By the time the clock winds down to sine die in a normal legislative year — however nasty the fights that preceded it — the final state budget vote is generally noncontroversial. Every legislator has a stake in it, every member is aware how much common work and mutual compromise went into it, and even the least enthusiastic normally feel compelled to vote “for the process.” Not so for the 78th — seven senators (including locals Gonzalo Barrientos and Jeff Wentworth) voted against the budget bill (HB 1), and a whopping 41 House members (including Austin Democrats Elliott Naishtat, Dawnna Dukes, and Eddie Rodriguez) voted nay.
This time “the process,” as ramrodded by the new GOP leadership, left a very bitter aftertaste — and the full extent of the damage to vulnerable Texans is yet to be realized. Sen. Juan “Chuy“ Hinojosa, D-McAllen, released a statement anticipating the effects on South Texas and the Valley, the poorest region not only of Texas but of the nation. “With this budget, the state spends more per day on a convict than it does on a working-class citizen. … With this budget, the county of Hidalgo will lose $198 million in C.H.I.P. and Medicaid funds. Nueces County will lose $59 million. Brooks County would lose approximately $3.5 million and Jim Wells would lose about $13.3 million in funds.” He added that Hidalgo — the largest recipient of the state’s indigent county health care fund — would only receive about one-third of the funds it receives now. “The leadership made a promise of ‘no new taxes,'” concluded Hinojosa, “but what the leadership is really doing here is shifting the tax burden to local government. The people whose lives are affected most by these cuts will have to make up the difference.”
Meanwhile, the House General Investigating Committee, chaired by Rep. Kevin Bailey, D-Houston, released a preliminary report on its investigation into the extent of the involvement of state and federal law enforcement in the search for the absent Democratic legislators (aka the Killer D’s) during the week of May 12-15. The committee has evidence that both Assistant Attorney General Jay Kimbrough, also the Texas coordinator for homeland security, and Gov. Rick Perry were directly involved in managing the hunt, and that the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security directed the Mineral Wells police in searching airfields for Rep. Pete Laney‘s plane. One DPS officer said his men were no more than “puppets” acting at the direction of the politicians. Kimbrough’s office insists that his only involvement was in his role as a state legal adviser, and both Perry and Speaker Tom Craddick have described their roles as minimal.
Plainclothes agents apparently followed one D’s wife by car for 180 miles; others turned up in Ardmore spying on the Dems in advance of the Texas DPS officers who arrived to formally request the House members’ return to Texas. The DPS says it does not know the identity of those pursuers. Bailey says the committee is continuing to collect information on the matter, because “politicization of the Dept. of Homeland Security and its involvement in domestic surveillance is improper and a serious abuse of government resources.” Bailey has himself been subpoenaed to testify in a lawsuit filed by Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, against the DPS, concerning destruction of records relating to the search. The U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security is also continuing the investigation on its end.
Rep. Roberto Gutierrez, D-McAllen, was not a Killer D — one of only six Dems to report for duty that week — and was duly hailed by his Republican colleagues. “For me, Roberto Gutierrez is the bravest soul here,” Rep. Dianne White Delisi, R-Temple, told Steve Taylor of Quorum Report May 16. “He’s the real hero for staying behind and working for his district and for the people of Texas.”
Delisi and other pachyderms may soon find their enthusiasm for Gutierrez waning. Last week, when border hospitals offered to pay for a study to analyze the effects of allowing HMOs into the Valley (four of the poorest Valley counties are currently exempt from HMO requirements), Gutierrez says he responded, “I don’t think the state would allow the hospitals to carry out the study because the leadership would want the results to come out a certain way.” (Delisi chairs the House select committee on state health care spending.) And this week, Gutierrez told Taylor that House Redistricting Committee Chair Joe Crabb, R-Atascocita, had asked him about the quality of meeting rooms in McAllen — from which Gutierrez inferred that Crabb was considering South Texas field hearings on congressional redistricting, as many Democrats had demanded. (Crabb apparently thinks McAllen — a city of 100,000 — is a frontier town in the middle of a cow pasture. Not like that glittering metropole, Atascocita. We hear they have running water, too.)
Crabb told Taylor that’s old news: “The issue of redistricting died with Ardmore.” But it remains obvious that the GOP Texas elite — from U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay all the way down to Crabb — is looking for any pretext for a special session to take up redistricting. Note to elephants: Don’t tip the news to “Loose Lips” Gutierrez.
This article appears in June 6 • 2003.
