God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

  Like so many Texans in the early 1980s, Patrick thought the boom would never end. “Within two years, I had become involved in five establishments,” he wrote in a spiritual memoir, The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read, that he published in 2002. “I had hundreds of employees and a huge in-over-my-head nightmare.” In 1986, when the bust hit with full force, he declared bankruptcy.

  The psychic cost of that tragedy is not mentioned in The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read. In 1989, Patrick gave a deposition in a lawsuit that he had filed against The Houston Post and its gossip writer, Paul Harasim. Patrick asserted that Harasim had libeled him by writing a false story about a physical encounter at his nightclub. Harasim had written that Patrick had provoked a fight with Alvin “Boom Boom” Jackson, a six-foot-four, 250-pound former football player and hammer thrower at Penn State. Patrick denied that it was a fight or a “tussle,” although it ended when he fell over a trash can behind the back door. Patrick objected to the statements in the article saying that he had lost his “cool” and had screamed insults at Jackson that people in the club had heard. Harasim quoted Boom Boom Jackson: “Maybe I could never have set a record for the hammer throw. But I could have thrown a manager out that night.”

  Patrick’s suit was dismissed with prejudice in 1993.

  In their questioning, the attorneys for Harasim and the Post elicited a portrait of a man who had numerous conflicts, both physical and professional. They also gained permission from Patrick to examine his medical records, which revealed his struggle with depression. He had been hospitalized for exhaustion and anxiety in 1982. Then, in 1986, he was hospitalized again. “Last night, I did a foolish thing,” he told his physicians. “I attempted suicide. I took an overdose of medicine and cut my wrist. I was by myself and realized I did not want to die. I hailed a cab and took myself to the emergency room.” It was the second time he had tried to kill himself. He told the doctors: “I have never experienced a state of happiness.”

  This was at the nadir of the oil economy. Bars and restaurants were among the most visible victims of the crash. The Saturday night before Patrick’s suicide attempt, he’d had to shut down his nightclub. Three of his four restaurants would fail as well. The admitting physician’s notes describe “feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, hopelessness and a marked decrease of self-esteem.” Those were feelings that many in Texas experienced as their dreams came to a crashing end.

  Later, in Patrick’s first race for lieutenant governor, one of his opponents used the medical information against him, but it backfired. Patrick had taken a big risk—that was part of the Texas ethos—but he had also rebounded, and that fed his legend. In 1988, he rented time on a little AM station in Tomball, a bedroom community within the Houston broadcast area. When the shareholders of the station sued the owner, Patrick was able to negotiate a purchase for the debt. Six months later, he got a call from a then-unknown conservative talk-show host named Rush Limbaugh, who had been turned down by other Houston stations. Within a few months of Patrick’s signing Limbaugh, the station had become a success. He bought another. In 1994, he sold controlling interest in his stations for nearly $27 million. That’s a true Texas parable.

  Now, as I looked at Patrick on the dais, at the pinnacle of Texas political power, I thought that Dannie Goeb had reinvented himself once again, this time as a happy man.

  * * *

  “WHAT PURPOSE, Senator Birdwell?” Patrick asked, as Brian Birdwell, a Republican from Granbury, southwest of Fort Worth, rose to speak in favor of the sanctuary cities bill. Birdwell is a retired army colonel who was badly burned in the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11. He has undergone thirty-nine operations and numerous skin grafts. He said he was worried about “a culture of insubordination” arising in Texas, adding that the next step would be outright insurrection. This was apparently a shot at Sheriff Hernandez. “What you tolerate today, you’ll endorse tomorrow, and subsidize the day after.”

  Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, a Democrat from the fertile Rio Grande Valley, spoke against the bill. “I agree one hundred percent that we as a nation have the right to define our borders,” he said. But he felt that the bill could become an excuse for wholesale expulsion of undocumented immigrants who have committed no crimes. “I was deported when I was five years old,” he said. He and his father were American citizens, but his mother was undocumented. She was picking tomatoes in Hidalgo County, which abuts Mexico, when the Border Patrol arrived. “They put us in a paddy wagon and we didn’t even have time to notify my father,” he later told me. “We lived in Mexico for a year, while my father was looking for us.”

  Senator Hinojosa told me he thought Sheriff Hernandez was naive and inexperienced. “She talked about honoring detainers only in cases of violent crime, but suppose you’ve got somebody who smuggled in a hundred kilos of cocaine? If you got caught committing a burglary—hell, yeah, you ought to be detained.”

  Sheriff Hernandez defended herself in an op-ed: “Tasking our community police forces with the job of federal immigration agents creates a strain, which is why the detainer policy on nonviolent criminals is optional.”

  As the debate raged, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) began a national dragnet, targeting undocumented criminals and violent offenders, but also picking up undocumented bystanders. Fifty-one people were seized in Austin, fewer than half of whom were criminals—a lower proportion than in any other city in the country—leading residents to believe that the city had been singled out.

  Many Mexican Americans in Texas support stricter enforcement of immigration laws. “As long as there is no profiling of Hispanics, we understand the process,” Senator Hinojosa told me. “Since 9/11, the whole culture has changed.” Under the current practice, however, undocumented migrants—especially those from Central America, who cross from Mexico—often simply surrender to the Border Patrol; if they are released into the interior, they are then given a court date, a year or two in the future. Hinojosa said it makes no sense to allow undocumented people into the country, let them go wherever they want, and then conduct raids to root them out. “It’s a real broken system,” he concluded.

  In session after session, the Texas legislature has sought to impose strict rules on voter identification, with the putative goal of preventing election fraud. A 2011 law required voters to present a U.S. passport, a military identification card, a state driver’s license, a concealed-weapon permit, or a Texas election identification certificate. The same law excluded federal and state government IDs, as well as student IDs, from being used at polling stations. A federal judge, Nelva Gonzales Ramos, in the Southern District of Texas, struck down the law, calling it “an unconstitutional poll tax.” Texas appealed, but the appeal was rejected, in part because there was no actual evidence of voter fraud. (The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.) The appeals court sent the case back to Judge Ramos, asking her to determine if the law was intentionally discriminatory. If Ramos said yes, it could trigger federal monitoring of the state’s election laws under the Voting Rights Act.

  The question of voter fraud became a national issue after the 2016 presidential election. Gregg Phillips, a former official of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, gave Donald Trump the false idea that he would have won the popular vote if illegal votes had been discounted. Phillips, the founder of a group called VoteStand, tweeted that three million unqualified voters cast ballots in the election. He refused to provide proof, though he told CNN that he had developed “algorithms” that could determine citizenship status. Trump demanded a widespread investigation into voter fraud.

  In the midst of all this, Rosa Maria Ortega, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of four with a sixth-grade education, in Fort Worth, was found to have registered to vote illegally. She had lived in the United States since she was an infant and was a legal resident, entitled to serve in the military and required to pay taxes. She a
ssumed she could also vote, and had done so previously, in 2012 and 2014. The local prosecutor decided to make an example of her. She was sentenced to eight years in prison. When she gets out, she may be deported to Mexico. I suppose it’s an irony that she is a Republican, and actually voted for Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who has made voter fraud a signature issue.

  In April, Judge Ramos ruled that the Texas voter ID law was intentionally designed to discriminate against minorities. Almost simultaneously, a panel of federal judges in San Antonio decreed that three of the state’s thirty-six U.S. congressional districts were illegally drawn to disempower minorities.

  Evan Smith, a cofounder of The Texas Tribune, has closely followed thirteen legislative sessions. He took note of the attack on sanctuary cities, the persistent unwillingness to adequately fund public education or to expand Medicaid (in a state with the most uninsured citizens in the country), and the $800 million of state funds allocated to expand border security. “White people are scared of change, believing that what they have is being taken away from them by people they consider unworthy,” he told me. “But all they’re doing is poking a bear with a stick. In 2004, the Anglo population in Texas became a minority. The reality is, it’s all over for the Anglos.”

  * * *

  THE MOST CONTENTIOUS ITEM on Dan Patrick’s list of priorities for the 2017 session was the “bathroom bill,” S.B. 6, which would bar transgender people in public schools and government buildings from using restroom or locker-room facilities that do not correspond to the sex listed on their birth certificates. It also overturns any local antidiscrimination ordinances that permit transgender citizens to choose which bathroom to use.

  In 2016, a similar bill was signed into law in North Carolina. In response, musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam canceled concerts, and sporting associations, including the NBA and the NCAA, dropped plans to hold events there. Governor Pat McCrory, who supported the law, lost his bid for reelection, in part because of the national outcry. Patrick contends that his bill will have no economic effect on Texas, and that the only people opposed to it are “the secular left” and the press. “They don’t want prayer in public schools, they’re not pro-life, they see nothing wrong with boys and girls showering together in the tenth grade, or a man being in a woman’s bathroom,” the lieutenant governor said at a prayer rally on the capitol steps. Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is under indictment for securities fraud, added, “This is a spiritual war.”

  The bathroom bill arose after the superintendent of schools in Fort Worth, following federal guidelines at the time, announced in 2016 that transgender students would be allowed to use the restroom or locker room that corresponded to their gender identity. He additionally suggested that teachers and administrators refer to students as “scholars” rather than “boys and girls.” At the prayer rally, Patrick called for the superintendent’s resignation, suggesting that these sorts of policies would be “the end of public education” and would ignite a mass revolt on the part of parents. “I believe it is the biggest issue facing families and schools in America since prayer was taken out of public school,” Patrick concluded.

  The business community in Texas went a little berserk over S.B. 6, and produced a report suggesting that passage could cost the state up to $8.5 billion (a figure discredited by PolitiFact). The Super Bowl was held in Houston a month after the legislature opened for business, and in response to the bathroom bill the National Football League intimated that, were S.B. 6 to pass, the championship might not visit Texas again. Governor Abbott, who had been keeping his head down, told the NFL to mind its own business.

  Bathrooms have been an issue in the state before. At a Willie Nelson concert, in Austin, in the 1980s, I was in the men’s room when a dozen desperate women barged in and laid siege to the stalls. It was actually a rather high-spirited interlude. It happened again on several occasions, until 1993, when Ann Richards was governor. She signed the “potty parity” bill, which mandated that new sports and entertainment facilities place two toilets in the women’s restrooms for every one in the men’s.

  The bathroom bill was not unique to Texas—a dozen other states had similar bills pending—but it embodied the meanness and intolerance that people tend to associate with Texas. The bill was being sold as a way to protect women against sexual predators who might pose as transgender—a problem that scarcely exists. Laws already on the books protect women from being accosted or spied upon. The sponsors of the bill claimed that it was not meant to discriminate against transgender Texans, although the law would do just that. The only remedy for trans people would be to change their birth certificate, a costly and time-consuming procedure. The bill proposed fining schools or state agencies up to $10,500 per day for violations. “How are they going to enforce it?” Chuy Hinojosa asked me. “Would a woman have to raise her dress?” There was grumbling about the need to hire “pecker checkers.”

  We’ve talked about the bathroom bill at my regular Monday breakfast, which consists of Steve Harrigan, historian H. W. “Bill” Brands, and Gregory Curtis, the former editor of Texas Monthly. It seems inevitable that bathrooms of the future, at least in Texas, will devolve into unisex stalls, the way they already are in some restaurants. I said that I noticed a new bathroom in the Austin airport. The sign said, All Genders. Greg observed that would spell the end of urinals. We were all silent for a bit. That would be a loss.

  Steve later reported a sign on a restroom door at an Austin restaurant that said:

  WHATEVER

  JUST WASH YOUR HANDS

  * * *

  ON MARCH 2, 2017, I returned to the capitol to have lunch with the Speaker of the House, Joe Straus, a laconic Republican from San Antonio. It was the hundred-and-eighty-first anniversary of the day Texas declared its independence from Mexico, and the beginning of the “high holy days” among Texas historians, climaxing on March 6, the date of the fall of the Alamo. The capitol rotunda was filled with schoolchildren wearing coonskin hats and gingham dresses with frontier bonnets, getting ready to perform Marty Robbins’s song “Ballad of the Alamo.” Kids from the Texas School for the Deaf were there to sign as the other children sang. Four retirees representing Buffalo Soldiers—the black cavalrymen who made their mark in the Indian Wars—were getting ready to present the colors. A tall man wearing a top hat paced about, rehearsing Travis’s letter from the Alamo. Meanwhile, on the floor of the House, resolutions were being offered to honor the “sacrifice of the heroes of the Alamo” and to commend notable citizens. A member advocated for the breakfast taco becoming the official state breakfast item.

  I met Straus in his office. There was a bust of Sam Houston on the Speaker’s desk. “You know, it’s also his birthday,” Straus said. He then switched on the closed-circuit television to watch a moment of the press conference for the Texas Freedom Caucus, a newly hatched group of a dozen cultural conservatives, led by Matt Schaefer, a state representative from Tyler, in East Texas. They model themselves on a similar body of House Republicans in Washington. They had formed in part because the term “Tea Party”—in Texas at least—had lost its meaning, since nearly every Republican in the legislature claimed to be unimpeachably conservative. The declared mission of the group was to “amplify the voice of liberty-minded grassroots Texans who want bold action to protect life, strengthen families, defend the Bill of Rights, restrain government, and revitalize personal and economic freedoms in Texas.” What distinguished this group was that they were all vociferously anti-Straus.

  Straus shot me a weary look.

  “The thing that concerns me is the near-total loss of influence of the business community, which has allowed really bad ideas like the bathroom bill to fill the void,” he said, as we sat down to some delicious crab cakes in the Speaker’s private dining room. Audubon bird prints adorned the wall. “CEOs have stopped coming to the capitol to engage directly. They now work only through lobb
yists, and it’s just not the same.”

  Straus comes from a longtime Republican family in San Antonio. One of his ancestors founded the L. Frank Saddlery Co., which made saddles, harnesses, and whips. Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders stopped in San Antonio to equip themselves with L. Frank gear on their way to the Spanish-American War. The company’s slogan was: “The horse—next to woman, God’s greatest gift to man.”

  When Straus is not in Austin, he is an executive in the insurance and investment business. He spent some time as a young man in Washington, where his wife, Julie Brink, worked in the Reagan White House and in the 1988 George H. W. Bush presidential campaign, while Joe served in the Commerce Department. Texas Monthly called him “the last moderating force in Texas politics.”

  Straus is trim and dapper, like an account executive out of Mad Men. He is certainly the most prominent Jewish politician in Texas history—a fact that has repeatedly been used against him in campaigns, to little effect. This is his fifth term as Speaker, which ties a record. He beat Tom Craddick for the post, one of the most dominating Speakers the House has ever had. Still, it’s a surprise to many observers that the even-tempered Straus has persevered as long as he has. “All the things they said about him—‘He’d show up at a gunfight with a butter knife,’ ‘He can’t make a fist’—they were all wrong,” Evan Smith told me. “Joe Straus is so much tougher than he appears.”