God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

  Roger Stone, who was present at Trump’s campaign event, claimed that he had the police escort his coauthor away from the rally. To add to the insult, Stone tweeted that Morrow was a “Clinton quisling.”

  * * *

  I ONCE WROTE a play that was set in the Texas House of Representatives, my favorite political body. The hero was a rancher from West Texas who represented House District 74, which in real life stretches across thirty-seven thousand square miles—making it larger than the state of Indiana. While I was researching the subject, I met in Austin with Pete Laney, a Democrat and a cotton farmer from Hale County, who was Speaker of the House at the time. Laney was known as a scrupulously fair and honest leader who inspired a bipartisan spirit among the members. The grateful representatives called him Dicknose.

  We sat down in the Speaker’s office, and I explained to Laney that I was having a plot problem: My hero, Sonny Lamb, was in a war with the biggest lobbyist in the state over an ethics reform bill. How could the lobbyist retaliate? Laney rubbed his hands together and said, “Well, you could put a toxic waste dump in Sonny’s district, and that would mess him up right and left.”

  Laney was inspired by an actual law passed in 1991, allowing sewage sludge from New York City to be shipped by train to Sierra Blanca, a little desert town in District 74, ninety miles southeast of El Paso. The train became known as the Poo-Poo Choo-Choo.

  “Another thing,” I said. “I’d like my lobbyist to take some legislators on a hunting trip. What would they likely be hunting?”

  “Pigs,” said Laney.

  “Pigs?”

  “Wild pigs. They’re taking over the whole state!” Laney said. “You ever seen one? Huge. They got these tusks out to here.”

  “How do you hunt them?”

  “Well, I don’t hunt ’em myself, but I got a friend who does.” He punched an intercom button on his phone. “Honey, get Sharp on the phone,” he said.

  In a moment, John Sharp, the state comptroller of public accounts (now chancellor of the Texas A&M system), was on the speaker. “Sharp,” said Laney, “I got a young man here wants to know how you hunt pigs.”

  “Oh!” Sharp cried. “Well, we do it at night, with pistols. Everybody wearing cutoffs and tennis shoes. We’ll set the dogs loose, and when they start baying we come running. Now, the dogs will go after the pig’s nuts, so the pig will back up against a tree to protect himself. So then you just take your pistol and pop him in the eye.”

  And these were progressive Democrats. More or less.

  * * *

  IN JANUARY 2003, the Republicans took over the Texas legislature, for the first time in 130 years, and Laney lost the Speakership—to Tom Craddick, a Midland Republican. More than anyone, Craddick was responsible for gaining a Republican majority in the House. “There were eight Republicans in the House when I got elected, in 1969, and one in the Senate,” Craddick told me. “The first time I tried to introduce a bill, they told me I couldn’t, because I was a Republican.”

  He was also, at twenty-five, the youngest member of the House. “Back then, most of the other members were retired, and they ran for office as a civic duty,” he said. Now, at seventy-three, he is the longest-serving legislator in Texas history.

  I once lobbied Craddick, when he was Speaker, to make Camp Mabry—a Texas State Guard facility in the heart of Austin, eight hundred acres of poorly used and superfluous training ground—into our version of Central Park. Craddick was going to make it a Speaker’s bill, but then he lost the gavel to Joe Straus, who has shown no interest in my park idea. It’s still a project of mine.

  Craddick is slight and white-haired, wry and friendly, with a bit of slur in his speech and a shuffle in his step. He’s easy to miss in the crowd of vigorous young legislators, few of whom were in office when Craddick turned the House into a Republican domain. His crusade started in the late 1980s. The party had practically no infrastructure, so Craddick helped to organize campaigns for the candidates, requiring them to report to him how many doors they had knocked on and how many mailers had been sent out. In 2002, Republicans finally got control, and the coup was complete. Craddick became the first Republican Speaker since Reconstruction. “But it wasn’t just about winning elections,” he told me. “We had a redistricting plan.”

  In those same 2002 elections, 56 percent of Texans who voted for a U.S. representative chose a Republican, but Democrats nevertheless held more seats—seventeen to fifteen—in the U.S. House. Craddick worked with Tom DeLay, from Sugar Land, near Houston, who was then the majority whip, to put into motion a sweeping plan to create a permanent Republican majority in the U.S. House.

  Under Craddick’s leadership, the Texas legislature began carving historic congressional districts into new fiefdoms. Taking care not to violate Supreme Court guidelines on minority representation, lawmakers jigsawed Texas into shapes that would decisively capture the state for the right.

  In May 2003, the redistricting plan came up for a vote in the Texas House. Unable to block it, more than fifty Democratic members of the Texas House fled to Oklahoma. The next morning, when Craddick gaveled the House to order, he realized he didn’t have a quorum. He locked down the capitol chamber to prevent any more defections and called out the state troopers to hunt down the missing members, who became known as the Killer Ds.

  In the midst of this hubbub, Pete Laney, the deposed Speaker, flew his Piper turboprop from the Panhandle to Ardmore, Oklahoma, where he joined his colleagues at the Holiday Inn. Someone in DeLay’s office got Laney’s flight plan from the Department of Homeland Security by claiming that Laney’s plane was “overdue” and might have crashed or been seized by terrorists. Soon, Texas troopers and national reporters were swarming into Ardmore, but the defiant Democrats stayed put until the session ended without a vote on redistricting. Governor Rick Perry called a special session for late June, whereupon eleven state senators fled to New Mexico. It took two more special sessions to ram the vote through.

  The fruits of Craddick and DeLay’s Republican revolution can be seen in the current Texas delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives: twenty-five Republicans and eleven Democrats, a far more conservative profile than the actual political demography of the state. The Austin metro area, the heart of liberal Texas, was divvied up into six congressional districts, and only one elected representative is a Democrat. I’m now represented by Roger Williams, an automobile dealer from Weatherford, two hundred miles north of Austin. Another congressman, Lamar Smith, lives in San Antonio, but his new district sweeps in the University of Texas in Austin. Smith, a member of the Tea Party caucus who denies that human activity affects global warming, heads the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, which oversees NASA, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency. (In November 2017, Smith announced he would not run again.) Lloyd Doggett is the only Democrat representing the Austin area, and his district runs along I-35, from East Austin to East San Antonio, scooping up as many Democrats in one basket as possible.

  The redistricting process that took place in Texas has since been replicated in statehouses around the country, creating districts that are practically immune to challenge and giving Republicans an impregnable edge. “Texas became a model for how to get control,” Craddick told me.

  In 2005, DeLay was prosecuted for money laundering and conspiracy in connection with the illegal use of corporate funds related to financing Republican candidates in Texas. Craddick was also questioned, but he was never indicted. DeLay’s conviction was overturned on appeal, in 2013, but by then he had resigned from Congress and made an unexpected appearance on Dancing with the Stars. The show has become a pathway for redemption for disgraced Texas politicos. Rick Perry, who was also indicted—in 2014, for abusing his power as governor—was also cleared, and also celebrated his comeback on Dancing with the Stars. Now he heads the Department of Energy. I wonder if Ted Cruz can dance.r />
  * * *

  THE MAJESTIC TEXAS CAPITOL, in Austin, was constructed in 1888 of pink granite, for which the state, destitute at the time, paid with three million acres of public land in the Panhandle—about the size of Connecticut. The capitol was said to be the seventh-largest building in the world, and as one would expect, it is somewhat taller than its uncle in Washington, D.C. During the summer, nighthawks swirl around the crowning statue on the dome: the Goddess of Liberty, holding aloft a golden star.

  The legislature meets every other year for 140 days, reflecting the state’s native aversion to government. The sessions begin on the second Tuesday in January and end on Memorial Day. The legislature’s only mandated task is to produce a two-year balanced budget, which was about $100 billion per year in the 2015 session. Two years later, the lower price of oil and a rise in population augured substantial cutbacks and a struggle to meet the expanding health, education, and safety needs of the state’s citizens.

  When I visited the capitol in January 2017, a group of high school girls stood on a terrazzo mosaic in the middle of the rotunda. In the center was the seal of the Republic of Texas, a lone star wreathed by branches of olive and live oak. “It’s two hundred and eighteen feet from this star to the one above,” a guide told them, gesturing to its mate on the ceiling of the dome high above the girls. “You could fit the Statue of Liberty in here.” Around the Republic of Texas seal are those of the five other nations that Texas has been part of—Spain, France, Mexico, the United States, and the Confederacy.

  The walls of the rotunda are ringed with portraits of our former governors. When Greg Abbott, our current governor, leaves office, his portrait will go where Perry’s is now, and those of all the previous governors will take one step to the left. When a portrait gets to the end of the ground-floor circle, it rises to the wall of the floor above, and then higher and higher and further into obscurity.

  The next portrait to make the ascent from the lobby floor is that of W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel. In some respects, O’Daniel, a Democrat, was a precursor of Donald Trump. He was a political naïf who had never even cast a ballot when he ran for governor in 1938, and he wasn’t even eligible to vote for himself because he hadn’t paid his poll tax. He passed himself off as a rube, but he was actually a savvy operator. He was a flour salesman who made a fortune in Fort Worth real estate, but he found his true métier when he began hosting a radio show with his band, the Light Crust Doughboys. It became the most popular show in the state. Radio was his Twitter. When his opponents staged a rally, sometimes hundreds might attend, but O’Daniel spoke to tens of thousands. Nothing like that had ever happened in Texas before. In his first race, he defeated eleven contenders without a runoff.

  As governor, he reneged on the promises he had made to abolish the death penalty, block the sales tax, and raise pensions. His only real political platform was to stir things up. He was a scaremonger, railing against “Communistic labor-leader racketeers” and politically controlled newspapers. He was terribly ineffectual, but such a wonderful showman that, in 1941, voters elected him to the U.S. Senate over the young Lyndon Johnson. The portrait of O’Daniel in the rotunda shows a handsome, full-faced man with slicked-back hair and a “Who, me?” look in his eye.

  Next to him is Coke Stevenson, whose steadfast demeanor was so much appreciated that he served longer than any other governor until Rick Perry. He was succeeded by Beauford Jester, whom I once described as “the last happy man to govern Texas.” He died in the arms of his mistress on the midnight sleeper to Houston.

  Of all the governors on the rotunda wall, Ann Richards, who served from 1991 to 1995, is the most memorable, at least in my lifetime. She was incredibly vivid, with that stark white hair swept and sprayed into a blinding pompadour—Molly Ivins called it “hard hair”—and a switchblade sense of humor that was honed on the primitive male chauvinism she had grown up with. She became a national figure when she gave the keynote address at the 1988 Democratic convention. “Poor George,” she said of the Republican nominee, George H. W. Bush, “he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” She wasn’t nice, but she had a wonderful smile and batted those icy blue eyes when she stuck the knife in.

  She was a recovering alcoholic and a single mother of four, so her rise to governor was a near miracle. Although she had been a successful state treasurer, her wealthy opponent, West Texas rancher and oilman Clayton Williams Jr., won the Republican primary in a landslide and was ahead by 30 points when the general election began. He blew that lead with a series of character-revealing gaffes. He told reporters that rape was like inclement weather: “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.” He had to fight off persistent rumors that he had invited his ranch hands and clients to join in “honey hunts,” which involved scattering prostitutes on his property like Easter eggs. But Williams still held a commanding lead in the polls when he met Richards at a forum in Dallas. She stuck out her hand and said, “Hello, Claytie.” He declined the gesture, violating the cowboy code that is deeply ingrained in every Texan. In that instant, Williams lost the election.

  Richards wore designer suits but picked her teeth, and she cleaned her fingernails with a Swiss Army knife. I think she was always a little amazed, after storming the ramparts, to find herself in the seat of power, but she cherished the comedy of the situation. Molly once told me that when the ACLU filed suit against a manger scene in the capitol, she called Governor Richards and asked, “Annie, is it really necessary to remove the crèche?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Richards replied, “and it’s a shame because it’s about the only time we ever had three wise men in the capitol.”

  Richards had the most amazing drawl—a weapon that could be devastatingly comic, but with a cut-the-crap edge to it. She was a flirt and she loved dirty jokes. Once we had a fundraiser for a mutual friend in the ballroom of the Four Seasons. The writer Kinky Friedman, who is also the lead singer of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, seized the opportunity to tell the story of going to the beach with a family friend who wore a swimsuit that was so tight it squeezed one of his balls into view. It’s not so funny when I tell it, but Richards was laughing so hard she could barely stay in her chair.

  Despite the state’s super-religious reputation, there has always been a tolerance for sexual misdemeanors on the part of elected officials. Charlie Wilson, the U.S. representative from the Second District, in East Texas, one of the most conservative parts of the state, was a drunk, a drug user, and the most energetic playboy on Capitol Hill, who enjoyed lounging in hot tubs with showgirls and cocaine. He was elected to twelve terms.

  The tolerance for sexual liberty didn’t extend to Richards, however. She had surrounded herself with a coterie of very powerful women, which led to countless innuendos and slurs about her sexual orientation. She complained to a lobbyist I know, “I could be fucking Charlie Wilson on Sam Houston’s bed, and they’d still call me a lesbian.”

  Richards’s loss, in 1994, after a single term, to George W. Bush, marked the end of the Democratic Party as a force of any consequence in the state.

  * * *

  ON THE WINTER DAY in 2017 that I was going through security at the capitol—waving my new concealed-weapon permit to escape any actual scrutiny—the current governor whizzed by in his wheelchair. Greg Abbott was a great track star in high school, having never lost a race, but in 1984 a tree fell on him while he was jogging through the wealthy enclave of Houston’s River Oaks, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. He had just graduated from law school and had no health insurance. Fortunately, he won a $9 million judgment from the homeowner whose tree had fallen, and from the tree company that had inspected the tree and failed to recommend its removal. Later, as a member of the Texas Supreme Court, and then as attorney general, Abbott supported measures that capped pain-and-suffering damages in medical malpractice cases at $250,000.

  Abbott’s pet issue
is fending off the malevolent influence of California. “Texas is being California-ized, and you might not even be noticing it,” he declared in 2015. “It’s being done at the city level with bag bans, fracking bans, tree-cutting bans. We’re forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.” He warned that the “Texas miracle” could become a “California nightmare.”

  This obsession with California really puzzles me. I play keyboards in a blues band, WhoDo, and our drummer has a sticker on his kit saying Stop Californication of Texas Music. The mayor of Austin, Steve Adler, a Democrat, warned that if our city stays on its current path, “we’ll end up like San Francisco,” with out-of-control housing costs. The newspapers often feature gloating stories about how many Californians are fleeing to Texas (eight per day to Austin alone), as an indication of the vast superiority of the Texas way of life; but if Texas could snatch away Hollywood, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, the California university system, the climate, the mountains, and the celebrities, I think the state would put up with a few more plastic-bag bans.

  I love being in California for many reasons, but as a Texan I sometimes bridle at the elite disdain and raw contempt that Californians express toward my state. They reverse the sentiments you hear in Texas, like Greg Abbott speaking into a mirror. Historically, the two states act as a political seesaw. Texas was as blue as the cloudless sky in the first half of the twentieth century, when California was as red as a beet. The defining political figures of our time—Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan—emerged from these opposing political climates, shaping the country and changing the world. The fact that America can contain two such assertive, contrary forces as Texas and California is a testament to our political dynamism, but more and more I feel that America is being compelled to make a choice between the models these states embody. Under the Trump administration, Texas is clearly the winning archetype. The wave of conservatism that has rolled through so many statehouses and the three branches of the federal government makes the entire country look a lot more like Texas.