State Government

This is the last issue of Texas Weekly for 2004. We’re taking two weeks off and will return in the first week of January, in time for the government and political fun to begin all over again. Thanks for your support this year: We appreciate your business and wish you a wonderful holiday season.

A kind of inertia surfaces in the parlor speculation of political people that follows every big election. Top-of-the-ballot stuff is so well trodden that you can talk about whether She will challenge Him and everybody in Texas knows what you’re babbling about. But while most eyes are focused on two of the state’s top officeholders, other ambitions are being stoked. No one has declared for anything yet — except for Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Gov. Rick Perry, the only two statewides who say they’ll definitely seek reelection — but trial balloons fill the sky.

Three Republicans who apparently lost on Election Day are officially questioning the results, contending the numbers at the bottom of the ledgers in those contests don’t reflect the legal votes. A fourth who was considering a challenge decided to let it rest.

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and other federal officeholders might be able to use their federal accounts for state races after all. That big fat federal appropriations bill kicked out of Congress in the last few hours before Thanksgiving includes a change in campaign finance law that would allow candidates to transfer money from their federal campaign accounts to state accounts.

To recall the business half of an old curse, these are interesting times in Texas politics and government. The Texas Legislature is coming back for a regular session in January, faced with the usual stuff. There’s a state budget to write, difficult even when everything’s humming and it’s not. They have business fights to referee: workers’ compensation insurance, tort reforms (particularly asbestos), and health insurance for people on the job. The state’s health and human services safety net for children and adults is so fouled up that the state agency in charge has been indicted. The agency that oversees that and all other HHS programs is in the middle of a complex and controversial reorganization. Pour on local issues, pet legislative issues, social issues and so on that make up the rest of a regular session and you have a busy time. But that’s normal. Look at what else is in the in-box:

When they say it’s all over but the shoutin’, that’s another way of saying it’s not over. Voters have done their part, and a handful of Texas House contests are now in the hands of lawyers and election officials. Several close elections involving incumbents still fall short of final outcomes.

Texas Republicans won four of the five expensively contested congressional seats on Election Day, grabbing hold of the last cul-de-sac they didn’t fully control in the neighborhoods of federal and state government. With the results now in hand, the Texas elephant herd’s dominion now includes the White House, both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats, the Texas congressional delegation, every statewide elected position in the executive and judicial branches, the state Senate and the state House. Twenty years ago, that landscape was populated mostly by donkeys.

It’s a strange thing to be surrounded by an election that has the whole country in a lather while at home, there’s no doubt about the outcome at the top of the ticket and — with exceptions for a handful of congressional races — a ballot dominated by personality clashes, professional feuds and local races.

An Austin judge ordered the Associated Republicans of Texas PAC to stop taking, spending, or soliciting any corporate money until after the November 2 election. If the ruling holds — ART is appealing it — it’ll mean money from corporations and unions can’t be used for any purpose by political action committees that aren’t affiliated with them, either directly or through a trade group. And the ruling could have implications in ongoing grand jury investigations of campaign finance in the 2002 elections that put the first Republican majority in the Texas House since Reconstruction.

After the 2002 elections, it was obvious to every political wonk with a spreadsheet and a lick of sense that Reps. John Mabry, D-Waco, and Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, were in trouble. They appeared to be downright pre-cooked: Mabry won in Republican territory when his opponent imploded; Mercer won in Democratic territory when his opponent was indicted. The conventional wisdom was (and this is not over yet) that the two politicos would soon be giving up their spots to the rightful owners from the opposing parties. But they’re both alive and each has a chance at winning a sophomore legislative term. Their opponents have run sloppy campaigns, they’ve run good ones, and in Mabry’s case, the environment is under the influence of a hotly disputed congressional race.