Robert Locander - How Texas Politics Really Works

How Texas Politics

Really Works

Kevin Bailey

Bob Locander

Richard C. Shaw

Copyright 2017 Kevin Bailey, Bob Locander, Richard C. Shaw

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproducedin any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,including information storage and retrieval systems,without permission in writing from the authors, exceptby a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.For permission, write to3 Friends Publishing

403 Sulky Trail

Houston, TX 77060

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-5323-4645-3

Cover Design: Alan McCuller, www.Mc2graphics.com

Interior Design: Vivian Freeman, Yellow Rose Typesetting

Printed in the United States of America

Published by

Lone Star Productions

13820 Methuen Green

Dallas, TX 75240

Contact: 972-671-0002

Table of Contents

About the Authors

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter One Power in Texas

Chapter Two Constitutions in Texas

Chapter Three Voting in Texas

Chapter Four Democrats in Texas

Chapter Five Republicans in Texas

Chapter Six Business and Labor in Texas

Chapter Seven Legislatures in Texas

Chapter Eight Governors in Texas

Chapter Nine Judiciary and Bureaucracy in Texas

Chapter Ten Texas: State of Mass Delusion

Bibliography

On the Authors

About the Authors

After leaving college teaching, Kevin Bailey took a position in Houston city government as the chief of staff for Councilmember Dale Gorczynski. In 1990 Bailey ran and won an election to the Texas House of Representatives for District 140. During his 18 years as a legislator in Austin, he chaired the House Committees on Urban Affairs and General Investigating and Ethics. KB was one of the co-founders of the Legislative Study Group in the House. Holding political science degrees from the University of Texas at El Paso and Sam Houston State University, Bailey is now on the faculty at Houston Community College.

Bob Locander holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of New Mexico. His professional articles and reviews have appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly, The American Political Science Review, and The Texas Journal of Political Science. Locander has been a long-time faculty member at Lone Star CollegeNorth Harris. He has also taught courses on politics at Lamar University, the University of Houston, and the University of Houston-Downtown. Tales from the Unionside is a regular political column BL writes for a quarterly labor newsletter.

For over 43 years, Richard C. Shaw was active in the Texas union movement. Shaw retired in 2016 from his position as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Harris County AFL-CIO Council. Prior to his 1995 election to the labor council, he had been the president of the Houston Federation of Teachers. After leaving HFT, RS held posts with AFSCME Local 1550 as a business representative and as an executive director, in addition to serving as a Vice President of the Texas AFL-CIO. Shaw has also worked in government for the City of Houston and is an election judge for Harris County voting Precinct 165.

Preface

The idea to write a short introduction to Texas politics for general readers and students came about as a result of a phone call. One future author (KB) called another (BL) to measure his level of interest in joining a group of professors in writing a Texas government college textbook. As we discussed the possibility, both authors began to convince themselves of how bad an idea this was.

As colleagues at North Harris County College in the 1980s, our old complaints began to be resurrected and haunted us again. The major textbook publishers only wanted formula books with glossy pictures, tables, charts, and inserts with sticker shock prices on the coverbetter to make students poorer and no more wiser.

The thought came to us that we should break the textbook market mold and head in a different direction. Why not write a realistic introduction to Texas politics with a kick? If toes were stepped on, so be it. Our goal was to write a book that would be short, sweet, and cheap. We never considered contacting the major publishing companies, because their preferences in textbooks ran to long, bland, and expensive.

As the two of us continued our discussions, we decided to seek out a third author (RS) to complete our writing team. When asked to join the project, he paused for a moment reflecting and said, What you want in a book is some good-old fashioned Texas truth-telling. Exactly! We three authors have known each other for over 35 years. Each of us comes from a different political vantage point or place: state legislator, college professor, and labor advocate.

With over 100 combined years of engagement in Texas politics, we share many things in common, but we are not political triplets. Much of this book was written during the 2016 presidential election race, and many conversations took place among us about the diabolical Don, Lyin Ted, little Marco, crooked Hillary, and Uncle Bernie. On November 8, we authors went in three different presidential directions.

From disunited views on national politics, however, came a united view about the structure, purpose, and powers associated with the Texas political system. Taking our lead from James Lamare, author of Texas Politics: Economics, Power, and Policy, we openly embraced the elite perspective or model as the best way to explain How Texas Politics Really Works.

As a student at the University of Texas at El Paso, Kevin Baily took a political science course from Professor Lamare and was no doubt influenced by him. Lamares student would go on to serve 18 years in the Texas House of Representatives, where the reality of the professors theories were confirmed in practice in legislative session after session.

While Lamares model influenced the books perspective, it was another author whose work had an impact on the books format. As a Texas college professor, Bob Locander has seen many changes in students and books over the past 40 years. Just like President Donald Trump, many students today are nonreaders. While it used to be said that readers are leaders, Trump challenges this idea and many students are like the president in that they hate to read anything beyond 140 characters. Even todays English majors seldom get to the peace in Tolstoys great novel. It was partly for this reason and the hope that general readers might be willing to give a short book a try that we watched our page count. In choosing brevity, we followed a template that Charles Peters utilized in his book, How Washington Really Works.

In its first edition, the Peters book, consisting of eight chapters and 135 pages, was very popular among BLs students in an introductory government class. While the organization and title guided us, our work is different from his in subject and tone. We tried to draw on our collective strengths to produce a book that is different from any other Texas politics text in print. How Texas Politics Really Works is many books in one. First, we drew on our own personal experiences and political involvements in Lone Star politics as government insiders and outsiders. Second, we tried to stay grounded in political science and history where we could utilize national and state examples to better inform the reader. Third, this point of view book will not be everyones cup of tea. A teaching colleague of KB used to say that he did not like to be around political scientists as they were always bringing him bad news. The bad news of political science based on academic research has a way of bursting the bubbles of the nave and destroying the falsehoods of partisans.

While we think of ourselves as three amigos out to inform citizens of the way things really are in Texas, others might see us as three bad hombres who have been out in the sun too long. To our friends and foes alike, we say that we have tried to give an honest appraisal of Lone Star politics as we have witnessed it from three different angles. As over 65 authors, we like to quote the late Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panther movement on the value of growing old, Being 65...becomes a crossroads. We said, we have nothing to lose (at this age), so we can raise hell. It is time for the baby boomers in Texas to display no fear of the state political and economic establishment and to speak truth to power. For the young and the middle-aged, it is our hope that this book will get you thinking about questioning authority and realizing that the public interest is seldom the same as the private interests controlling Austin today.