God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

  Patrick felt that Texas schools had enough money. In an op-ed published in early June, he noted that total education spending, including universities, was already the largest item in the budget—“about fifty-two per cent of all state dollars.” He added: “It is disingenuous to suggest that we are, somehow, holding back funding that we could spend on schools.” (PolitiFact pointed out that education spending, as a percentage of the Texas budget, is lower than it has been in at least twenty years. It is among the lowest, per capita, in the country.)

  By now, the ill will between Patrick and Straus had spilled over into the chambers they led. San Antonio Republican Lyle Larson, who is close to Straus, accused the Senate of “taking hostages” when it promised to pass certain House bills only if the House voted for Patrick’s priorities. “I’ve got six,” Larson cried. “How many other bills were held hostage by the Texas Senate?”

  A roar went up in the House, which only increased in volume when Democrat Harold Dutton, a black state representative from Houston, took the microphone. “When the Senate won’t respect us, they need to expect us,” he said. “I don’t know if they can see us, but would you open the door so they can hear us?” The House doors were flung open as the frustrated representatives bayed like wolves at the Senate chamber.

  Governor Abbott had warned Straus that he would demand action on the bathroom bill, even if he had to call a special session to get it. With the Speaker’s blessing, a compromise was crafted by Chris Paddie, a Republican representative from Marshall. It was styled as an amendment to a bill on school safety and would affect grade schools and high schools but not universities or government buildings. It affirmed the right of all students to use the bathroom with “privacy, dignity, and safety,” but it did not explicitly bar students from using particular bathrooms.

  Across Texas, school districts and chambers of commerce seemed resigned to accept the amendment. In Straus’s opinion, it codified a reasonable practice that many schools had already adopted. Still, there was bitter opposition in the House by members who saw it as appeasement. Rafael Anchia, a Democratic state representative from Dallas, reminded the other members that since January, when they began debating the bathroom issue, ten transgender people had been violently killed in the United States. He read their names aloud.

  The amendment passed the House, but it didn’t satisfy Patrick. Straus refused to go further. He declared that Patrick could take Paddie’s amendment or leave it. “For many of us—and especially for me—this was a compromise. As far as I’m concerned, it was enough. We will go no further. This is the right thing to do in order to protect our economy from billions of dollars in losses and more importantly to protect the safety of some very vulnerable young Texans.” He added that it was “absurd” that the bathroom bill had taken on more urgency than fixing the school finance system.

  Patrick called a press conference shortly afterward. He said of Straus’s remarks, “Instead of siding with the people of Texas—and, as a Republican, siding with Republicans of Texas—he has decided to support the policies of Barack Obama, who said, ‘I want boys and girls in every shower in every school in the country.’ ” (Obama never said that.) Patrick then added a remark aimed directly at the reluctant Governor Abbott: “Tonight, I’m making it very clear, Governor. I want you to call us back on your own time.”

  The two chambers succeeded in passing a budget, but a special session seemed inevitable.

  Abbott clearly hated the position he had been thrust into. He had said repeatedly that there was still time in the regular session to resolve these issues. But time had now run out. A special session devoted almost entirely to the bathroom bill would focus even more unwanted national attention on Texas.

  To add to the pressure, on May 27, the CEOs of fourteen companies with a significant presence in Texas, including Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Google, and IBM, sent Abbott a letter. “We are gravely concerned that any such legislation would deeply tarnish Texas’ reputation as open and friendly to businesses and families,” it said. The bill would harm the companies’ ability to recruit talent to the state, they asserted, adding: “Discrimination is wrong and it has no place in Texas.” Ray Perryman, a respected economist in Waco, did his own study of the bathroom bill. He forecast that its passage would cost the state $3.3 billion in gross state product and the loss of 36,000 jobs, most of them in the tourist industry. Indeed, convention bookings in the state were already suffering cancellations while the measure was being discussed.

  Reporters caught up with Abbott at a gun range, where he signed a bill lowering the cost of handgun licenses. “Texans’ ability to bear arms is going to be even bolder today than it’s ever been before,” he said. He then shot a few rounds at a target sheet, which he proudly displayed to the reporters, who have generally been very kind to him. This was the day after Montana had held a special election and chosen as U.S. representative a candidate who had body-slammed a reporter, sending him to the hospital. It was also the same season in which Trump had declared the press to be the enemy. Abbott held up his bullet-riddled target and said, “I’m gonna carry this around in case I see any reporters.”

  On the Friday before the end of the regular session, Straus told me, the lieutenant governor sent two emissaries from the Senate to visit with the Speaker in his office. They seemed nervous. One of the senators carried an envelope, apparently containing the language of the bathroom bill that Patrick would accept. The senator, a lawyer whose name Straus would not disclose, told Straus that the language had been carefully crafted to ensure that the bill would override any local antidiscrimination ordinances. The senator started to open the envelope, but Straus said not to bother. “I’m not a lawyer, but I am a Texan,” he said. “I’m disgusted by all this. Tell the lieutenant governor I don’t want the suicide of a single Texan on my hands.”

  * * *

  DURING THE REGULAR SESSION of the Eighty-fifth Texas Legislature, more than 6,600 bills were filed, and more than 1,200 were passed and sent to the governor to sign. The session was widely viewed as being dictated by Dan Patrick, but many of the signature items he sought—school vouchers, property-tax rollbacks, and the bathroom bill—failed to pass.

  The major cities in Texas quickly joined in a lawsuit against S.B. 4—the sanctuary cities bill—saying that its provisions would lead to racial profiling, and that regulating immigration is a power reserved for the federal government. However, the U.S. attorney general, Jeff Sessions, announced that the Justice Department was on the side of S.B. 4. “President Trump has made a commitment to keep America safe,” he said. “Texas has admirably followed his lead by mandating statewide cooperation with federal immigration laws that require the removal of illegal aliens who have committed crimes.” Faced with the possibility of being incarcerated in her own jail if she disobeyed federal immigration detention requests, Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez said that her office would comply with the new law.

  The last day of the session, Memorial Day, is usually spent in presentations of proclamations, commendations to the staff, and good-byes among colleagues who have endured 140 of the most intense days of their lives together. Some of the members will retire; others may be defeated in the next election; those who endure will be back in eighteen months for another round.

  Meanwhile, buses began arriving at the capitol. Hundreds of protestors, some from distant states, burst through the doors, filling all four levels of the rotunda and spilling into the House gallery. They blew whistles and unfurled banners (“See You in Court!”) and chanted “S.B. 4 has got to go!” One of the leaders of the protest, Stephanie Gharakhanian, explained to reporters, “We wanted to make sure we gave them the send-off they deserve.”

  The House came to a halt amid the pandemonium. A few of the Democrats on the floor looked up at the chanting protestors and began to applaud. State troopers cleared the gallery and broke up the demonstration, but by that time the attemp
ted bonhomie that usually characterizes the final day had blown up. Matt Rinaldi, a member of the Freedom Caucus from Dallas County, who is sometimes rated the most conservative member of the House, later told Fox Business Network that he noticed several banners bearing the message “I Am Undocumented and Here to Stay.” He says he decided to summon Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and then bragged about it to his Hispanic colleagues.

  A shoving match broke out on the House floor. Curses flew, along with spittle. Afterward, Rinaldi posted on Facebook that Alfonso “Poncho” Nevárez, a Democrat from the border town of Eagle Pass, had threatened his life. “Poncho told me he would ‘get me on the way to my car,’ ” Rinaldi wrote. He said he made it clear that “I would shoot him in self-defense.”

  * * *

  THE CAPITOL WAS SUBDUED the day after the session ended. In the House chamber, docents were leading school tours and explaining, in English and Spanish, the identities of the famous Texans in the portraits along the walls. I like the one of Stephen F. Austin with his musket, a spotted hound at his feet. In the rotunda, a high school orchestra was playing a piece for woodwinds. I went up on the second-floor tier, where the acoustics were better. The students were from Kountze, a little East Texas town that had the distinction, in 1991, of electing America’s first Muslim mayor. The musicians were arrayed in the center of the rotunda atop the seals of the Republic and the five other nations that Texas had once been part of. I was moved by the thought that the long and bloody march of Texas history had paused at this moment, with small-town kids bringing all the diverse voices of our state into harmony.

  Speaker Straus was waiting in his chambers, seated on his couch in his shirtsleeves, under a painting of Hereford cattle. He looked more relaxed than I thought was warranted, given that the governor was poised to call a special session that would likely focus on Patrick’s two must-pass bills. But Straus seemed satisfied. He boasted that the priorities of the House—his priorities—had been mostly accomplished. “We did the Child Protective Services reforms, adding fourteen hundred new caseworkers,” he said. “We made tremendous progress on mental health reforms.” Texas’s decrepit hospitals were going to be upgraded. A health-care plan for retired teachers was saved. Massive cuts to higher education were averted. “These were issues a little bit under the radar because they’re not sensational, but they’re issues that are going to make a big difference in Texas lives,” Straus said. “What we didn’t achieve was to begin fixing the school finance system, which everybody knows is a disaster.” Straus said that schools in districts that have been affected by the downturn in the oil and gas economy might have to be shuttered. “We had a plan to bridge that. Unfortunately the Senate had other priorities.” He attributed the failure to Patrick’s “fixation on vouchers.”

  I asked Straus about the clash between business and cultural conservatives, which was tearing the Republican Party apart, both in Texas and nationally. He quoted William H. Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, who described the forthcoming Civil War as “an irrepressible conflict.” The prejudices unleashed by the election of Donald Trump were mixing with the already volatile elements of Texas politics. Given that Dan Patrick had been Trump’s campaign manager in the state, there was bound to be a confluence of interests.

  Referring to the bathroom bill, Straus said, “We came very close this session to passing a sweeping discriminatory policy. It would have sent a very negative message around the country.”

  “That’s still possible, right?” I asked. Couldn’t the governor just put forward his own bill and threaten to veto any amendments?

  Straus agreed, but noted, “The legislature is not obligated to act upon his agenda items within the thirty-day period. And the governor would have the option to call as many thirty-day sessions as he would like.”

  “So it could stay in committee and not get voted out?”

  Straus smiled.

  The session was the most fractious in memory, and the bad feelings stirred up in the capitol will linger long after the lawmakers return home. Immigrant communities are fearful, lawmakers are vengeful, and hatemongers feel entitled to spread their message. And the bitter battle among Texas Republicans wasn’t yet over. Governor Abbott called a special session, to convene on July 18, and set forth a list of twenty items that he said required action. Most of them could have been passed in the regular session; none of them were a priority for him before the session began. In addition to the bathroom bill, his list of demands included education vouchers, caps on state and local spending, and new abortion restrictions. He asked for a thousand-dollar pay raise for public-school teachers, which the local school districts—not the state—would likely have to pay for. “I expect legislators to return with a calm demeanor, and with a firm commitment to make Texas even better,” the governor declared.

  Straus was not intimidated. He told me, “We’re under no obligation to pass anything.”

  * * *

  REPUBLICAN POLITICAL CONSULTANT Karl Rove sometimes drops in on my regular Monday breakfast. He’s a notorious figure in liberal Austin, a status he seems to relish. He’s also a historian and writer, which is what draws him to our table. The week after the regular session closed, he sat down with us and we talked about how Texas turned red.

  Rove attributed the turnover, in part, to migration. “People moved to Texas from somewhere else in the country, and that started to turn the urban areas Republican.” The new Texans arrived with different political histories. My own family was part of that migration. My father was an Eisenhower Republican when we moved to Dallas in 1960. The Kennedy-Nixon campaign was under way, and Daddy was strongly for Nixon, although I think my mother secretly voted for Kennedy. She was always quiet about her politics. The Republicans didn’t make Dallas a right-wing stronghold—it was already very conservative—but it became the first city in Texas to turn red, in 1954, when it elected Bruce Alger, a real-estate developer and political extremist, to Congress.

  Suburbs sprang up to accommodate the massive growth in Texas in the postwar decades, and they tended to be more like one another than like the cities they surrounded. Everything was new: the churches, the schools, the shopping centers, even the trees. “Think about Williamson County, or better yet, Collin County—these were cow pastures in the seventies,” Rove said. “You used to be able to go to Frisco”—in Collin County—“and there was one stoplight in it. Now it has ten high schools.”

  Unlike the cities, the suburbs were largely middle class and overwhelmingly white. There was a great sorting out, which left the cities poorer and more concentrated with minorities. The suburbs were organized around families who were seeking affordable homes and good schools. Suburbanites tended to have white-collar jobs, which meant that they were less likely than laboring Texans to belong to a union. They were more religious, often intensely so, belonging to massive evangelical congregations. All of these suburban characteristics—their relative affluence, their domination by white, non-union, churchgoing families—coincided with the core demographics of the emerging Republican majority.

  Rove also pointed to another factor—“the sequential flow of parts of rural Texas into the Republican column.” That process began in West Texas in 1978, then moved to the eastern and central parts of the state. By 1994, “rural Texas had moved from being solidly Democratic to solidly Republican.”

  “That was where the progressives were, in the old days, right?” I asked. “What changed in their condition that caused them to turn Republican?”

  “They were not so much progressives as they were populists,” he replied. “And populists think the system’s rigged against them. They went from being economic populists, who thought the system was rigged against the little guy, to social and conservative populists, who thought that government was the problem.”

  “And also, the effects of the Civil War finally wore off,” Bill Brands observed. “But when the nationa
l Democratic Party embraced civil rights, then the Southern Democrats decided this is no longer my party.”

  “The Democrats lasted longer in Texas than elsewhere in the South because the party remained relatively moderate,” said Rove. Under Governor Ann Richards, however, “the Democratic Party took a hard left turn.” It was Rove who engineered her downfall.

  “What accounted for her popularity?” Steve asked.

  “She was the aunt you loved to see at the family picnic every summer,” Rove replied. “Outrageous, say anything, do anything.” At the beginning of the Bush campaign, Richards had a 67 percent approval rating and more than $4 million in her war chest. George W. had lost one congressional race and had no experience in politics, but thanks in part to Rove’s political mastery, Bush beat the incumbent governor 53.5 percent to 45.9 percent, the widest margin of victory in twenty years.