God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (26 page)

Dana Hodges, the state director of a right-wing Christian organization called Concerned Women for America, was the first to testify. Like many supporters of the bill, she cast the issue as one of women’s safety. “I myself was the victim of being videotaped by a hidden camera placed in a women’s bathroom stall by a man,” she said in a trembling voice. She held up a plastic coat hook that, she said, had a miniature camera embedded in it, like the one used to spy on her. Under questioning, she acknowledged that a non-transgender man had hidden the camera inside her stall, and that he had been punished under existing laws. Kolkhurst also conceded that she knew of no crimes that had been committed in Texas bathrooms by transgender persons. Her intent, she said, was to prevent nefarious people from taking advantage of inclusive bathroom policies. (Crimes against transgender people, meanwhile, are routine; according to
Texas Monthly,
a quarter of all transgender Texans have been physically assaulted.)

Dan Forest, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, who had been a muscular advocate of that state’s bathroom bill, came to Austin to testify that economic damage was minimal—affecting “less than one-tenth of one percent of the GDP.” He asserted that no business had actually left the state because of the bill. (The Associated Press examined public records and interviewed only the business leaders who specifically said that they had canceled projects because of the bill. On the basis of that narrow data alone, the AP estimated that the potential loss on investment in the state would approach $4 billion over a dozen years.) On March 30, the North Carolina legislators, assailed on many fronts, partially repealed their bill.

In Austin, most of the witnesses spoke against the bathroom measure. One of them was Dr. Colt Keo-Meier, a transgender psychologist, who is currently enrolled in the medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He wore a white lab coat and a stethoscope around his neck. “If you pass this bill, I will not be able to continue attending medical school, because I will not be able to use the men’s room,” he said. “And look at me”—he has a full beard—“I certainly would not be able to go to the women’s restroom safely.” Concerns about voyeurism, he said, were misplaced: “I’ve used the women’s restroom for twenty-three years and the men’s for ten, and I’ve never seen any genitalia.”

A woman in a short-sleeved black dress identified herself as Jess Herbst, the mayor of the tiny town of New Hope, north of Dallas, in a firmly Republican section of the state. A few weeks earlier, Mayor Herbst had written a letter to her constituents to tell them that she was taking hormone therapy and transitioning to female. She received what she said was overwhelming support. “It’s not our responsibility to keep people from pretending to be us,” she said. “I just want to be able to use the women’s room and not have someone ask me at the door for my papers.”

The testimony continued until nearly five in the morning, when the committee voted 8–1 to support the bill.

In the center of the chamber is a wide aisle with a lectern and microphone at each end, where members present and question bills. The rostrum dominates the back of the chamber. There are three chairs on the platform; one for the Speaker in the center; one for the parliamentarian, and another for supplicants to come whisper in the Speaker’s ear. Directly behind the rostrum is a shrine: two white columns, with velvet bunting draped between them, enclosing a silk flag that was carried in the Battle of San Jacinto. It features Lady Liberty holding a cutlass, which is draped with a banner saying
L
IBERTY OR
D
EATH
. The original battle flag is only displayed while the legislature is in session; at other times, a reproduction takes its place. The room resonates with a sense of history and identity and pride.

The air-conditioning was merciless; one of the members showed me his long johns poking out from under his shirt cuffs. House members had been at it all day, and once again it would go on till early morning. I saw 5-Hour Energy shots arrayed on some desks.

Desperation suffuses the beautiful chamber on Budget Night—the last stand for bills that have not been funded. The trick is that in order to get the money for your legislation, you have to take it from somewhere else. The members were on guard, lest their own bills be raided. More than four hundred amendments to the budget were waiting their turn. One baffling amendment—offered by Valoree Swanson, a freshman Freedom Caucus member from a suburb of Houston—would prevent state funds from being used to renovate bathrooms in order to “allow or enable a man to enter a women’s restroom facility.”

There is a brass rail that circumscribes the chamber; only members, clerks, and pages can be inside it. Members of the press are supposed to sit at a table near the dais, but I like to hover around the rail, hoping to capture bored legislators. There are some wonderful people in the House. Senfronia Thompson is a seventy-eight-year-old former teacher from Houston. She’s a Democrat in her twentieth term. Unlike a lot of other state legislatures, Texas still follows a tradition of awarding important posts to members of the minority party. This is true even in Dan Patrick’s Senate. Thompson, known as Ms. T, is the chair of the Local and Consent Calendars Committee, one of the gateways that many bills must pass through to reach the floor. She once told me that when she was a girl, African Americans were not welcome in the capitol. Now she is the longest-serving woman and black person in Texas legislative history. Among her accomplishments is a hate crimes act, passed in 2001, that includes protections for homosexuals. She has also fought against racial profiling and passed measures to help low-income Texans pay their utility bills.

Armando Martinez, a forty-two-year-old Democratic member from the Valley, is a firefighter and a paramedic. He showed up on the first day of the session with a bandage on his head; on New Year’s Eve, he’d been hit by a stray celebratory bullet. Martinez filed a bill to prohibit the “reckless discharge of a firearm.”

Dr. John Zerwas, an anesthesiologist from Richmond, Texas, is the chair of the House Appropriations Committee. A business-conservative Republican in the Straus mold, he is deeply respected in the legislature, and Straus selected him to craft the House version of the budget. The main difference between the House budget and the Senate budget is that Zerwas proposed dipping into the Rainy Day Fund—a spare $10 billion amassed from oil and gas taxes that the state has set aside for emergencies. The fund is projected to grow to $12 billion by the next legislative session, which is more than the actual budgets of a dozen other states. Patrick maintains that the fund should not be used for “ongoing expenses,” but Zerwas proposed taking $2.5 billion out of the pot, in part to finance health care and public schools—Joe Straus priorities.

There was a telling incident in the afternoon, which would provide a glimpse of how the rest of the budget fight would play out. A freshman member, Briscoe Cain, presented an amendment to kill an advisory panel on palliative care. Normally, freshmen keep quiet, but Cain is an assertive member of the insurgent Freedom Caucus. He is thirty-two years old but looks much younger, and bratty, reminding me of Matthew Broderick in
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
“This amendment seeks to get rid of what I’ve kinda nicknamed the ‘advisory death panel,’ ” Cain said, using a term that is popular among the far right for end-of-life counseling.

Soon after he said those words, John Zerwas came to the front microphone and stood there, giving Cain what one reporter, Jonathan Tilove of the
Austin American-Statesman
, termed the
morem pellis hispidus distentione nervorum
—the hairy eyeball.

It’s fascinating to watch the choreography of the members when deep political chords are struck. The Freedom Caucus members gathered with Cain at the front of the chamber; the traditional Republicans, along with some Democrats, stood beside Zerwas at the microphone in the rear. It was a Texas version of the Montagues versus the Capulets.

“Would you please describe for me what a death panel is?” the mighty chairman of Appropriations demanded.

“A death panel is whereby a group of individuals unrelated to the person in the hospital decide whether or not that person will live or die,” Cain replied.

“Have you ever understood, really, what palliative care is?” said Zerwas.

“Mr. Zerwas, being in your profession, I am sure you could inform this body better than I could,” Cain replied, looking for help.

The old warhorses in the House knew, if Cain did not, that Zerwas had lost his first wife to brain cancer. He wore a ring on his right hand in her memory.

Zerwas said, “You could probably ask fifty, sixty, seventy, a
hundred
members in this House who have had somebody with a serious illness who has dealt with this particular issue.”

Zerwas forced Cain, several times, to admit having made false or uninformed statements. “You know about this and I don’t,” Cain finally said. “My apologies.” The amendment was withdrawn.

Cain later got a bit of redemption when he offered an amendment blocking any payment by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for a “sex reassignment or gender transitioning” operation—something that has never actually happened. Cain’s battle cry: “Don’t California my Texas!”

I caught the eye of Pat Fallon, a Republican member from Frisco, a wealthy and intensely conservative bedroom community in the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. Many young legislators, like Fallon, are not originally from Texas. I asked him how he came to the state. He said that after playing football for Notre Dame, he joined the Air Force and was stationed in Texas. “When they asked me my state of residence, I said, ‘Massachusetts.’ The payroll officer informed me that Massachusetts has a 5.6 percent income tax, but there’s no income tax in Texas. I said, ‘I’m a Texan!’ ”

This was his third term. So far, he’s best known for coauthoring a bill in 2013 that reasserted the right of students and employees at public schools to say “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays.”

“Have you got an amendment?” I asked Fallon.

“Yeah, it’s number one fifty-two, in which we defund the portion of the Travis County Public Integrity Unit’s investigation of insurance fraud and motor vehicle tax fraud.” That unit has been under attack for years, because it also addresses crimes committed by state officials. Of course, anything attacking Austin and Travis County is reliably popular in the legislature. Austin is a spore of the California fungus that is destroying America.

“Who would do the investigating?” I asked.

“We’d give it to the attorney general,” Fallon responded.

“But he’s under indictment.”

“I would prefer it not be that way,” Fallon admitted. “But he hasn’t been convicted.”

Fallon ranks high on the conservative “report cards,” compiled by watchdog groups, by which modern legislators live and die. The most feared is the Fiscal Responsibility Index, a powerful weapon against Republicans who are less than ultraradical. It is produced by Empower Texans, a group led by Michael Quinn Sullivan, a lobbyist who is known by his initials, MQS, which some members pronounce “Mucus.”

Sullivan is tall and friendly. He likes to talk about Boy Scouts (he was an Eagle Scout), the Aggies (he was in the AM Corps of Cadets), and his three children. He’s a right-wing zealot, sometimes described as the most powerful non-elected political figure in Texas. Several years ago we had lunch, and Sullivan told me, “I’m not there to get a seat at the table. I’m there to get rid of the table.” In other words, destroy the government.

Empower Texans is largely funded by a reclusive Midland oilman named Tim Dunn, an evangelical Christian who hopes to create in Texas a model of small government that could be replicated by other states and countries. Even people who hate Dunn’s politics consider him the most effective moneyman in the state. His mission has been to push Republican lawmakers to the far right, eliminating the kind of middle-ground figures who support Joe Straus. Dunn has made it a mission to bring the Speaker down.

While Fallon and I were talking, Jonathan Stickland approached the front microphone. Stickland, a member of the Freedom Caucus, is a former pest-control operator from Bedford, near Arlington, who now lists himself as an oil-and-gas consultant. Stickland is heavyset, with a Falstaffian beard, narrow-set brown eyes, and an occasional broad smile, showing beautiful teeth. He made news last session by posting a sign outside his office: