Who Let the Dogs In? (32 page)
Read Who Let the Dogs In? Online
Authors: Molly Ivins
Until 1973, Texas had the most draconian drug laws in the nation. Whether they stopped Bush or not, they didn’t stop me, didn’t stop people now serving in the Legislature, and didn’t stop most of a generation of Texans from trying marijuana.
What did Bush learn from that? Nothing.
Harsh laws do not stop young people from trying illegal drugs. So what does Bush do when he gets to be governor? Increases the penalties and toughens the system so it’s harder on young people. Signs a memorably stupid bill making possession of less than a twentieth of an ounce of cocaine punishable by jail time.
Are there people who are now in Texas prisons for making “youthful mistakes”? There are thousands of them. At least 5,000 people are in for marijuana possession alone. Twenty percent of the state prison population of 147,000 is there on drug-related charges.
The truth is, if Bush
had
been caught using marijuana or cocaine twenty-five years ago, he would not have been sentenced to prison. He was rich and white, and his daddy was an important guy. That’s the way the system worked then; that’s the way the system works now.
When Bush became governor, he had a world of opportunity to try to make the system more fair. What did he do? He vetoed a bill (passed unanimously by both sides of the Republican-controlled Legislature) that would have given poor defendants the right to see a lawyer within twenty days. Twenty days, big deal: In most of the country, an indigent defendant gets a lawyer within seventy-two hours, or they have to let him go. We have poor people in Texas who spend months in jail just waiting to see a lawyer, who may be drunk or asleep at trial.
Bush vetoed that bill. He learned nothing.
When Bush came in as governor, this state had committed to the most extensive in-prison drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation program in the country—the joint legacy of Ann Richards and Bob Bullock, both recovering alcoholics. Eighty percent of the people in Texas prisons are diagnosed by the system as having substance abuse problems. The entire program is gone now, completely repealed.
Bush learned nothing. That’s the story.
THE REPUBLICAN
Party expects to find at least one hundred supporters who will give $250,000 a year over four years in soft money. Just what we need: a club of $1 million donors. In one of the funniest statements in years, Julie Finley, chair of the Republican Team 100 program (these are the pikers who give only $100,000), explained to
The New York Times
what the $1 million donors will get for their money: “What they get is they are left alone. They don’t get calls to buy a table at the gala. They don’t get calls to give to the media program. They have a pass that lasts all year.”
And, by George, if that’s not worth a million bucks, what is?
Oh, they also get private meetings with the people who write the laws for all of us.
MY GUN-NUT
friends often tell me that mass shootings like the one at the Jewish community center in Los Angeles wouldn’t happen if more people carried concealed weapons. How right they are: If those five-year-olds in L.A. had just been packing, none of ’em would have gotten hurt.
I wrote that line right after the shooting but didn’t use it on the grounds that it was too flip. But I’m using it now because Thomas Sowell, a right-wing columnist from the Hoover Institute, actually wrote a column in all seriousness saying, yep, the solution to these mass killings is more guns. Incredibly, he argues that the mass killings that have been taking place in white, middle-class settings wouldn’t happen in the ghettos or barrios because more folks there are packing.
I hate to tell him this, but if the murder rate in white, suburban America were the same as that in the ghettos and barrios, we’d be confiscating guns by now.
October 1999
H
OUSTON
—
My favorite thing at the Texas Republican Convention was the advertising in the back of the hall that constituted an almost perfect record of the major scandals, conflicts of interest, and bad public policy that have occurred during the W. Bush gubernatorial administration. There they all were, proudly displaying their gratitude to Bush and the party. It was a near-perfect metaphor for American politics today.
Chemical had several of the small billboards for each part of the hall. Dow and the rest of the chemical industry were given one third of the seats on the Texas equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency when Bush got into office.
He appointed a lobbyist for the Texas Chemical Council to the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission. This citizen had spent thirty years working for Monsanto. He used his position as one of the top environmental officials of Texas to go to Washington to testify that ozone is benign and to oppose strengthening federal air-quality standards. Being in Houston during the lovely summer ozone season reminds us all how grateful we must be for this kind of zealous watchdoggery of our air quality.
Also advertising its gratitude to Bush was TXU, formerly Texas Utilities, which under Bush’s deregulation scheme is trying to stick consumers with $3.7 billion in “stranded costs”—aka dumb management decisions. Enjoy that on your summer utility bill.
And how nice to see an ad from a grateful Metabolife.
According to the May 22 issue of
Time
magazine, Texas was fixing to regulate ephedrine, an amphetamine-like stimulant widely used for weight loss. Ephedrine products had been linked to eight deaths and fourteen hundred health problems in Texas, so the health commissioner was ready to regulate. But according to
Time,
Metabolife International of San Antonio hired a San Antonio law firm headed by some of Bush’s closest political associates, and instead there was a meeting with the commissioner, who then decided to bring in an outside lawyer to negotiate a settlement with ephedrine producers.
Metabolife’s Washington lobbyist, who had given $141,000 to Bush’s gubernatorial campaigns and raised at least $100,000 for his presidential campaign, was also a player. Stricter limits on ephedrine were dropped.
Next up, an ad for Pilgrim’s Pride, the chicken company of Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim of East Texas. Some of you may remember Lonnie-Bo from the famous time, pre-Bush, when he strolled onto the floor of the Texas Senate and started handing out $10,000 checks to senators in the midst of a hearing on workers’ comp law.
Lonnie-Bo was also a big funder of Texans for Public Justice, a tort reform outfit, and gave $125,000 to Bush for his gubernatorial campaigns. As you know, tort reform under Bush has gone so far that the state is now paradise for insurance companies.
Next up, Promised Land Dairy, owned by James Leininger, who crusaded first for tort reform and is hot on school vouchers and other Christian-right causes. Leininger gave $1.5 million in contributions and loans to Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry, helping to provide the razor-thin margin by which he defeated Democrat John Sharp. Leininger also provided a huge loan to Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander in 1998, as well as $65,000 to Bush in ’98.
How nice to see an ad for Philip Morris Co., Inc. Philip Morris provided employment for Karl Rove, the man running Bush’s campaign, from 1991 to 1996. Rove was paid $3,000 a month to lobby for Philip Morris while also working for Bush. This was during the time that Texas was suing the tobacco companies.
What a pleasant stroll down memory lane these little billboards provided.
Meanwhile, various Republican orators were at the mike describing the coming election as “a struggle for the soul of the American people” (U.S. Representative Tom DeLay) and a battle between our values and the “indecency” of Al Gore. (Everyone was on the virtues-and-values theme, usually referred to as “our virtues” and “our values.”)
And I was just strolling along that wall of ads, studying those virtues and values.
June 2000
I
N
MAY 1957,
one of the ugliest times in Texas history, the Legislature was debating a long series of bills designed to reinforce the legal structure of segregation.
Henry B. Gonzalez opposed the bills for twenty-two hours straight—still the record in the Texas Senate. Ronnie Dugger of
The Texas Observer
reported:
A tall Latin man in a light blue suit and white shoes and yellow handkerchief was pacing around his desk on the Senate floor. It was eight o’clock in the morning. An old Negro was brushing off the soft senatorial carpet in front of the president’s rostrum. Up in the gallery, a white man stood with his back to the chamber, studying a panel of pictures of an earlier Senate. The Latin man was orating and gesturing in a full flood of energy, not like a man who had been talking to almost nobody for three hours and had another day and night to go.
“Why did they name Gonzalez Gonzalez, if the name wasn’t honored in Texas at the time?” he asked. “Why did they honor Garza along with Burnet? My own forebears in Mexico bore arms against Santa Anna. There were three revolutions against Santa Anna—Texas was only one of its manifestations. Did you know that Negroes helped settle Texas? That a Negro died at the Alamo?”
The angry, crystal-voiced man stopped in his pacing and raised his arms to plead, “I seek to register the plaintive cry, the hurt feelings, the silent, the dumb protest of the inarticulate. . . .”
For 22 hours he held the floor, an eloquent, an erudite, a genuine and a passionate man; and any whose minds he didn’t enter had slammed the doors and buried the keys.
What you have to remember about a twenty-two-hour filibuster, still the record, is that it requires more than enormous physical stamina. You have to have twenty-two hours’ worth of knowledge in your head—and having heard many a shorter filibuster, I can testify that many people do not. They just don’t know enough to talk that long, not to mention talking that long at such a level of historical, constitutional, legal, and judicial knowledge, in addition to the extraordinary passion for justice that animated the whole.
Henry B. read widely his whole life and spoke four languages. That he was dismissed on the floor of the Texas Senate as a “lousy Mexican” was just a tiny part of the contempt and hatred that he experienced because of his skin color. Henry B.’s filibuster finally killed all but two or three of the whole hateful package.
When someone like Henry B. dies, as Gonzalez did Tuesday, I sometimes think those platitudinous tributes “fearless champion of the underdog, honorable and principled” actually get in the way of those who did not know the late, sainted whoever. Henry B. was not a saint. He was a boxer.
