State Government

The grand jury investigating campaign contributions and expenditures in the 2002 legislative elections sent subpoenas to House Speaker Tom Craddick and a number of other House members, asking for their testimony and/or records relating to Texans for a Republican Majority, a political action committee set up that year to win more GOP seats in the Texas House.

Texans for Lawsuit Reform, which spent huge amounts of money to knock off trial lawyers in two recent East Texas Senate races, is on its way to a new record. With a week to go before the special election in SD-1, the group had spent $843,397 kicking Democrat Paul Sadler around. TLR gave nominal amounts — $5,000 — to two of the Republicans in the first round. Other than that, all of the group’s money has gone into a third-party campaign tearing into Sadler, a trial lawyer and former House member who hopes to succeed Republican Bill Ratliff in the Texas Senate. Former Tyler Mayor Kevin Eltife was one of the recipients of the $5,000 contribution, but TLR hasn’t done any advertising touting him. Their goal is to whack Sadler, and they’re doing it to such an extent that the Democrat’s campaign is fighting a two-front war, against Eltife on one hand and TLR on the other.

Ever dent the fender driving a new car off the lot? The coalition of school boards and school administrators formed to lobby state government to spend more money on public schools is looking, unexpectedly, for professional help. Public Strategies Inc., the Austin-based public affairs firm that had been doing the group’s polling, public relations and marketing – an effort that put them on the wrong side of the governor – dropped out less than a week after the coalition was publicly announced, citing conflicts between the school clients who want more money and clients who hired the firm to work on the tax bill that would fund that and other state spending.

Gov. Rick Perry wants to call a special session on school finance this spring to try to cut property taxes and end the Robin Hood formulas that have rich-district voters in uproar. But he’s leading with “education excellence” instead of finance, adding $500 million to the price and diverting attention from the funding emergency that’s driving the issue. And the lack of consensus over that plan, and over schemes to re-jigger the school finance system, threatens plans to call lawmakers to Austin.

Every election is a new thing. The numbers that flow out of political consultants’ laptop computers share a problem with the stuff flowing out of an investment advisor’s box: Past results do not guarantee future results.

If he didn’t have his hands full already, state Rep. Tommy Merritt, R-Longview, got hit with an ad campaign from a conservative third-party group called Americans for Job Security, blasting a proposal he made that would have broadened sales taxes in Texas (while cutting local school property taxes around the state). The ads don’t mention the property tax cut, but say the higher sales taxes would “mean fewer jobs around here.”

The judges who approved the Legislature’s new congressional map acted like health inspectors who don’t like the food in a particular restaurant but still find the kitchen clear of cockroaches and other violations of the health code. The results are a matter of taste; the restaurant’s legal.

In the last presidential election, George W. Bush easily beat the field, at least in Texas. He got 3,799,639 votes while Al Gore was pulling in 2,433,746 votes here. That’s a difference of 1,365,893 – quite a safety buffer when it came to tallying the state’s 32 electoral votes (the state will have two more electoral votes in 2004, because of the two congressional seats added after the last census; state’s get a vote for each person they elect to Congress).

Picture a room with no windows, with three judges and courtroom staff assembled in one corner, 30 attorneys (yes, really) seated and passing notes around a couple of large tables, a couple of dozen reporters squirming on hard wooden pews on one side in the back, and an assembly of officeholders, political hacks and all manner of aides seated on the other side in the back. At the door, a bailiff has been stationed to make sure nobody comes in unless one of the seats is emptied.

Federal judges apparently like theme weeks as much as network television executives do.