropriate role and that you have to be a man or a mannish woman in order to want it or to succeed at it.

And I will tell you that women in executive leadership are transforming executive leadership. I’m not saying that men don’t do this well, as a matter of fact, the best public servant males in executive leadership do exactly this – they build teamwork, recognizing that no one does this work alone, and your work doesn’t last unless you build teamwork and build succession. The best public servants do both. I’m not a social anthropologist, and I don’t know why, but women seem more predisposed to building team and succession.

Chronicle: Is there something about your family’s political legacy, this multi-generational effort, that changes the way that you work?

Eckhardt: Absolutely. You’ve got to keep the next 150 years in mind, because if you do something for expediency today and establish a precedent and normalize anti-democratic strain, you will pollute democracy. And democracy is under threat. That sounds so theoretical until you see protesters getting arrested and shot, until you see women imprisoned by their own reproductive capabilities. And until you see political purges in the ranks of government.

Chronicle: There are two types of legislation that you might fight. Some is conservative in nature, goes against certain values, but there’s a difference between that and legislation that actually is anti-democratic. In fighting anti-democratic efforts, what is your role and has it changed in this session?

Eckhardt: It’s changed a lot. Back when I was in local government, I would always say my metric for deciding whether a policy was good or good enough was that it had to be effective, efficient, fair, and minimally intrusive. That was great, pretty nonpartisan type stuff.

But when I came to the Senate, we didn’t even have the luxury to get to the “effective, efficient, fair, and minimally intrusive” moment. I mean, I haven’t flipped through my pocket Constitution so much since law school. It’s been nuts. So I had to quickly pivot from being a policy practitioner to being – to the extent that I could be – a trailblazer on how to get back to democracy.

And so when I have the opportunity to be a policy technician on a bill, I seize it, but this leadership doesn’t like me to be at the table for that. I’ve been moved off of committees where I have expertise, because they don’t want me utilizing my policy expertise. So where I am most useful is in those amendments and questions and floor speeches that call out where a bill is deficient from a policy standpoint, but more often where it’s deficient from a constitutional standpoint.

Chronicle: Interesting to go from being in a position where you’re really aiming for the perfect policy, to now aiming for–

Eckhardt: Just a legal policy.

Chronicle: That sounds like a frustrating shift.

Eckhardt: It is a frustrating shift. But hey, given my background, my training, and my family, I’m a pretty good hammer for this nail.

Chronicle: And going back to your family, how are your views and other progressive views on womanhood and family different from the views of your GOP colleagues? And are these differences surmountable?

Eckhardt: Oh, there is way more agreement in this building than the legislation is allowing. I will tell you that many of my Republican colleagues are getting pretty tired of this unreasonable positioning with regard to reproductive health care. They’re getting pretty tired of the authoritarian boot on their neck. And I’m not going to tell you which of those Republicans they are, because I don’t want to damn them with Democratic praise. But whether it’s public education, reproductive health care, freedom of religion, or just the general notion that there are some things that the government should have no role in – you know, e.g., the Bill of Rights – I would venture to say most of my Republican colleagues, and frankly the culture of Texas, doesn’t support this kind of government intrusion.

Chronicle: When you say “the authoritarian boot,” do you mean donors?

Eckhardt: Yes and no. This is a tyranny of the minority, a very extreme faction that really doesn’t believe in the democratic process or a democratic republic. They find a democratic republic messy and hostile to their wealth and power. And so, it’s actually a fairly small group, but they have outsized power in this building.

Chronicle: This group that you’re talking about, when you say that it’s a threat to their wealth and power, some of them are fundamentalist Christians. But their religious beliefs are not what drives them?

Eckhardt: I really do believe in government that is effective, efficient, fair, and minimally intrusive. I have no issue with fundamentalist religious ideals.

Chronicle: –existing in a society, but not in the law?

Eckhardt: We all have freedom of religion, and we should be able to practice. So it’s not the religion. It’s the weaponizing of it for political power gain, which is the very reason why the Founding Fathers were so adamant about a separation between church and state. But I didn’t totally answer your question about difference in gender roles. And I don’t think there is. I think that the majority of Republicans and Democrats all live in the 21st century and know that women and men should share power.

Chronicle: Do you think most of your colleagues see women as valuable to lawmaking and also as people who should have a choice with abortion? Because there are two different parts that we talked about there.

Eckhardt: In this extreme ban on abortion that Texas has, there is an underlying presumption among most who voted for it that “if my daughter or my wife or my girlfriend gets pregnant, we’ll be okay.” This is a disgusting display of political pragmatism.

Texas’ abortion ban is also a constitutional issue. The framers of the U.S. Constitution didn’t initially write a Bill of Rights, and then there was big pushback that the government should lay out the areas where the government should not intrude. And so they sallied forth and came up with the amendments. The idea from the get-go – and, of course, it really only applied to property-owning men – but still, the idea from the get-go was that the government should not intrude upon the individual’s rights and the individual’s ability to make determinations for their own household and their own person. You had to prove a compelling state interest before you could invade upon a person’s individual decisions.

An elective termination is also a moral decision. But we've gone so far into bizarro land that even a termination that's medically necessary or medically advisable is off the table because the government has said so. [Author’s note: Texas’ abortion ban allows an exception to save the life of the mother, though many doctors say it is unclear how close to death a mother must be.] But I assert that not only is it a policy decision, but it's also a fundamental constitutional issue. In our version of a democratic republic, was the government ever intended to go this far into individual rights and determinations?

Chronicle: You were talking about political pragmatism, which could be thought of as political performance. Before you were an attorney, you studied arts and performed in theatre productions. We have this phrase “political theatre,” which implies something nefarious, but in a pure sense of what theatre is, is there artistry in the work of being a lawmaker?

Eckhardt: As a public servant you have to tell the story outside the building, so I don’t consider political theatre a bad thing. I think you need to be sufficiently theatrical, a sufficient storyteller, so that your community knows what their government is up to.

There are also posturing bills. These are examples of really bad theatre. It’s candy politics. It has no nutritional value. It doesn’t increase your public safety. It doesn’t increase your prosperity. It doesn’t improve your health care. It doesn’t reduce the price of groceries. It’s purely about looking good and doesn’t do any good.

Chronicle: Posturing bills sometimes seem to be solving imaginary problems. What are we talking about this session that is an imaginary problem?

Eckhardt: Every session we do a bunch of criminal penalty enhancements to make illegal things even illegal-er, even though it has no deterrent value. This year we have a bill to teach the scourge of communism in high schools. We already teach communism in the historical context in high school. We’ve got a bill to create a DOGE in Texas. We already have a DOGE in Texas; it’s called the Sunset Commission. And then, of course, the last three sessions, we keep hammering away at the nonexistent voter fraud. All of that is really bad “candy politics.”

Chronicle: Thinking about all these things that we’ve been talking about – the candy politics, the anti-democratic behaviors, the political pragmatism – is this all stuff that your dad was dealing with?

Eckhardt: 100 percent.

Chronicle: This is not new?

Eckhardt: It’s not new at all. And whenever anybody says “it’s never been like this,” it’s like, crack open a history book! Democracy has to be continually refreshed. It’s not natural to human beings. Before our democratic republic, there was no precedent for what we were trying to do in the United States – zero precedent. To the extent there was any precedent, you had to go way back to, like, ancient times. So this is not natural. What’s natural for human beings is to get a strong man bully who’s going to tell you what to do and what to say and how to act and who wins and who loses, who will protect you against the threats from outside of your tribe. That’s our natural state. Democracy is hard, and it requires us to continually refresh it.

Good Governance

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Chronicle: I was at the Travis County Democratic Party’s election night watch party, and it felt like watching a bunch of people fall into grief for the country. How do you feel about the threat of authoritarianism? Is there something new there?

Eckhardt: We’ve made great strides in the last 40 years. I mean, our air is cleaner, our water is cleaner, median household incomes in every demographic are improved. Educational attainment has increased. For a good while, our life expectancy was growing. By really objective metrics, we were getting a lot better, but now we’re starting to slide back. And when I start to get gloomy, you know, in the Senate Chamber I sit under the portrait of Barbara Jordan. I can look over at her and remind myself, “Oh, Jesus Christ, she had it so much harder. I mean, put your big girl panties on and get to work.” Can you imagine what it was like for her being the only Black woman in the chamber? Oh, it must have been just hella hard.

Chronicle: Do you feel alone in the chamber?

Eckhardt: I came into the chamber with the mantra that I was going to be part of a team and build a team. And I feel like we really are building a team. I call it the cowpokes. The Coalition of the Willing to poke the regime.

Chronicle: Do you feel genuine partnership and teamwork with many or any of your Republican colleagues?

Eckhardt: One way I can get policy passed is by quietly talking to my Republican colleagues and acting like a superstaffer saying, “Hey, I read your bill. I think it’s really, really good. I can’t vote for it yet. Here are a couple of things that would improve it, that would make it possible for me to vote for it.”

Another way I can influence policy is I can propose a bill and file it and then float it to see how many Republicans I can get to co-author, and if I can’t get any to co-author, but one of them says, “I really like this bill, but politically, I can’t be seen on a bill with you.” I’ll say: “file the identical bill, and I’ll co-author yours. Take my bill. Cool.” You can get a lot more done if you don’t need your name on it.

Chronicle: I’m going to bring it back to your mom, because her memoir speaks to the sacrifice of being a politician’s wife in the Sixties and Seventies. It could be thankless. Your mom wrote that, not long before your dad’s death, he told her: “Sarah got the best of both of us. She would make a great legislator.” Is ego-checking something you got from your mom?

Eckhardt: Well hilariously, I think that my dad was less ego-driven than my mom. He was more likely to work a backroom deal, and she was more likely to hit the press. She was far more fiery than he. And he wasn’t even gonna run for Congress, and she berated him until he got off his butt and filed. The person who told me you can get a lot more done if you don’t need your name on it was not a woman. That was one of my male mentors. If you can keep your ego in check in this building, you can get a lot more done.

Chronicle: This ego thing, is it something you understood early or had to learn?

Eckhardt: It’s like democracy. You have to work on it every day. Yeah, it’s not a natural state to not be offended when people are telling you that you’re a crazy liberal and that you’re biased, and you’re extreme and destroying the morals of America.

Chronicle: Was there a recent moment where you were really offended by something that a colleague said?

Eckhardt: Yeah. The lieutenant governor called me into the corner office to tell me that he had instructed the chair of a committee not to bring a witness, Justin Berry. [Author’s note: Berry is an Austin police officer who was indicted for aggravated assault against protesters in 2020, though the charges against him were dropped in 2023]. He is being appointed to TCOLE [the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement] and I wanted to question him in front of the nominations committee, because he has some issues in his record that should be explored. So I asked for him to come before the committee. The chair initially didn't want to bring him, but had told me and the rest of the Senate Democratic Caucus that she was going to bring him.

So the lieutenant governor took me into the corner office to say that he had instructed the chair that she would not be bringing Justin Berry, because I was biased, that I was out to get him, that I intended to crucify him. In those moments, you just breathe deep and say, “Respectfully, Governor, this isn’t about me. This is about this nominee’s qualifications for this position.” And then he continued to say that the problem was me and that it was my bias and my vendetta and my “emotional involvement” – that was a good one, too. I thought to myself, what is the phrase that I can repeat over and over as he continues with this gaslighting? And the phrase I came up with was: “I look forward to a day when the Senate has rules that are fair and equally applied.”

[Author’s note: Justin Berry was confirmed by the Senate last Tuesday. The Chronicle reached Dan Patrick’s office about the referenced conversation. Patrick said in an April 3 statement, “Under our constitution, the Senate is to provide 'advice and consent’ for all nominees of the governor. Senators offer their advice and consent through their deliberations and vote. I will not allow any nominee to be subjected to an unfair process outside of that scope. Sen. Eckhardt made it clear she wanted to turn a committee room into a courtroom, as she attempted Monday, to litigate a case that was dismissed by her own Travis County District Attorney for lack of evidence. That is clearly outside the scope of offering advice and consent.”]

Chronicle: Does it ever seem to you that Dan Patrick has an accurate understanding of your values and who you are?

Eckhardt: Well, Dan Patrick is not interested in using the values and the skill sets of all the senators. That’s not his goal. If it were, let’s just take an example like [state Sen.] Roland Gutierrez – excellent lawyer, brilliant strategist, the only immigration attorney in the chamber, long history of service in the House, and he is intentionally put on the bench.

Chronicle: Your mentioning Roland Gutierrez made me think of Colin Allred [Author’s note: the two were primary opponents running to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz, with Gutierrez being more progressive and Allred more moderate]. We often talk about the current political era as one of extremes. I think that we are hearing a lot now that a middle path doesn’t really exist. And on a practical level, someone moderate like Colin Allred, he failed. He did not generate as much excitement as the more progressive Beto O’Rourke did years earlier. Allred didn’t pull enough Republicans, but he also didn’t excite enough Democrats. So on a practical level, where does that leave us? Is there any kind of middle path?

Eckhardt: Absolutely. There’s absolutely a middle path. I suspect that that middle path is to remind people and empower them that democracy is about individual action. Thinking that stuff is going to happen that is outside your control and you can’t do anything about it, and so screw it, why even deal with government? That is a very fatalistic and defeatist attitude. In a democracy, democracy is us, so when we say that government sucks, that it’s at least incompetent, if not corrupt, we’re saying we suck. So my gut is that the middle path is to remind people that we actually do have power, and it’s greater and better when it’s collective. And when we do organize and work collectively, we do increase our overall prosperity. Through increased participation, we actually do clean our water and clean our air and expand our access to education and health care. And that happens when we all act. And to the extent that you’re a religious person, democracy is proof that God works through people.

Chronicle: The way you talk about democracy – and maybe this is like a hitting-the-joint-in-college question – but it sounds like you think most people are good. If when we act together, it is good, that implies that we are good.

Eckhardt: I think that most people are good. And also, I think to the extent that people are self-serving, it’s also better for the self-serving to live in a prosperous community. If your wealth and power keeps being concentrated in smaller and smaller numbers, then your lottery chances of being among the wealthy and powerful go way down.

Chronicle: As you said, to the extent that you’re a religious person, God works through people. Is that your view? And how do you feel about far-right legislation that references religious values but that you clearly strongly disagree with?

Eckhardt: I think it is a wonderful thing to encourage people to have a moral compass. I think it’s a wonderful thing to support people in their search for their reason for being. That’s a beautiful and wonderful and very human desire that government should never require, instruct, or punish, because faith isn’t faith if it is coerced.

Chronicle: Some of what you have said in this interview has struck me as libertarian in nature. How much do you feel that you really fit within the lay understanding of what a Democrat is?

Eckhardt: I don’t know. I don’t think about that that much. I think that most people see me as a flame-throwing, granola-munching, tree-hugging liberal. And I think actually this should be the very definition of “liberal.” At the individual level, if what you’re doing is not a threat to a child or the public, even if you think it’s stupid, wasteful, crazy, immoral – let people be people.

I mean, if somebody wants to sit naked in their living room and play scratch-offs all day long, fine. But we get into really important areas of balance when you see folks who say, for instance, “I don’t want to get vaccinated.” That would be fine if they never had any contact with any other people. But we’ve seen the detriments of not getting vaccinated. I don’t think we can ever force people to get vaccinated, but I do think that we can create incentives and disincentives for folks who refuse. We should never criminalize a person for refusing to get vaccinated, but there is a public health component to that. Like when I was a prosecutor back in the day, if somebody wanted to get stoned in their living room, just get baked, fine. But if they get baked and go out and get in a car, arrest them. Because that’s a danger.

Our Times

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Chronicle: What comes next for Texas?

Eckhardt: The Trump administration is dismantling some really important programs at the federal level, and the state is going to have to grapple with the hole that’s blown in the structure of government. Currently state leadership is turning a blind eye to the hole, and we’ve got a pretty considerable fund balance [budget surplus]. And rather than proactively addressing what we see is happening, we’re turning a bit of a blind eye. And so I think it’s going to be really important in the coming years for us to look bravely at health and public health, at least for the next four years.

Chronicle: Often Democrats in Texas are talking about Medicaid expansion, but when federal resources are so imperiled, how does that change your health care strategy?

Eckhardt: We’re going to have to look at state and local investment in health care and public health. And right now, local investment in health care and public health is pretty robust. You know, local governments, to the extent they can, are creating hospital districts and putting money – local property tax dollars – toward indigent health care in the knowledge that it will cost us all if people are not getting the care that they need. With the Trump administration, the offer of expanding Medicaid is probably now off the table, so we’re going to have to look for ways to make health care more accessible, utilizing state and local resources.

Similarly in the agricultural industry, the federal government does a tremendous amount to stabilize, support, and expand our agricultural industry that’s getting blown apart on an argument that that effort is mostly for environmental purposes. The state of Texas has a huge agricultural industry, and without that scaffolding of the federal government, the state and mostly rural local governments are going to need to step up and stabilize our agricultural communities. Right now, our rural communities are pretty ignored by state policy. We’re so focused on that candy legislation that looks good but doesn’t do any good that nobody ever gets around to addressing the fact that rural hospitals are closing, that rural public education will decline under the voucher system, that health care is difficult to access in rural areas just by virtue of the fact that it’s a low-density population.

It's going to be a tall order, but I think that in the coming years, if the tyranny of the minority continues as it's going, there's going to be enough Democrats, Libertarians, and disaffected Republicans who say: "We need a citizen-initiated ballot right in Texas." If our current leadership will not listen to our preferences and hand-picks their districts so that they can maintain power, then we need citizen rights to a ballot initiative in Texas. [Author’s note: Currently, Texas citizens can only vote on ballot initiatives approved by state lawmakers. Eckhardt has attempted to put abortion on the ballot in Texas.]

Chronicle: What do you want readers to understand about your day-to-day in the Senate?

Eckhardt: The story I’d like people to tell about me outside of this building is that I am doing everything I can to build teamwork among the Democrats to fight hard against this gathering authoritarianism. And also making a really clear record for blazing that trail back to democracy, so that my colleagues, both Republican and Democrat, see the ramifications of what we’re doing here. It’s going to be a long haul unraveling this mess, but we’ve got to do it.

I’ve got the patience to pull that knot apart. And I want to help people see what strand to pull on. I want to be their concierge for civic engagement, and say, here’s the knot. Don’t be overwhelmed by the knot. Here’s the strand you can pull on. If you pull this one and you pull this one and you pull this one, it’ll start to pull apart. It just requires constant maintenance. We’re gonna keep pulling on those threads.