It’s not just the politics; the mentality and lifestyles of Texas and California are foreign to each other. They are alike, however, in their conformity. I had a liberal friend who moved from Texas to California. A few years later, I asked her what living there was like. “It’s confusing,” she said. “I’ve never lived in a place where everybody agrees with me.”
In 2013, I had a play, Fallaci, produced at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Berkeley and Austin are often thought to be political cognates—Austin being the “Berkeley of Texas.” I think this is a stretch. Once, while I was walking to rehearsals in Berkeley, I passed a woman who had an energetic Chihuahua on a leash. The dog’s paws were skittering all over the pavement as it strained to race ahead. As I passed by, the woman was instructing the Chihuahua, “Moderation, moderation.”
In Austin, we don’t have such high expectations of Chihuahuas.
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AT SIXTY, Greg Abbott is still a vigorous man; his aides were racing through the rotunda to keep up with him. Although he remains in the shadows of his predecessors Rick Perry and George Bush, I suspect he has similar ambitions. He latched on to a proposal, already adopted by ten other states, to call a constitutional convention, aimed at reining in the power of the federal government. Abbott rebranded it as the Texas Plan. It would require the federal government to balance its budget, as Texas does, and prohibit government agencies—such as the EPA and the Department of Labor—from issuing regulations that override state laws. As attorney general, Abbott was on the losing end of many lawsuits that he filed on behalf of the State of Texas against the U.S. government—he objected to the Affordable Care Act, and to many federal environmental controls. Under the Texas Plan, the Supreme Court would need a supermajority of seven justices to strike down a state law. Abbott designated the Texas Plan an emergency item, and it quickly passed the legislature and was signed into law, worrying mainstream Republican lawmakers in Washington, who fear that in the current political climate, such an effort could lead to a runaway assault on federal authority.
Another emergency item on the governor’s list for the 2017 session was ethics reform, but his measure failed to address the most obvious ethical needs. “Some of the most egregious violations are in the governor’s office,” Lyle Larson, a state representative from San Antonio, told me. “It’s well known that pay-for-play has been going on in that office for years. For you to be on the Parks and Wildlife board, for instance, or to be a regent at the university, you have to make significant contributions”—as much as $100,000 or more—to Abbott’s campaign fund. “That’s not in the governor’s bill.” (Abbott’s press secretary assured me that “Governor Abbott selects and appoints individuals he believes are the most qualified and capable of bringing excellence to the organizations in which they serve.” In any case, little came of ethics reform.)
For all of Abbott’s initiatives, this session was dominated by Lieutenant Governor Patrick’s priorities, which included capping property tax increases and addressing matters such as hailstorm-lawsuit reform (according to the Insurance Council of Texas, homeowners suffered $5 billion in losses from hailstorms in 2016, the highest in the nation, resulting in half a million insurance claims). The heart of Patrick’s agenda consisted of the AM Texas platform of anti-abortion absolutism and hostility to same-sex marriage and undocumented workers. He proposed public subsidies—vouchers—for homeschooling and private school tuition. Despite the fact that a federal appeals court ruled in 2016 that the existing Texas voter ID law discriminates against minorities and the poor, Patrick sought to strengthen it. These bills would bend Texas further in the direction of the affluent and fortify the political strength of white evangelicals who feel threatened by rising minorities and changing social mores.
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POLITICIANS SELDOM PAY a price for the damage that their legislation may do in the name of popular causes, such as declaring war or slashing taxes at the expense of vital social programs. Stiff-necked political philosophy is often mistaken for moral strength, as when Governor Rick Perry vetoed a bill in 2011 that would have banned texting while driving, saying that it was “a government effort to micromanage the behavior of adults.” Texas is always above the national average in the number of highway fatalities. According to the Texas Department of Transportation, more than four hundred Texans are killed every year in crashes related to distracted driving, often because they are texting.
The sponsor of the bill that Perry vetoed was Tom Craddick, the ultraconservative former Speaker. He put the measure forward again in the 2017 session, for the fourth time. He compares it to the seat belt law, which, he notes, “is very unpopular” in his district. “But they say that ninety-five percent of the people obey the law.”
On March 29, 2017, in the middle of the legislative session, a welder named Jody Kuchler called the sheriff’s offices in Uvalde and Real Counties to say that a white truck was swerving all over a two-lane highway. “He’s going to hit someone head-on or he’s going to kill his own damn self,” Kuchler told the cops. He then watched helplessly as the truck rammed into a bus carrying members of the First Baptist Church of New Braunfels. Thirteen people on the bus were killed. The driver of the errant truck was twenty-year-old Jack Dillon Young, who had taken a cocktail of drugs. He was largely unhurt. “He said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was texting,’ ” Kuchler told reporters. “I said, ‘Son, do you know what you just did?’ ”
That was just one of the accidents that might have been prevented if Rick Perry had signed the 2011 texting bill into law.
In that same session, the Republican state legislature turned its attention to defunding women’s health programs. “This is a war on birth control and abortions,” Wayne Christian, a state representative, Tea Party stalwart, and gospel singer, straightforwardly admitted. “That’s what family planning is supposed to be about.”
Texas has a long history with the abortion issue. In 1970, Norma McCorvey, under the name Jane Roe, brought suit against the legendary district attorney of Dallas, Henry Wade. McCorvey was a reform-school dropout who at the age of twenty-one was pregnant with her third child. At the time, abortion was prohibited in Texas unless the life of the mother was endangered. There were only six states in the country where abortion was legal. Two young Austin attorneys, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, took up the case, and in 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Roe v. Wade, that the right to privacy under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment included a woman’s decision to seek an abortion. However, the court also specified that the state has an obligation to balance a woman’s right to choose against the protection of her health and the potential viability of her fetus.
The decision came too late for McCorvey, who had the baby and gave it up for adoption. McCorvey was working in an abortion clinic in Dallas when she suddenly had a conversion experience and decided that abortion was wrong. She subsequently joined the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, whose director, Flip Benham, baptized her in 1995 in a backyard swimming pool.
The long-term goals of cultural conservatives in Texas are to cut off access to abortion, end state subsidies for birth control, and gut state funding for Planned Parenthood—which, until 2011, served 60 percent of the health needs for low-income women in the state. The legislators slashed the family planning budget from $111.5 million to $37.9 million. Eighty-two family-planning clinics were shut down as a result. By defunding Planned Parenthood, the legislature incidentally blocked many women from getting cancer scans and other vital health treatments.
In March 2012, Rick Perry, who had just dropped out of his first presidential race, signed a bill requiring all women seeking an abortion to have a sonogram twenty-four hours before the procedure. Carol Alvarado, a Democratic representative from Houston, pointed out on the House floor that, for a woman who is less than eight to ten weeks pregnant, such a procedure would require a “transvaginal sonogram.” She ac
tually displayed the required instrument to the discomfited lawmakers, a white plastic wand that resembled an elongated pistol, which would be inserted into the woman’s vagina—“government intrusion at its best,” she observed. Nonetheless, the bill passed, 107–42. “This is a great day for Texas,” Dan Patrick, then a state senator, declared. “This is a great day for women’s health.”
Texas has the highest rate of uninsured people in the nation, and about 17 percent of Texan women and girls live in poverty. After the family-planning budget was cut, many women no longer had access to birth control, and there was a sharp rise in childbirths covered by Medicaid. Subsequently, maternal deaths in Texas have doubled, from 18.6 per 100,000 live births in 2010 to 35.8 in 2014—not only the worst in the nation but worse than the rate in countries such as Armenia, Egypt, and Romania; it’s more than twice the rate of maternal deaths in Lebanon. Those figures represent six hundred dead Texas women.
Researchers say it’s not entirely clear what accounts for the rise in maternal mortality, since the rate was already rising before the 2011 laws went into effect. Obesity, heart disease, drug overdoses, and lack of health insurance—all serious problems in the state—play a role. Misreporting may be a factor. “Still, in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval, the doubling of a mortality rate within a two year period in a state with almost 400,000 annual births seems unlikely,” an article in the September 2016 issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology reported.
The mystery might be cleared up if Governor Abbott would release records about the causes of death for these women. In 2011, when he was attorney general, he issued an opinion that information about the deceased would be withheld, supposedly to prevent fraud.
Fed up with the callous treatment of women, Jessica Farrar, a liberal state representative from Houston, filed House Bill 4260, the Man’s Right to Know Act, using the same patronizing “we’re doing this for your own good” language that characterizes the many bills directed at abortion and women’s health—for instance, requiring a sonogram and a rectal exam before prescribing Viagra. Then there’s this:
SEC. 173.010. FINES RELATED TO MASTURBATORY EMISSIONS
Masturbatory emissions created in health or medical facilities will be stored for the purposes of conception for a current or future wife.
(a) Emissions outside of a woman’s vagina, or created outside of a health or medical facility, will be charged a $100 civil penalty for each emission, and will be considered an act against an unborn child, and failing to preserve the sanctity of life.
The bill never made it to the House floor.
Children have also faced heartless treatment in Texas. In 2015, a federal judge, Janis Graham Jack, ruled that foster children “almost uniformly leave State custody more damaged than when they entered.” The state, she said, was violating the children’s constitutional rights by exposing them to unreasonable risks of harm. The judge declared that state oversight agencies adopted a policy of “deliberate indifference” toward the plight of the children in their care, even in the face of repeated abuse and, sometimes, homicide. “Rape, abuse, psychotropic medication, and instability are the norm,” the judge stated.
Governor Abbott promised to overhaul the child-welfare system, but things have only gotten worse since he stepped in. In fiscal year 2016 alone, at least 200 children died of maltreatment in the state, compared with 173 the previous year, and that doesn’t include more than 100 other deaths that are still being investigated. Child Protective Services, the state unit charged with investigating cases of abuse, is in chaos. Nevertheless, Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the judge’s decision to appoint a special master to oversee the foster-care system because it would amount to a “federal takeover.”
Nearly a year after the judge’s ruling, an investigation by The Dallas Morning News found that as of September 2016, more than 4,700 children at high risk of abuse or severe neglect had not yet been contacted by state agencies. In the meantime, hundreds of children have been sleeping on air mattresses in hotels, emergency shelters, and even in government offices because the state has nowhere else to put them. Hundreds of caseworkers have also quit, complaining that they were overworked, demoralized, poorly paid, and often in danger. Union officials have said that higher pay would help attract more applicants to the job, which offers a starting salary of about $37,000 a year, but state officials countered with a plan to lower the educational requirements for caseworkers. During the 2017 legislative session, while bills addressing the child-welfare crisis were being considered, a teenage girl who was being housed in a state office building fled in the middle of the night. She was hit by a van and killed.
Despite this shameful record, Texas ranks in the middle of various measures of child-welfare systems, according to the Foundation for Government Accountability, ahead of New York, California, and Massachusetts, which is the worst.
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LOBBYISTS GET THEIR NAME because they stand in the lobby. When I returned to the capitol in February 2017, about fifty of them, almost all men in dark suits, stood outside the Senate chamber, forming a mosh pit for any actual senator who might appear. Although they pose as supplicants, lobbyists actually write much of the legislation and corral the votes.
Bill Miller, a friend and neighbor, has worked in the lobby for three decades. When he first arrived, he noticed that all the political leaders had animal heads mounted on their walls, so Bill had a papier-mâché sea lion head made up for his office.
“Wow, you killed a sea lion?” an impressed legislator asked.
“Yeah,” said Bill. “With a surfboard.”
Inside the Senate chamber, a crucial debate was under way concerning Senate Bill 4, known as the sanctuary cities bill—one of the governor’s priorities. It essentially required Texas to join the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. There are about a million in Houston and Dallas alone.
A few days earlier, 450 people had lined up to testify before the Senate Committee on State Affairs in protest of S.B. 4, which they saw as a discriminatory measure that would codify racial profiling. The line snaked around the rotunda and up to the second level. The hearing lasted more than sixteen hours, breaking up well after midnight. The police chiefs from Austin and San Antonio testified that the bill would harm their ability to work with immigrant communities. A young woman spoke about attempting suicide after her father was deported. In the end, the bill passed out of committee, 7–2, on partisan lines. Clearly, no minds had been changed.
Federal immigration authorities often ask local law-enforcement officials to put a hold—called a detainer—on people in their custody until their citizenship status can be verified. Our sheriff in Travis County, Sally Hernandez, a political novice who had been in office for only a month when the legislature convened, had promoted Austin as a “sanctuary city” in her campaign. She declared that she would honor detainers solely for cases in which individuals are charged with violent crime; otherwise, people who posted bond would be released.
It was as if Sheriff Hernandez had just opened the door to a mob of flesh-eating zombies. Perhaps she didn’t fully appreciate what liberal Austin and Travis County represent to the Republican—largely Tea Party—establishment. Governor Abbott abruptly cut off $1.5 million in state grants to the county. He went on Bill O’Reilly’s TV show and said of S.B. 4, “Today we introduced legislation that will put the hammer down on Travis County as well as any sanctuary city policy in the state of Texas.”
“Is Miss Hernandez doing this for political reasons?” O’Reilly asked. “I don’t understand her motivation.”
“She is doing it to pander to the ideology of the left, just like what you see in California,” Abbott responded.
S.B. 4 was quickly loaded up with punitive amendments, all of which were endorsed by the entirely white Republican majority. (Of the thirty-one members of the Texas Senate, only el
even are Democrats; seven of them are Latino.) Under one amendment, Sheriff Hernandez—“Sanctuary Sally,” as the governor began calling her—could be jailed for up to a year if she refused to grant a detainer.
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S.B. 4 WAS ALSO HIGH on Dan Patrick’s agenda. As the bill was being debated in the Senate, he watched from the dais, occasionally conferring with the parliamentarian or a clerk. At sixty-seven, Patrick has a full head of brown hair that is graying at the temples. He is tall and assured, with an easy smile. It was hard to square this confident, popular public official with the turbulent life that had brought him to this point.
He was born Dannie Scott Goeb, in a blue-collar neighborhood in East Baltimore, where his father was the circulation manager for the Baltimore Sun and his mother was a bookkeeper. Dannie was the first in his family to go to college: he graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 1972, with a BA in English. He had an early marriage to a high school sweetheart, which ended in 1973. At the time, Dannie Goeb was selling class rings and caps and gowns for the Carnation Company. He was a talented salesman, but that wasn’t his dream. He wanted to host The Tonight Show.
He got his first job in television doing sports and weather on the weekends at WNEP in Scranton, Pennsylvania—the same station where Bill O’Reilly got his start. He adopted a new name, Dan Patrick. Along with the name, apparently, came an evolving new persona. Seven months after that first broadcasting job, Patrick was the sports director of a station in Washington, D.C. In October 1979, he moved to Houston, where he became the sports anchor at KHOU, a CBS affiliate. He had a genius for stirring up attention—getting two Houston Oilers cheerleaders to paint his body blue, for instance, or once reciting scores with a cougar in his lap. The funny hats and fake beards he sometimes wore failed to pull the station out of the gutter, though, and it was sold in 1984, to owners who wanted a more sober-minded anchor on the sports desk. “I couldn’t be a phoney so I resigned,” Patrick announced in a newspaper advertisement, in which he invited Houstonians to his latest venture, a sports bar near Rice University. He grew a beard and set a goal of becoming a millionaire in six years. After that, maybe politics. “I see no reason why I couldn’t be president,” he told Texas Monthly at the time.