by Molly Ivins
And another good issue is Bush’s business record, where he very clearly did not take his own advice that we shouldn’t look to the government for help.
As for the rather silly argument that if George W.’s last name were Smith, no one ever would have heard of him—that’s quite true, but so what? His last name isn’t Smith. Get over it. Yes, he is ahead now on name recognition, and no, most people don’t know a single thing about where he stands. And whose fault is that?
April 1999
“No Position” Bush
AFEW WEEKS ago, a consoling clip from an Arizona newspaper arrived on my desk informing me that one member of the Arizona Legislature had said to another, “Gee, I didn’t know you were Jewish. You don’t look Jewish. You don’t have a big hook nose.” There was even a picture of the Jewish member helpfully labeled: DOES NOT HAVE BIG HOOK NOSE.
A pal sent me this snippet because the last time I was in Arizona this sensitive state representative had managed to conflate homosexuality and cannibalism into a single menace, a confusion so remarkable I felt impelled to write about it. It’s always nice to know not all the morons are in the Texas Lege.
Trouble is, I can’t think of anything else encouraging about the seventy-sixth session of the Texas Lege. I’ll put our morons up against theirs, anytime.
Representative Arlene Wohlgemuth, one of our top contenders, opposed a resolution noting that 1.5 million Texas children do not have health insurance. She said they might not have health insurance because their parents are so rich they can afford to pay cash for medical care. “Their parents might be making $1 million a year. It is still our right in this country not to have health insurance,” she said.
The right not to have health insurance is one of the most undercelebrated rights we have in this great nation, and we are all grateful to Arlene for pointing it out to us.
Perhaps the high point of the session was the day the Democratic minority in the Senate left the chamber en masse, decamped to the rotunda of the Capitol, and there proceeded to hold hands and pray. Led in prayer, I might add, by Senator John Whitmire of Houston, who has not heretofore been much noted for Christian leadership. (Whitmire has taken offense at my astonishment over his new incarnation as a spiritual leader and informs me he is known as “John the Baptist.”) The proximate cause of this Democratic re-course to The Lord was that they couldn’t get the hate crimes bill out of committee. And the reason they couldn’t get it out is because gays and lesbians were included in the bill, and that presented a huge problem for George W. Bush, who is running for president. Because, you see, it would upset the many fundamentalist Christians who would vote in Republican primaries if killing “sinners” was somehow especially illegal. I know this because Senator Drew Nixon explained it to Senator Rodney Ellis, sponsor of the hate crimes bill. Senator Nixon knows his onions when it comes to sin, he being our leading convicted perp in the Senate, having done time for the unfortunate sin of soliciting a prostitute last year. He served his sentence in a halfway house and, may I add, is in point of actual fact one of the more useful and intelligent members of the Texas Senate.
I am in some danger of becoming fond of Senator Nixon, who has populist instincts. You may think incipient fondness for him reflects poorly on my judgment, but that’s only because you don’t know the other Republicans in the Senate.
Senator Florence Shapiro, one of the other Republicans, said the entire hate crimes bill was about one man, George W. Bush—all an effort to embarrass the governor. Actually, the hate crimes bill was about one man, and his name was James Byrd Jr., who was dragged to death behind a pickup truck near Jasper, Texas, last year because he was black. His corpse was recovered in chunks. In this year of Our Lord 1999, the Legislature of the state of Texas is still not ready to condemn hate crimes because that includes crimes against “queers.” A lesser person might be discouraged by that. The governor, incidentally, had no position on the hate crimes bill: That’s the governor’s usual position—he has no position. He has said, “All crimes are hate crimes.” As Representative Senfronia Thompson, House sponsor of the James Byrd Jr. Memorial Bill, asked sarcastically, “Is forgery a hate crime? Fraud? Prosti-tution? Armed robbery?”
The other big fight of the session was over whether to use federal money to give health insurance to the children of the poor (about 165,000 kids would be covered). The governor had no position. The House, the one that still has a Democratic majority, prevailed.
Governor Bush, the crown prince of the Republican Party, had one big goal this session: He wants to give $2 billion in property tax relief back to the people who own property in this state. Texas has an extraordinarily regressive tax structure; it weighs most heavily on those who are poorest. Poor people rarely own property. Nevertheless, property tax relief was the goal. And it was certainly aided by the fact that we in Texas have a handsome budget surplus this year. What better to do with it than give a property tax rebate to those who own property? They will get a cut worth as much as a Big Mac and fries every month! Meanwhile, Texas ranks fiftieth among the states (that’s last) in per capita spending, and that includes highways, the one thing we do well. If you were to exclude highway spending, Texas would rank where it so often does—behind Puerto Rico and Guam.
So what could we have done instead of a tax cut? Kindergarten. We thought it would be nice to have kindergarten in Texas. We keep reading all these studies about how important early childhood development is. Hillary Clinton—you should forgive I mention her name—has made a big deal about this, all this new research shows the early development stuff is critical. So we thought maybe kindergarten. But no. The Education Governor is not that keen on education.
July 1999
The Real Question for Bush
UNDER THE OLD rules, before we wrote about something, we were expected to have some evidence that it was true. Under the new rules, the fact that there is gossip about someone is news, whether the gossip is true or not.
In the case of George W. Bush, the fact that he refuses to deny that he used cocaine has seemed to the entire press corps sufficient evidence—a charming latter-day version of “Have you stopped beating your wife?”
The media, as happens so depressingly often, are asking the wrong question. Bush himself stands there and begs us to ask it. “I have learned from my mistakes,” he says over and over. The question is: What did he learn?
Until 1973, Texas had the most draconian drug laws in the nation. Whether they stopped Bush or not, they didn’t stop me, didn’t stop people now serving in the Legislature, and didn’t stop most of a generation of Texans from trying marijuana.
What did Bush learn from that? Nothing.
Harsh laws do not stop young people from trying illegal drugs. So what does Bush do when he gets to be governor? Increases the penalties and toughens the system so it’s harder on young people. Signs a memorably stupid bill making possession of less than a twentieth of an ounce of cocaine punishable by jail time.
Are there people who are now in Texas prisons for making “youthful mistakes”? There are thousands of them. At least 5,000 people are in for marijuana possession alone. Twenty percent of the state prison population of 147,000 is there on drug-related charges.
The truth is, if Bush had been caught using marijuana or cocaine twenty-five years ago, he would not have been sentenced to prison. He was rich and white, and his daddy was an important guy. That’s the way the system worked then; that’s the way the system works now.
When Bush became governor, he had a world of opportunity to try to make the system more fair. What did he do? He vetoed a bill (passed unanimously by both sides of the Republican-controlled Legislature) that would have given poor defendants the right to see a lawyer within twenty days. Twenty days, big deal: In most of the country, an indigent defendant gets a lawyer within seventy-two hours, or they have to let him go. We have poor people in Texas who spend months in jail just waiting to see a lawyer, who may be drunk or asleep at trial.
Bush vetoed that bill. He learned nothing.
When Bush came in as governor, this state had committed to the most extensive in-prison drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation program in the country—the joint legacy of Ann Richards and Bob Bullock, both recovering alcoholics. Eighty percent of the people in Texas prisons are diagnosed by the system as having substance abuse problems. The entire program is gone now, completely repealed.
Bush learned nothing. That’s the story.
THE REPUBLICAN Party expects to find at least one hundred supporters who will give $250,000 a year over four years in soft money. Just what we need: a club of $1 million donors. In one of the funniest statements in years, Julie Finley, chair of the Republican Team 100 program (these are the pikers who give only $100,000), explained to The New York Times what the $1 million donors will get for their money: “What they get is they are left alone. They don’t get calls to buy a table at the gala. They don’t get calls to give to the media program. They have a pass that lasts all year.”
And, by George, if that’s not worth a million bucks, what is?
Oh, they also get private meetings with the people who write the laws for all of us.
MY GUN-NUT friends often tell me that mass shootings like the one at the Jewish community center in Los Angeles wouldn’t happen if more people carried concealed weapons. How right they are: If those five-year-olds in L.A. had just been packing, none of ’em would have gotten hurt.
I wrote that line right after the shooting but didn’t use it on the grounds that it was too flip. But I’m using it now because Thomas Sowell, a right-wing columnist from the Hoover Institute, actually wrote a column in all seriousness saying, yep, the solution to these mass killings is more guns. Incredibly, he argues that the mass killings that have been taking place in white, middle-class settings wouldn’t happen in the ghettos or barrios because more folks there are packing.
I hate to tell him this, but if the murder rate in white, suburban America were the same as that in the ghettos and barrios, we’d be confiscating guns by now.
October 1999
Political Advertising
HOUSTON — My favorite thing at the Texas Republican Convention was the advertising in the back of the hall that constituted an almost perfect record of the major scandals, conflicts of interest, and bad public policy that have occurred during the W. Bush gubernatorial administration. There they all were, proudly displaying their gratitude to Bush and the party. It was a near-perfect metaphor for American politics today.
Chemical had several of the small billboards for each part of the hall. Dow and the rest of the chemical industry were given one third of the seats on the Texas equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency when Bush got into office.
He appointed a lobbyist for the Texas Chemical Council to the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission. This citizen had spent thirty years working for Monsanto. He used his position as one of the top environmental officials of Texas to go to Washington to testify that ozone is benign and to oppose strengthening federal air-quality standards. Being in Houston during the lovely summer ozone season reminds us all how grateful we must be for this kind of zealous watchdoggery of our air quality.
Also advertising its gratitude to Bush was TXU, formerly Texas Utilities, which under Bush’s deregulation scheme is trying to stick consumers with $3.7 billion in “stranded costs”—aka dumb management decisions. Enjoy that on your summer utility bill.
And how nice to see an ad from a grateful Metabolife.
According to the May 22 issue of Time magazine, Texas was fixing to regulate ephedrine, an amphetamine-like stimulant widely used for weight loss. Ephedrine products had been linked to eight deaths and fourteen hundred health problems in Texas, so the health commissioner was ready to regulate. But according to Time, Metabolife International of San Antonio hired a San Antonio law firm headed by some of Bush’s closest political associates, and instead there was a meeting with the commissioner, who then decided to bring in an outside lawyer to negotiate a settlement with ephedrine producers.
Metabolife’s Washington lobbyist, who had given $141,000 to Bush’s gubernatorial campaigns and raised at least $100,000 for his presidential campaign, was also a player. Stricter limits on ephedrine were dropped.
Next up, an ad for Pilgrim’s Pride, the chicken company of Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim of East Texas. Some of you may remember Lonnie-Bo from the famous time, pre-Bush, when he strolled onto the floor of the Texas Senate and started handing out $10,000 checks to senators in the midst of a hearing on workers’ comp law.
Lonnie-Bo was also a big funder of Texans for Public Justice, a tort reform outfit, and gave $125,000 to Bush for his gubernatorial campaigns. As you know, tort reform under Bush has gone so far that the state is now paradise for insurance companies.
Next up, Promised Land Dairy, owned by James Leininger, who crusaded first for tort reform and is hot on school vouchers and other Christian-right causes. Leininger gave $1.5 million in contributions and loans to Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry, helping to provide the razor-thin margin by which he defeated Democrat John Sharp. Leininger also provided a huge loan to Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander in 1998, as well as $65,000 to Bush in ’98.
How nice to see an ad for Philip Morris Co., Inc. Philip Morris provided employment for Karl Rove, the man running Bush’s campaign, from 1991 to 1996. Rove was paid $3,000 a month to lobby for Philip Morris while also working for Bush. This was during the time that Texas was suing the tobacco companies.
What a pleasant stroll down memory lane these little billboards provided.
Meanwhile, various Republican orators were at the mike describing the coming election as “a struggle for the soul of the American people” (U.S. Representative Tom DeLay) and a battle between our values and the “indecency” of Al Gore. (Everyone was on the virtues-and-values theme, usually referred to as “our virtues” and “our values.”)
And I was just strolling along that wall of ads, studying those virtues and values.
June 2000
Henry B.
IN MAY 1957, one of the ugliest times in Texas history, the Legislature was debating a long series of bills designed to reinforce the legal structure of segregation.
Henry B. Gonzalez opposed the bills for twenty-two hours straight—still the record in the Texas Senate. Ronnie Dugger of The Texas Observer reported:
A tall Latin man in a light blue suit and white shoes and yellow handkerchief was pacing around his desk on the Senate floor. It was eight o’clock in the morning. An old Negro was brushing off the soft senatorial carpet in front of the president’s rostrum. Up in the gallery, a white man stood with his back to the chamber, studying a panel of pictures of an earlier Senate. The Latin man was orating and gesturing in a full flood of energy, not like a man who had been talking to almost nobody for three hours and had another day and night to go.
“Why did they name Gonzalez Gonzalez, if the name wasn’t honored in Texas at the time?” he asked. “Why did they honor Garza along with Burnet? My own forebears in Mexico bore arms against Santa Anna. There were three revolutions against Santa Anna—Texas was only one of its manifestations. Did you know that Negroes helped settle Texas? That a Negro died at the Alamo?”
The angry, crystal-voiced man stopped in his pacing and raised his arms to plead, “I seek to register the plaintive cry, the hurt feelings, the silent, the dumb protest of the inarticulate. . . .”
For 22 hours he held the floor, an eloquent, an erudite, a genuine and a passionate man; and any whose minds he didn’t enter had slammed the doors and buried the keys.
What you have to remember about a twenty-two-hour filibuster, still the record, is that it requires more than enormous physical stamina. You have to have twenty-two hours’ worth of knowledge in your head—and having heard many a shorter filibuster, I can testify that many people do not. They just don’t know enough to talk that long, not to mention talking that long at such a level of historical, con
stitutional, legal, and judicial knowledge, in addition to the extraordinary passion for justice that animated the whole.
Henry B. read widely his whole life and spoke four languages. That he was dismissed on the floor of the Texas Senate as a “lousy Mexican” was just a tiny part of the contempt and hatred that he experienced because of his skin color. Henry B.’s filibuster finally killed all but two or three of the whole hateful package.
When someone like Henry B. dies, as Gonzalez did Tuesday, I sometimes think those platitudinous tributes “fearless champion of the underdog, honorable and principled” actually get in the way of those who did not know the late, sainted whoever. Henry B. was not a saint. He was a boxer.
When he was seventy years old, some fool called him a communist, so Henry B. decked the guy. At the time, Henry B. claimed that although he was provoked, he had still acted in a restrained manner. “If I had acted out of passion, that fellow would still not be able to eat chalupas.”