His Speakership has concentrated on providing the workforce and infrastructure that Texas businesses need by protecting public education, building roads, establishing more top-tier universities, and expanding job training. Perhaps his biggest victory was passing the State Water Plan in 2013; when the state was in the middle of a devastating drought, Straus ushered through a $2 billion revolving loan fund for state water projects.
With each session, Straus has watched the Republican Party drift further away from the “compassionate conservatism” of the Governor Bush era to domination by social and religious ideologues, such as Patrick, for whom economic issues are secondary. Although both Democrats and non–Tea Party Republicans see Straus as a brake on the controversial cultural agenda being pushed by the lieutenant governor, Straus worries that his moderation is being used as a foil for the radicals. “I can only do so much to keep the focus on fiscal issues and away from the divisive stuff,” he told me. “The confidence that people seem to have in the House to serve as a stopper only enables the Senate to run hotter than they ever have before.”
Straus believed that most Republicans in the House didn’t want to vote on the bathroom bill, but like their colleagues in Washington, they worry about being challenged from the right in the primaries. “If it gets to the floor it could be a close vote,” Straus observed. “I can’t imagine anyone really wanting to follow North Carolina’s example, but I can’t guarantee that’s not going to happen.” Meanwhile, he was pressing his own legislative agenda, which included additional funding for public schools, improving Child Protective Services, and devoting more resources to mental health—all this in a session where the budget had been hit by the decline in oil and gas revenues.
Before the session began, Straus was issuing warnings against the bathroom bill. “I’ve become more blunt than ever,” he told me. He frequently urges business leaders to stand up against such legislation. “I try to be diplomatic but clear: that if you give in on the bathroom bill to preserve a tax break, there’s another equally awful idea right behind it.”
The political story in Texas both reflects and influences the national scene. At a time when Democratic voices have been sidelined, the key struggle is within the Republican Party, between those who primarily align with business interests and those preoccupied with abortion, gay marriage, immigration, religion, and gun rights. The 2017 session in Austin would prove to be a bruising example of raw politics waged by two talented people, Straus and Patrick, both of whom fervently believe in their causes. There are crucial differences between Patrick’s style of governance and Straus’s, caused by the fact that the lieutenant governor is elected by the voters of the state, whereas the Speaker is chosen by House members. Unlike Patrick, who has total control over what bills come to the floor, Straus exercises influence by artfully appointing committee members who can pull the fangs from the most damaging legislation (or let bills languish until there’s no time to consider them). “Dan Patrick rules by fear,” Gene Wu, a Democratic state representative from Houston, told me. “Joe Straus rules by consensus.”
* * *
A FEW WEEKS AFTER President Trump was inaugurated, he withdrew the protections that President Obama had instituted for transgender students in public schools. The U.S. Supreme Court now raised the stakes by refusing to hear the case of a transgender student from Virginia, Gavin Grimm, who had sued to be allowed to use the boys’ bathroom at school. That left the issue up to individual states, at least for now. Dan Patrick said that the Texas bill would be a model for the rest of the nation.
The day after the Court’s ruling, the Texas bill went to its first public hearing before the Senate Committee on State Affairs. A number of transgender Texans, along with their families, signed up to speak, as did preachers and business leaders and moral crusaders on both sides. More than four hundred names were on the list when the hearing finally began. The bill’s author, Senator Lois Kolkhorst, a Republican from Brenham, said that it was designed to “find the balance of privacy, decency, respect, and dignity, to protect women, children, and all people.”
Dana Hodges, the state director of a right-wing Christian organization called Concerned Women for America, was the first to testify. Like many supporters of the bill, she cast the issue as one of women’s safety. “I myself was the victim of being videotaped by a hidden camera placed in a women’s bathroom stall by a man,” she said in a trembling voice. She held up a plastic coat hook that, she said, had a miniature camera embedded in it, like the one used to spy on her. Under questioning, she acknowledged that a non-transgender man had hidden the camera inside her stall, and that he had been punished under existing laws. Kolkhurst also conceded that she knew of no crimes that had been committed in Texas bathrooms by transgender persons. Her intent, she said, was to prevent nefarious people from taking advantage of inclusive bathroom policies. (Crimes against transgender people, meanwhile, are routine; according to Texas Monthly, a quarter of all transgender Texans have been physically assaulted.)
Dan Forest, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, who had been a muscular advocate of that state’s bathroom bill, came to Austin to testify that economic damage was minimal—affecting “less than one-tenth of one percent of the GDP.” He asserted that no business had actually left the state because of the bill. (The Associated Press examined public records and interviewed only the business leaders who specifically said that they had canceled projects because of the bill. On the basis of that narrow data alone, the AP estimated that the potential loss on investment in the state would approach $4 billion over a dozen years.) On March 30, the North Carolina legislators, assailed on many fronts, partially repealed their bill.
In Austin, most of the witnesses spoke against the bathroom measure. One of them was Dr. Colt Keo-Meier, a transgender psychologist, who is currently enrolled in the medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He wore a white lab coat and a stethoscope around his neck. “If you pass this bill, I will not be able to continue attending medical school, because I will not be able to use the men’s room,” he said. “And look at me”—he has a full beard—“I certainly would not be able to go to the women’s restroom safely.” Concerns about voyeurism, he said, were misplaced: “I’ve used the women’s restroom for twenty-three years and the men’s for ten, and I’ve never seen any genitalia.”
A woman in a short-sleeved black dress identified herself as Jess Herbst, the mayor of the tiny town of New Hope, north of Dallas, in a firmly Republican section of the state. A few weeks earlier, Mayor Herbst had written a letter to her constituents to tell them that she was taking hormone therapy and transitioning to female. She received what she said was overwhelming support. “It’s not our responsibility to keep people from pretending to be us,” she said. “I just want to be able to use the women’s room and not have someone ask me at the door for my papers.”
The testimony continued until nearly five in the morning, when the committee voted 8–1 to support the bill.
* * *
AFTER DINNER on April 6, I went down to the capitol to watch the fight over the budget bill. As you enter the House chamber, you pass through large doors with glass panels etched with the state seal, the garlanded lone star, a motif repeated throughout the room, even in the skylights in the coffered ceiling above. During the day sunlight streams through the slatted shutters on either side of the upstairs gallery; at night, two star-shaped chandeliers illuminate the generous, open room. If you stand under them and look up, you’ll see that the lights spell:
There is a schoolroom quality to the simple construction of the paired oaken desks, where the 150 members sit, two by two. Each desk has a small round panel of buttons for casting votes. The accompanying brown leather, high-back recliners also have the seal emblazoned on them. When you sit, there is an exhalation as the cushion adjusts; one lawmaker told me that a colleague taped over the vents on the back of the chair in
front of him to keep the gust from mussing his hair.
In the center of the chamber is a wide aisle with a lectern and microphone at each end, where members present and question bills. The rostrum dominates the back of the chamber. There are three chairs on the platform; one for the Speaker in the center; one for the parliamentarian, and another for supplicants to come whisper in the Speaker’s ear. Directly behind the rostrum is a shrine: two white columns, with velvet bunting draped between them, enclosing a silk flag that was carried in the Battle of San Jacinto. It features Lady Liberty holding a cutlass, which is draped with a banner saying LIBERTY OR DEATH. The original battle flag is only displayed while the legislature is in session; at other times, a reproduction takes its place. The room resonates with a sense of history and identity and pride.
The air-conditioning was merciless; one of the members showed me his long johns poking out from under his shirt cuffs. House members had been at it all day, and once again it would go on till early morning. I saw 5-Hour Energy shots arrayed on some desks.
Desperation suffuses the beautiful chamber on Budget Night—the last stand for bills that have not been funded. The trick is that in order to get the money for your legislation, you have to take it from somewhere else. The members were on guard, lest their own bills be raided. More than four hundred amendments to the budget were waiting their turn. One baffling amendment—offered by Valoree Swanson, a freshman Freedom Caucus member from a suburb of Houston—would prevent state funds from being used to renovate bathrooms in order to “allow or enable a man to enter a women’s restroom facility.”
There is a brass rail that circumscribes the chamber; only members, clerks, and pages can be inside it. Members of the press are supposed to sit at a table near the dais, but I like to hover around the rail, hoping to capture bored legislators. There are some wonderful people in the House. Senfronia Thompson is a seventy-eight-year-old former teacher from Houston. She’s a Democrat in her twentieth term. Unlike a lot of other state legislatures, Texas still follows a tradition of awarding important posts to members of the minority party. This is true even in Dan Patrick’s Senate. Thompson, known as Ms. T, is the chair of the Local and Consent Calendars Committee, one of the gateways that many bills must pass through to reach the floor. She once told me that when she was a girl, African Americans were not welcome in the capitol. Now she is the longest-serving woman and black person in Texas legislative history. Among her accomplishments is a hate crimes act, passed in 2001, that includes protections for homosexuals. She has also fought against racial profiling and passed measures to help low-income Texans pay their utility bills.
Armando Martinez, a forty-two-year-old Democratic member from the Valley, is a firefighter and a paramedic. He showed up on the first day of the session with a bandage on his head; on New Year’s Eve, he’d been hit by a stray celebratory bullet. Martinez filed a bill to prohibit the “reckless discharge of a firearm.”
Dr. John Zerwas, an anesthesiologist from Richmond, Texas, is the chair of the House Appropriations Committee. A business-conservative Republican in the Straus mold, he is deeply respected in the legislature, and Straus selected him to craft the House version of the budget. The main difference between the House budget and the Senate budget is that Zerwas proposed dipping into the Rainy Day Fund—a spare $10 billion amassed from oil and gas taxes that the state has set aside for emergencies. The fund is projected to grow to $12 billion by the next legislative session, which is more than the actual budgets of a dozen other states. Patrick maintains that the fund should not be used for “ongoing expenses,” but Zerwas proposed taking $2.5 billion out of the pot, in part to finance health care and public schools—Joe Straus priorities.
There was a telling incident in the afternoon, which would provide a glimpse of how the rest of the budget fight would play out. A freshman member, Briscoe Cain, presented an amendment to kill an advisory panel on palliative care. Normally, freshmen keep quiet, but Cain is an assertive member of the insurgent Freedom Caucus. He is thirty-two years old but looks much younger, and bratty, reminding me of Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “This amendment seeks to get rid of what I’ve kinda nicknamed the ‘advisory death panel,’ ” Cain said, using a term that is popular among the far right for end-of-life counseling.
Soon after he said those words, John Zerwas came to the front microphone and stood there, giving Cain what one reporter, Jonathan Tilove of the Austin American-Statesman, termed the morem pellis hispidus distentione nervorum—the hairy eyeball.
It’s fascinating to watch the choreography of the members when deep political chords are struck. The Freedom Caucus members gathered with Cain at the front of the chamber; the traditional Republicans, along with some Democrats, stood beside Zerwas at the microphone in the rear. It was a Texas version of the Montagues versus the Capulets.
“Would you please describe for me what a death panel is?” the mighty chairman of Appropriations demanded.
“A death panel is whereby a group of individuals unrelated to the person in the hospital decide whether or not that person will live or die,” Cain replied.
“Have you ever understood, really, what palliative care is?” said Zerwas.
“Mr. Zerwas, being in your profession, I am sure you could inform this body better than I could,” Cain replied, looking for help.
The old warhorses in the House knew, if Cain did not, that Zerwas had lost his first wife to brain cancer. He wore a ring on his right hand in her memory.
Zerwas said, “You could probably ask fifty, sixty, seventy, a hundred members in this House who have had somebody with a serious illness who has dealt with this particular issue.”
Zerwas forced Cain, several times, to admit having made false or uninformed statements. “You know about this and I don’t,” Cain finally said. “My apologies.” The amendment was withdrawn.
Cain later got a bit of redemption when he offered an amendment blocking any payment by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for a “sex reassignment or gender transitioning” operation—something that has never actually happened. Cain’s battle cry: “Don’t California my Texas!”
I caught the eye of Pat Fallon, a Republican member from Frisco, a wealthy and intensely conservative bedroom community in the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. Many young legislators, like Fallon, are not originally from Texas. I asked him how he came to the state. He said that after playing football for Notre Dame, he joined the Air Force and was stationed in Texas. “When they asked me my state of residence, I said, ‘Massachusetts.’ The payroll officer informed me that Massachusetts has a 5.6 percent income tax, but there’s no income tax in Texas. I said, ‘I’m a Texan!’ ”
This was his third term. So far, he’s best known for coauthoring a bill in 2013 that reasserted the right of students and employees at public schools to say “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays.”
“Have you got an amendment?” I asked Fallon.
“Yeah, it’s number one fifty-two, in which we defund the portion of the Travis County Public Integrity Unit’s investigation of insurance fraud and motor vehicle tax fraud.” That unit has been under attack for years, because it also addresses crimes committed by state officials. Of course, anything attacking Austin and Travis County is reliably popular in the legislature. Austin is a spore of the California fungus that is destroying America.
“Who would do the investigating?” I asked.
“We’d give it to the attorney general,” Fallon responded.
“But he’s under indictment.”
“I would prefer it not be that way,” Fallon admitted. “But he hasn’t been convicted.”
Fallon ranks high on the conservative “report cards,” compiled by watchdog groups, by which modern legislators live and die. The most feared is the Fiscal Responsibility Index, a powerful weapon against Republicans who are less than ultraradical.
It is produced by Empower Texans, a group led by Michael Quinn Sullivan, a lobbyist who is known by his initials, MQS, which some members pronounce “Mucus.”
Sullivan is tall and friendly. He likes to talk about Boy Scouts (he was an Eagle Scout), the Aggies (he was in the A&M Corps of Cadets), and his three children. He’s a right-wing zealot, sometimes described as the most powerful non-elected political figure in Texas. Several years ago we had lunch, and Sullivan told me, “I’m not there to get a seat at the table. I’m there to get rid of the table.” In other words, destroy the government.
Empower Texans is largely funded by a reclusive Midland oilman named Tim Dunn, an evangelical Christian who hopes to create in Texas a model of small government that could be replicated by other states and countries. Even people who hate Dunn’s politics consider him the most effective moneyman in the state. His mission has been to push Republican lawmakers to the far right, eliminating the kind of middle-ground figures who support Joe Straus. Dunn has made it a mission to bring the Speaker down.
While Fallon and I were talking, Jonathan Stickland approached the front microphone. Stickland, a member of the Freedom Caucus, is a former pest-control operator from Bedford, near Arlington, who now lists himself as an oil-and-gas consultant. Stickland is heavyset, with a Falstaffian beard, narrow-set brown eyes, and an occasional broad smile, showing beautiful teeth. He made news last session by posting a sign outside his office:
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