Monthly Archives: April 2014

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LBJ legacy shines brightly

Fifty years ago this week, a long, tall Texan who was new in his job as president of the United States, signed a landmark bill into law that changed the face of the nation — and changed the political landscape in this country.

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It guaranteed the rights of all Americans regardless of race, ethnicity or religion.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/civil-rights-act-50

He had become president under grievous conditions just six months earlier. President John F. Kennedy’s murder was still fresh in our minds and our broken hearts. The new man in the Oval Office took office and took charge of JFK’s unfinished legislative agenda, which included the Civil Rights Act.

It took a master legislator such as LBJ to finish the job. Prior to becoming vice president, Sen. Lyndon Johnson served as majority leader and had built a reputation as, shall we say, a supreme negotiator. He was unafraid to lay his hands on fellow senators to persuade them to vote his way … or else.

He took that skill to the presidency. Meanwhile, he had to persuade southern Democrats who weren’t as keen on the Civil Rights Act as many northern Republicans. LBJ did the deed and was told by one of his best Senate friends, arch-segregationist Richard Russell, D-Ga., that the bill would “cost us the South.”

Johnson perhaps knew what the political stakes were at the time he signed the bill, but he knew it was the right thing to do.

He put his name to it.

The LBJ Library in Austin this week is honoring the late president’s achievement. Four of his presidential successors — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — will be on hand in Austin to speak to the greatness of the Civil Rights Act.

What’s more, the Johnson family along with the library administration, are working overtime to burnish LBJ’s legacy to include far more than the tragedy and heartache of the Vietnam War.

Let’s hope they succeed. Lyndon Baines Johnson deserves high praise for enacting this law.

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Do as I say, not do

Vance McAllister is a Louisiana Republican member of Congress who campaigned in 2012 for an office while touting his deep Christian faith, his devotion to his wife and children and his vow to make Washington a more moral place.

Then he got caught in a lengthy and reportedly passionate kiss with a female (who’s also married) member of his staff.

The stuff, shall we say, is hitting the fan down yonder in Louisiana.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/caught-kissing-staffer-rep-vance-mcallister-asks-for-forgiveness/

This is what happens when you campaign as one thing and perform in another manner.

It happened to former U.S. Sen. and one-time Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards, who professed his devotion to his wife, Elizabeth, while producing a child with another woman.

It also happened when former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich was among the leaders in the impeach Bill Clinton movement during the president’s scandal over an affair of his own. Then we learned that as Gingrich was blasting Clinton to smithereens over his conduct, the speaker was having actual sex with a House staff member.

The bipartisan list of moral hypocrites is too long to list here. Those two jumped immediately to mind.

Rep. McAllister has some explaining to do to (a) his wife and (b) the good folks of Louisiana who elected him thinking they were getting someone with the record of a Boy Scout.

How he handles the trouble with his wife will be his business alone. How he settles it with the people who are paying his salary is quite another.

“There’s no doubt I’ve fallen short and I’m asking for forgiveness. I’m asking for forgiveness from God, my wife, my kids, my staff, and my constituents who elected me to serve,” McAllister said in a statement. “Trust is something I know has to be earned whether you’re a husband, a father, or a congressman. I promise to do everything I can to earn back the trust of everyone I’ve disappointed.”

How’s he going to make good with his constituents? Will he vow never to do it again? If so, can he be believed?

Good luck, congressman.

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Gerrymandering not always a bad thing

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Whether to gerrymander a congressional district, that is the question.

I’ve been stewing about this for years, believe it or not. It’s not that I don’t have many important things to ponder, but this one has been stuck in my craw ever since I landed in Amarillo back in January 1995.

The term “gerrymander” is named after Elbridge Gerry, who served as vice president during the James Madison administration. It’s come to identify the practice of drawn governmental boundaries in such a way as to protect certain political parties. It’s been vilified as a form of political protectionism.

Is it always a bad thing? I submit that it isn’t always a negative.

Consider what happened to Amarillo back in the early 1990s.

The 1991 Texas Legislature gerrymandered the 13th and 19th congressional districts in a way that split Amarillo in two. Potter County was included in the 13th district; Randall County was drawn into the 19th. The 13th was represented at that time by Democrat Bill Sarpalius; the 19th by Republican Larry Combest. The 1991 Legislature — which was dominated by Democrats — intended to protect Democratic members of Congress. Legislators believed that by carving out the Potter County portion of Amarillo into that district — which contained a good number of Democratic voters — that Sarpalius would be protected.

I came to work as editorial page editor of the Amarillo Globe-News, which was in the middle of a furious editorial campaign to put Amarillo back into a single congressional district.

What happened between 1991 and the time of my arrival in 1995? Well, Sarpalius was re-elected to the House in 1992, but in 1994, he was upset by upstart Republican Mac Thornberry, who at the time was serving as Larry Combest’s congressional chief of staff. Sarpalius wasn’t the only Democratic incumbent to lose that year, as that was the election featuring the GOP’s Contract With America.

Interesting, eh? Thornberry took office in 1995, which then meant that Amarillo was represented by two Republican members of Congress. Back when one was a Democrat and one was a Republican, you could count on Combest and Sarpalius voting opposite each other. Their votes and their constituencies canceled each other out. With Thornberry and Combest serving together in Congress, well, you had a two-for-one deal. Both men sang from the same sheet. You got two votes for Amarillo, even though they represented separate congressional districts.

Still, the newspaper kept beating the drum for a reuniting of Amarillo into a single congressional district. Our wish would be granted after the 2000 census and the 2001 Legislature returned all of Amarillo to the 13th district.

I look back, though, a bit wistfully on the time when Amarillo had two members of Congress looking after its interests. Combest was by the far the senior member of the two. He was a big hitter on the House Agriculture Committee and served on the Select Committee on Intelligence. He was a frequent visitor to Amarillo, where he maintained a district office.

I never challenged my publisher’s desire to throw over one of our two congressmen at the time. I wish now I had raised the issue with him.

My thought now is that gerrymandering, while it generally is meant as a tool to do harm, actually can produce an unintended positive consequence for a community — as it did in Amarillo.

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Jeb Bush lays down marker

Conventional Republican orthodoxy bears little resemblance to how it used to look.

It now includes a fairly strong anti-immigrant stance, particularly against those who are here illegally.

Enter a former Florida governor with a famous political name to challenge that common view.

Jeb Bush is considering a run for the presidency in 2016 and he’s laying bare a potential weakness among hard-core GOP voters who’ll nominate their next candidate.

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/jeb-bush-takes-potential-weaknesses-n73561

Bush wants his party to reform the immigration system that enables those who were brought here illegally by their parents to stay here and to live and work free from the fear of deportation.

“Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony; it’s an act of love,” Bush said over the weekend while declaring that he’ll make up his mind about running for president sometime this year.

Immigration might doom Bush’s candidacy. It plagued Sen.John McCain in 2008 and it helped torpedo Texas Gov. Rick Perry in late 2011 as he was running for the GOP nomination. What do these two men have in common? They both come from border states with large immigrant populations — and they also have realistic views on the best way to treat those who were brought here as children by parents who entered the United States illegally.

The Bush brand, such as it is, carries some heavy baggage. Jeb’s brother, George W., remains a too-hot-to-handle commodity among Republicans. The two men’s father, George H.W. Bush, broke that “no new taxes” pledge in 1990 while crafting a federal budget.

Now comes immigration. Jeb Bush is making the kind of sense on this issue that is flying over the heads of the tea party fanatics who control the party — at the moment.

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Uninsured rate is falling

Politicians of all stripes have this way of spinning news in their favor and against their opponents’ interests.

That’s how the game is played. Take the Affordable Care Act. President Obama has declared something of a victory in that 7.1 million Americans signed up for the ACA before the March 31 open enrollment deadline; he had set a goal of 7 million signups. Republicans on the other hand declared the signup period a failure because of the rollout snafus and clumsiness that followed.

Now comes some interesting news from the Gallup Poll organization. The rate of uninsured Americans is the lowest since 2008, the final full year of George W. Bush’s presidency.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/168248/uninsured-rate-lowest-2008.aspx

What does that mean?

Let’s see. The president said when he took office in 2009 that he intended to make health insurance available to more Americans and to bite into the number of uninsured Americans, which stood at 40 million or so, give or take.

The ACA passed. The enrollment period opened up. Americans got signed up through the exchanges. More Americans now have health insurance than before enactment of the law and, according to Gallup, the rate of uninsured Americans is at a six-year low.

The improvement is greatest among poor Americans and African-Americans, says Gallup. The rate of uninsured among all age groups has declined.

Is this an unqualified success for the Obama administration? It is not. The president made a couple of promises he couldn’t keep, such as the infamous “you can keep your doctor” pledge. The law will need to be tweaked, fine-tuned and improved along the way — which is the norm for almost all major pieces of legislation.

However, to say the ACA has “failed” and that it is going to “bankrupt the country” and create “death panels” to determine who lives is dishonest in the extreme.

The survey noted here suggests that the administration’s major goal — to provide health insurance to more Americans — has been met.

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Good news from Afghanistan?

Might there be a glimmer of hope finally in Afghanistan?

The Afghans have conducted an election to choose their next president. The top two candidates, according to National Public Radio, are pro-Western in their leanings and are not allies of the outgoing — and unpredictable — Afghan President Hamid Karzai; indeed, Karzai’s hand-picked successor is running far behind the top two candidates.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304819004579485482622918584

A runoff appears to be in the offing between opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah and former World Bank executive Ashraf Ghani.

What’s more, the election produced a stunning 60 percent turnout in the face of attacks from Taliban terrorists who, of course, oppose elections of any stripe.

Can this be a tipping point in the evolution of Afghanistan from a lawless, tribal society into one that is governed under the rule of laws that the rest of the civilized world understands?

Hope should spring eternal.

The United States already has ended its major combat role in Afghanistan after fighting an all-out war there against the Taliban since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. More than a dozen years have passed. Too much American blood has been spilled in what had been thought to be a lost cause.

It’s too early certainly to declare victory in a land with no known history of representative democracy. But with the impending election of either Ghani or Abdullah, the country appears to be headed toward a leadership that will tilt in our direction rather than toward the forces of evil.

It’s now time for the world to begin holding its breath.

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President/Rev. Huckabee?

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A thought just occurred to me, so I reckon I’ll share it here.

It involves former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who ran for the Republican nomination for president once and who might do so again. Some recent polling puts him near the front rank of a large gaggle of GOP contenders for the White House.

Huckabee on religion

Here’s the thought.

Back in 1960, when Sen. John F. Kennedy, was running for president, critics of the young lawmaker were dubious about his Catholic faith. They actually expressed some fear that a President Kennedy would be taking his orders from the Vatican, that he couldn’t separate his constitutional responsibility from his faith.

The candidate ended up making a speech in Texas in which he said, in effect, that he would swear to uphold the Constitution and that the oath never would play second fiddle to anything or anyone, period, end of discussion.

Should we ask similar questions of Gov. Huckabee, who in an earlier life was a Baptist preacher?

Indeed, the question might come if Huckabee decides to seek the presidency. Imagine someone asking: “Governor, will you govern according to the Constitution or will you base your policy decisions on what Scripture says?” I’ll point out once more that the Constitution is a totally secular document that states Congress shall make no law establishing a state religion and that there shall be no religious litmus test for office seekers.

Still, the issue might find its way to the table if Rev. Huckabee decides to run for the presidency.

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Mozilla boss done in by intolerance

Brendan Eich was under some illusion, apparently, that the First Amendment means people are free to express their political beliefs without retribution.

I guess not.

Eich was canned by Mozilla, the Internet browser, because he gave some money in 2008 to political organizations that favored a ban in California of gay marriage. Proposition 8 became a battle cry for those seeking “marriage equality.”

I do not care to comment on the merits of Prop 8. I do care, though, to suggest that Eich got the shaft by his company.

Whatever this man thinks of gay marriage, Prop 8, or whether the moon is made of green cheese has zero relevance to the company he runs.

Is he smart enough to be chief executive officer of a multi-bazillion-dollar Internet company? Apparently so. The company reportedly is in good financial shape in the cut-throat world of big business and matters relating to the Internet.

The most troubling aspect of this man’s dismissal — to my way of thinking — is that it suggests an intolerance of views that don’t comport with progressive thinkers. My understanding of the term progressive, which is synonymous with “liberal,” is that one should keep an open mind and judge everyone’s views on their merits. An unwritten element here is that the view should be relevant to something broader and more far-reaching than merely the individual who has expressed that view.

So what if the guy gave money to Prop 8 supporters? Does that make him less qualified to run his company? The link attached here suggests that his view restricts Mozilla’s ability to hire first-rate engineers and other geeks who might be dissuaded from working for someone who believes as he does about gay marriage.

Come on!

It pains me to say that we have a case of political correctness running amok. The U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment has been stomped on in the process.

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Look far and wide, Amarillo College

Now that Paul Matney has announced his intention to retire as president of Amarillo College, it’s not too early to light a fire under the school’s governing board of regents.

Cast a wide net, AC regents, in your search for someone to succeed Matney.

The AC president, arguably one of the most highly regarded public officials anywhere in the Texas Panhandle, rose from the ranks to the presidency in 2009. He had served as acting president while the late Steve Jones battled cancer. Matney had served three decades at AC in various faculty and administrative capacities. The school would have been wise then to look outside for a successor to Jones, but it chose instead to stay in-house.

The decision turned out to be a brilliant one.

Matney’s replacement, though, will need to be someone special. Matney’s mark is indelible. Foremost among his accomplishments has been his relentless advocacy of Amarillo College and the astonishing loyalty and ease with which he argues the virtues of the institution that has set student enrollment records for several of the past academic years.

Should regents look solely within the ranks of current administrators? I think not. Amarillo College has established an enough of a stellar reputation among other junior colleges — indeed, among universities — in Texas that qualified administrators would scramble to apply for this office the moment it is posted.

Paul Matney set a high bar for his successor and in the process has created a “headache” most college regents would love to have. They likely will have the chore of poring through a mountain of applications from high-quality candidates seeking to fill some mighty large shoes.

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Texas's next governor will …

Wendy Davis created quite a stir by visiting the Texas Panhandle this week.

Much of it was positive. Much of it was not. The Fort Worth state senator and Democratic nominee for governor ventured into some hostile territory just by setting foot in this heavily Republican region of a heavily Republican state.

Good for her.

Let’s look ahead to the next election. Just suppose …

Davis wins. Or just suppose Republican nominee Greg Abbott wins — as most observers think will happen.

The next Texas governor will be stripped almost immediately of the kind of power that Republican Rick Perry acquired during his umpteen years as the state’s top elected official.

It’s been said zillions of times over the years that the Texas governor is a relatively weak office. The real power rests with the lieutenant governor, as he/she presides over the state Senate. The governor’s power lies in his appointments. Given that Perry has been governor seemingly forever, he’s had ample opportunity to fill all key state boards and commissions with people friendly to his policies.

He’s also been successful at using the governor’s office as a bully pulpit. Has that always worked well for him? No. Consider his purported pro-secession language that energized the tea party faction within his party. Many of the rest of us were quite turned off by the careless talk.

The next governor will lose much of the aura that Perry acquired, for better or worse.

You can bet that Abbott will show up in the Panhandle — perhaps many times — before the election occurs. Davis’s next visit isn’t yet set.

My hope is that the gubernatorial candidates don’t fall victim to what I’ve noticed over many years watching and covering Texas politics from my perch on the top end of our vast state. It is that Republicans take us for granted, given our region’s bias in their favor, while Democrats have all but given up the fight for our votes.

Y’all come back.