Who Let the Dogs In? (28 page)

But I have a dream. A dream that someday Phil Gramm, the world’s meanest Republican, will be joined in the United States Senate by Jimmy Mattox, the world’s meanest Democrat. And then the rest of the country will give us back to Mexico.

April 1994

David Richards

I
’VE BEEN
PUTTING
this column off, hoping if I didn’t write about it, it wouldn’t happen. Makes me so glum to report it. David Richards, one of our greatest freedom fighters, is leaving Texas. But maybe only temporarily, we think he’ll be back, he’s bound to come back, really, who’d want to live in Santa Fe forever when Waco beckons? I give him a year before he hollers “uncle” and comes back to freedom-fight where it counts. Meantime, we’ll have to stagger along without one of the best civil-rights lawyers and one of the best all-purpose battlers for justice this state has ever produced. (He promised he wouldn’t let my writing his political obituary affect his decision to return.)

David’s ex-wife has gotten more publicity in recent years, but if you want to know the truth, David Richards has done more to make Texas a fair and just place to live than Ann has (term’s not over yet, Annie, keep working). One man–one vote, school desegregation, freedom of speech—the list of cases with David Richards’ name on them as attorney for those getting shafted by unfair and unconstitutional laws goes on and on. So many of them seem self-evident by now—the shame of legal segregation is so clear to us at this point, we forget when it was worth a person’s life to work to change it. One man–one vote, who could be against that? Oh, just an entire class of powerful, entrenched politicians who benefited under the old system of gerrymandered districts: In the old days when the Lege was “rural-dominated,” the rule was one cow, one vote.

One of my favorite David Richards’ cases was the tuba player who taught at the community college in Dallas. He had one tuba student for one hour a week and was paid all of $3.50. In those days, we had a lot of wiggy, leftover laws from the McCarthy era—in order to teach at, or even attend, a Texas college you had sign a pledge saying you were not now and never had been a member of the Communist Party, despite the fact that the Communist Party was perfectly legal. Now Richards’ tuba player was not a communist (I think he was a Methodist), but he felt strongly that he shouldn’t have to make any kind of political commitment to teach tuba. (Given our Lege in those days, we’re lucky they didn’t outlaw being a Republican: Come to think of it, not a bad idea.) The college wouldn’t give the tuba teacher his $3.50 because he wouldn’t sign the pledge, so David took the case (I assume for a handsome contingency fee, like half of the $3.50). And lo, at long last, at the end of the legal process, Richards triumphed and got this silly little menace to freedom of thought removed.

David Richards started as a lawyer in the Dallas firm Mullinax, Wells, which specialized in labor law and has produced so many freedom-fighting attorneys over the years. But he was not destined to be a happy camper in the rigidly conservative Dallas of the fifties and sixties. So David and Sam Houston Clinton, now on the Court of Criminal Appeals, started their own firm in Austin. They worked chiefly as attorneys for the AFL-CIO. One of the wonderful things about being in a state as backward as Texas, where we normally run twenty to thirty years behind most places (thank God for Mississippi), is that no element of our tiny progressive coalition has ever had time to become fat, complacent, and part of the Establishment—including Texas labor. The labor movement in this state remained for a long time more like the labor movement of the thirties, scrappy fighters for justice rather than defenders of their own turf. The AFL-CIO filed the first school desegregation suits (Corpus Christi, on behalf of a Mexican-American meat-cutter’s daughter). The key one man–one vote case in this state was
White v. Register,
subsidized by the AFL, that finally integrated the state Legislature. It took years. Richards developed one man–one vote cases as a specialty, trying them all over East Texas—county commissions, school boards, city councils. As Sam Houston Clinton says, if you were to hold a meeting of all the folks who first got elected because of David Richards, it would fill a hall. “He practically invented that kind of litigation,” said Clinton. “The thing about him is he wasn’t just marching in the streets to protest discrimination, he went into the courtroom and got it changed. He absolutely made it all happen. He’d come into the court and produce the evidence in front of you so you couldn’t deny it.”

It’s fashionable to bash lawyers as a bunch of greedy SOBs these days. The number of cases David Richards has taken pro bono would fill a book. In one of his most recent adventures, he tried to help the Save Our Springs coalition in Austin protect the city’s jewel, Barton Springs, from the depredations of developers and the city council. Richards has not only fought for freedom himself, he has inspired a generation or more of young lawyers to go and do likewise. During Jim Mattox’s first term as attorney general, Richards was his top hand, and that office almost crackled with energy and idealism. Everyone who was there seems to remember the speech Richards made at the farewell party they gave for him. He closed with a favorite line from one of the Mexican revolutionary leaders, who had been offered a share of the spoils, a big hacienda, when it was over: “I did not join your revolution to become a haciendado.”

As much as David Richards loves the struggle—he’s a born battler—he also has an equally outsized gift for relishing life. He loves softball and camping and canoeing and beer and singing and good books and running rivers and his wife, Sandy, and all his kids. So have a wonderful year in Santa Fe, David, but for God’s sake, come back: You know we need you more here.

May 1992

Charlie Wilson

T
HE
TREE
IS
down, the bills are due, the weather’s lousy, we’re all on Rye Krisp and cottage cheese, the Texas Legislature is upon us, and Charlie Wilson has gone to save the Bosnians. Katy, bar the door.

Wilson, Texas’ answer to Hunter S. Thompson, the Uncle Duke of Congress, is off on one of his save-the-freedom-fighter missions. When last we checked in on Representative Wilson’s foreign policy, he was working as Lawrence of Afghanistan, with his girlfriend Miss World in tow. For a while there, he took up Angola, as though the poor country didn’t have enough trouble with Jonas Savimbi running around loose.

But now Wilson’s bound for Bosnia and is so serious about the assignment that he has announced “no chicks.” Those who misunderstood him to mean “no checks” were also relieved (Charlie was a high scorer in the Rubbergate scandal).

Personally, I think Wilson should be declared a state treasure, if not an actual national monument, and protected like the snail darter. If it weren’t for Charlie, Henry B., and Jack Brooks, the Texas congressional delegation would be perilously close to boring—a bunch of earnest strivers, Bob Foreheads, and uninterestingly wrongheaded right-wingers. (And that’s another bone I have to pick with the right wing: You people used to produce a lot of entertainingly loopy public servants, but lately you’ve been letting down the side. Dick Armey is only marginally qualified.) It’s my belief that the nation depends on Texas to provide genuine, certified, bona fide characters as players in the political drama. We have a responsibility in this regard. You can’t count on South Dakota or Iowa to send anyone interesting to Washington. The place needs a bunch of hell-raising Texans, and Charlie is one.

He’s the only man in Congress with an M-16, which he has personally fired at actual commies, mounted over his office door. When he was in Afghanistan, he taught the freedom fighters to yell in English what he told them was an old Texas war cry, “Kill the commie @ %&-suckers!”

As a feminist, I am duty-bound to deplore Wilson’s perpetually adolescent attitude toward women, but since he has an excellent voting record on women’s issues, I see no reason to get into a stew about it. In the old days, before he lapsed into relative respectability, Wilson had a standing order to his office manager concerning the hiring of secretaries: “You can teach ’em to type, but you can’t teach ’em to grow tits.” On the other hand, he’s always had a crackerjack staff, noted for outstanding constituent casework.

Given the level of hideousness the situation in Bosnia has achieved, I suppose we should View With Alarm the prospect of our favorite loose cannon from East Texas careening around over there. But the Bosnians seem to be increasingly feisty these days, and if that’s their mood, Wilson’s their man. He specializes in government-sponsored gunrunning, which is what I think we should have been doing for the Bosnians all along.

Meanwhile, back at the Capitol, the poor old place is starting to look like postwar Berlin. The roof was leaking, the walls were cracking, and they’d found asbestos all over it, so our Capitol is now undergoing a giant redo. Workmen putter around the place continually, finding more things to take down and tear apart. The House will be meeting in its regular chamber, but the Senate has been shunted over to a former branch bank, which isn’t doing anything for the majesty of the Senate.

The underground extension of the Capitol is now open, and if you have to build a building underground, this one is state of the art. A central courtyard and lots of ground-level skylights keep it from being too gloomy: Most of the state toilers even have windows that open onto sort of moatlike runs between the walls. I rather miss the quaint, Dickensian squalor that ensued from having everybody squashed in on top of everybody else at the Capitol: The new subterranean roominess is slightly eerie.

Another form of gloom is already hovering over the seventy-third session. As we all know, the state has been close to broke ever since the oil crash of ’85. Every year, we’ve barely scraped by, cutting this and that, failing to take care of urgent needs, hoping to bail ourselves out with a lottery, raising sin taxes yet again. A combination of obdurate idiocy (“no state income tax, no state income tax”: talk about shooting yourself in the foot over and over out of sheer stubbornness) and gumptionless leadership means we still have this pathetic, regressive tax structure. We not only don’t have enough money to do anything well, we have grossly unfair taxes.

This time, after crying “wolf” and then staving off the wolf with some sorry, jerry-built patch, we are looking at the wolf. Knocking old folks out of nursing homes, dropping mothers and babies from nutrition programs, closing the schools. Oh, this is just going to be lots of fun.

January 1993

Ann Richards vs. Shrub