The Worst Little Statehouse in Texas

In 1964, journalist Willie Morris quoted a member of the Texas House as saying the state Capitol “was built for giants and inhabited by pygmies.” In the intervening years, the faces have changed, but not much else. The one-party Democratic Texas has been replaced effectively by one-party Republican Texas. Restroom segregation, tight-fisted state spending, mandates on cities, and a select committee to study how to pay for public schools—we’ve been there before. No matter how many oil wells we drill or shiny glass skyscrapers we build, some things remain consistent.

There was, however, a remarkable difference this year—a disdain for the community leaders of Texas. On a host of issues, Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s Republican Senate offered a deaf ear to the state’s business leaders, police chiefs, and locally elected public officials. The 2017 legislative sessions will be remembered for divisive fundamentalism, a miserly disinterest in investing in the state’s future, and, more than anything, an arrogance that the 181 lawmakers elected to the pink granite building in Austin are somehow smarter than the other 19,198 city, county, and school elected officials in Texas. Without the federal government of President Obama as a foil, the state’s leadership suddenly turned on us—or perhaps itself. As Morris wrote five decades ago, “One‐party complacency, and an uncommon tendency to at­tack Washington for all ills, have engendered a lingering suspicion of government of any kind.”

Almost twenty years after Morris made his observations on the Texas Capitol, another observer of our state, Larry L. King, visited the Pink Dome for a CBS special called The Best Little Statehouse in Texas, a title playing off the Broadway success he had achieved with a musical about a brothel outside of LaGrange. The year was 1981, and the producers got to wondering what kind of America President Ronald Reagan wanted, ultimately deciding it was Texas. “What we’ve seen is not peculiar to Texas—other mortals in other legislatures in other states make mistakes and cut deals and reach their own handy compromises,” King mused in the show’s opening. “In their own ambitions, the needs and desires of the people may not always get top priority. Perhaps my Texans are a bit more colorful, a bit rawer—but the process, alas, is much the same in your state and in your neighbor’s.”

And that is exactly why what happened in the Texas Legislature this year is so important. Texas is the trend-setter for the conservative states of America, an L-shaped geographical region linking the Old South to the Old West—the Rust Belt starting to squeeze its way in. As the demography-is-destiny Democrats sat smugly on the coasts for the past ten years, Republicans captured the statehouses in the heartland. Republicans dominate 33 states, and already we are seeing other states engaging in the same effort to crush local control as is happening in Texas: Michigan, Illinois and Ohio, plus Iowa, with state pre-emption of local control upsetting some Republicans as an abandonment of a basic principle of the party.

Read more: http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/worst-little-statehouse-texas/