Bucking the Texas Lockstep

By: Molly Ivins

Legislators on the lam. You can tell how grave this situation is by the news that Texas's last few remaining elected Democrats have bolted to Ardmore, OK. If they were doin' this for fun they'd be in Mexico, drinkin' margaritas. This is serious.

Okay, so it's Texas politics and so naturally it's got this weird hitch in the get-along. But we are looking at something grave, portentous, weighty, and fateful. (I just consulted the thesaurus.) Just because Texas always has this ridiculous pie-eyed quality of exaggeration (Ann Richards recently observed that the price of gasoline has gotten so high that Texas women who want to run over their husbands have to carpool) is no reason to ignore the deeper meaning in this semi-ludicrous caper. Creepin' fascism. That's what we're lookin' at.

All these years we've been listening to nutty right-wing preachers talking about creepin' socialism, and it turns out we've fixated on the wrong damn threat. It's a shame that it appears the proximate cause for the Big Bolt by the Texas legislators was a redistricting map. We must acknowledge, Republican and Democrat alike, that this map is a work of art. It's got districts that stretch for 300 miles and are two blocks wide.

Too bad redistricting is such an inside-baseball deal: Only wonks and political junkies care. But redistricting is the proverbial back-breaking straw here: The real reason Democrats are outta here is a session-long display of meanness and unfairness that finally became unbearable. The session was summed up by Rep. Senfronia Thompson when she carried the House rulebook up to the podium and dropped it on the floor. The legislative process has been shredded, rules ignored, points of order pointless. It's like a parody of the legislative process. Republicans, for the first time ever in the majority of both houses of our Legislature, have been voting in lockstep. No Democratic amendment, no matter how obvious or how sensible, is allowed to pollute Republican bills.

Faced with a $10 billion deficit, the Republicans decided to outlaw gay marriage. Then they kicked 250,000 poor children off a health insurance program that is mostly paid for by the feds in the first place. Picking on the weakest, the frailest, the youngest, and oldest Texans has been the sport of choice this session. When the handicapped came to the capital to protest cuts in their services, the governor had them arrested. The combination of cruel budget choices and an unfair process made this the session from hell.

During a committee meeting, Rep. Debbie Riddle (R-Houston) demanded earnestly: "Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education? Free medical care? Free whatever? It comes from Moscow. From Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell." Rep. Joe Crabb (R-Atascocita) explained why no public hearings were held on the now-infamous redistricting bill: "The rest of us would have a very difficult time if we were out in an area - other than Austin or other English-speaking areas - to be able to have committee hearings to be able to converse with people that did not speak English." The guy's talking about South Texas.

What planet do these people come from? Carl Parker of Port Arthur used to say: "If you took all the fools out of the Legislature, it would not be a representative body anymore." When one confronts such people with facts - such as that free education was established in the United States long before there was ever a Communist revolution in Russia, or that people in South Texas speak English quite fluently (some of them are even college graduates) - it does no good. These folks are not stupid, they're like members of some weird cult. You can't dent their worldview with reality. It's like trying to talk to the people who followed David Koresh.

They are, at long last, the perfect unpoliticians - they don't compromise, they don't deal, they don't look for the middle way, they don't give a damn about accommodating anybody else. Because they believe they're right. And they won't go out for a beer after work. They think it's them against evil. And everybody who ain't them is evil. These are Shiite Republicans.

Since all of y'all in the North think Texas is eternally screwed up, I'm not going to try to defend this lunacy (although it has causes), I'm just warning you: This is about to happen everywhere. A good country song says: "Lubbock on Everythang." Make it bigger, expand that. "Texas on Everythang." The whole country is being turned into the state whose proudest boast is that sometimes we're ahead of Mississippi.

When our governor, Rick "Goodhair" Perry (that's a head of hair every Texan can be proud of, regardless of party), asked New Mexico to arrest any escapees lurking there, the state's attorney general, Patricia Madrid, said: "I have put out an all-points bulletin for law enforcement to be on the lookout for politicians in favor of health care and against tax cuts for the wealthy."