Tag Archives: Larry Combest

local news

GOP state lawmakers stand on principle

Texas Republican legislators’ rebellion against Gov. Greg Abbott’s effort to siphon money from public education and hand it to private schools deserves another notice from this blog.

I already have spoken kindly about rural Republicans’ efforts to block the initiative, citing their belief in the strength that public education brings to their communities. The effort is so united and unbreakable through four special legislative sessions that Abbott appears to have given up on the fight for the time being.

The legislators answer to the voters, not to the political leadership in Austin. For their loyalty to the votes who send them to office, I applaud them.

Their resistance against political leadership reminds me of a struggle that occurred in Washington in the mid-1990s. It involved a West Texas congressman, Republican Larry Combest of Lubbock and his refusal to back the Freedom to Farm legislation pushed by newly installed House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Combest told Gingrich he opposed the agriculture overhaul effort because the farmers and ranchers who voted him into office opposed it. He would side with the South Plains and High Plains voters who expressed their opposition. One of the effects of the legislation would be to reduce the farm and ranch subsidies that went to those who worked the land.

I applauded Combest vociferously at the time while I worked for the Amarillo Globe-News as editorial page editor. I spoke with considerable passion about the guts Combest displayed in resisting Gingrich. It would cost Combest a coveted chairmanship of the House Agriculture Committee. Gingrich coaxed a retired Republican from Oregon, Bob Smith, to run again for the House and gave him the chairman’s gavel.

Combest eventually asked me to back off on my criticism of Gingrich. “I have to work with these guys,” Combest said. I don’t recall my precise answer, but I believe I said something like, “Too bad, Larry. I’m going to stay on it.”

Combest displayed plenty of backbone then. Texas rural GOP legislators are showing plenty of the same thing now.

Stand tall!

local news

Combest cast his loyalty in proper direction

All this talk we hear these days about “loyalty” to an individual rather than to the Constitution or to constituents who politicians represent brings to mind a story I related this evening to a friend of mine as we left a college football game in Commerce, Texas.

It involves a former congressman I got to know well while I worked as editorial page editor of the Amarillo Globe-News. His name is Larry Combest, a Republican from Lubbock who for years represented the 19th Congressional District, which for a time included the southern half of Amarillo.

Combest was, in the term of art applied these days, a “traditional Republican conservative.” He also was unafraid to buck the dictates of his political leadership.

In 1994, when the GOP took control of the House of Representatives and installed Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House, the Republican majority decided to reconfigure federal farm policy. The GOP-led House produced something called Freedom to Farm. Combest, whose congressional district included vast stretches of cultivated farm land and ranch land, didn’t like what the legislation contained. He said it treated the cattle ranchers and farmers who helped elect him badly. He refused to sign on to the legislation.

Combest’s refusal to buy into Freedom to Farm incurred Gingrich’s anger. He scolded Combest privately, or so I was led at the time to believe. Combest didn’t budge. He told Gingrich — and I heard this through back channels — that he didn’t work for the speaker. He worked for the people of West Texas, who told him they didn’t like the direction that the new federal farm policy was heading. Combest wasn’t going to give in to the dictates of the House political leadership.

Combest held his ground, even though it cost him — in the immediate term — an appointment as House Agriculture Committee chairman; he would become chairman, if memory serves, sometime after Gingrich left the House amid a personal scandal and when the GOP lost ground in subsequent midterm elections.

The point of this little essay is to illustrate that politicians should put the needs of their constituents above the needs of political leaders who harbor delusions of grandeur and godhood. Larry Combest knew who sent him to Congress and he honored his commitment to them rather than to a bomb-throwing ideologue.

We need a lot more of that kind of loyalty rather than what we are seeing being playing out these days in Washington.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Standing with a courageous GOP senator

I want to stand with an embattled Republican U.S. senator who chose to honor his sacred oath rather than following a path toward blind partisan fealty.

Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee, voted to convict Donald John Trump on an allegation of abuse of power when the Senate cast its vote to acquit the current president.

That has brought a barrage of scorn and recrimination from Trump’s loyalists. One of them is Fox News talker Jeanine Pirro, a former judge from New York who said this, according to The Guardian: “get the hell out of the United States Senate,” while claiming that “your dream of endearing yourself to the Trump-hating left is a joke.”

Sigh …

Pirro doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Sen. Romney, a freshman from Utah, is more of a Republican than Pirro or her Fox pals ever have been or ever hope to be. He is a man of deep religious faith. He takes the oath he took to deliver “impartial justice” as seriously as he could take any oath he’s ever taken.

So he voted to convict Trump on a single charge brought to the Senate from the House of Representatives impeachment. Trump was still acquitted. Romney’s vote didn’t matter, a point he made while declaring his intention to cast a “guilty” vote in a speech on the Senate floor.

I am reminded a bit by a former Republican House member I got to know well while I worked as editorial page editor of the Amarillo Globe-News.

Larry Combest represented the 19th Congressional District, which for a time included the southern portion of Amarillo. In the mid-1990s, Combest resisted a GOP-led farm policy overhaul. It was called “Freedom to Farm.” Combest stuck it in then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s eye when he opposed the Freedom to Farm legislation.

Gingrich demanded loyalty to the party platform. Combest was unwilling to grant it. Why? Because the farmers and ranchers in West Texas — for whom Combest worked — opposed the legislation. Combest was more loyal to them than to the House party leadership.

Accordingly, Mitt Romney was more loyal to the oath he took than to the president of the United States. Mitt Romney didn’t get my vote for POTUS in 2012. He gets my undying respect now.

local news, State news

Sen. Seliger deserves better than what he got

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I cannot put aside the shafting that Texas state Sen. Kel Seliger got from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. And as a result, Patrick also gave the shaft to hundreds of thousands of West Texans who deserve to be represented by their veteran lawmaker.

And for what reason? Because the Republican senator isn’t loyal enough to the ideological agenda proposed and pushed by the Republican lieutenant governor! From my vantage point, I believe Seliger answers first to the West Texans who have elected him to the Texas Senate, not the guy who runs the state’s upper legislative chamber.

Patrick removed Seliger, of Amarillo, as chairman of the Senate Higher Ed Committee; he pulled him off the Senate Education Committee and the Finance Committee. He installed him as chair of the Agriculture Committee, then pulled him out of the chairmanship after Seliger made what Patrick thought was an “lewd” comment about a key Patrick aide.

Seliger believes Patrick is angry over the senator’s resistance toward some of the rigid ideological views that Patrick expresses on occasion. He favors public schools and opposes Patrick’s push for vouchers to lure students away from public education.

So now the residents of Texas Senate District 31 have a senator in office with vastly reduced political clout. Shameful, I tell you!

This tempest reminds me a little of an earlier fight between two congressional Republicans, one of whom represented West Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich was a champion of something called Freedom to Farm. He had led the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994 and pushed the Freedom to Farm bill in the House. It would have dramatically overhauled federal farm policy, which didn’t set well with then-U.S. Rep. Larry Combest, who represented West Texas from Lubbock to Amarillo. Combest resisted Freedom to Farm and voted against it.

Gingrich thought he would punish Combest by denying him a House Agricultural Committee chairmanship. Combest stood firm, telling Gingrich in no uncertain terms that he didn’t work for the speaker, but worked for the farmers and ranchers who elected him to the House. He was their man, not Gingrich’s errand boy.

Combest wouldn’t be bullied by Gingrich in the 1990s. Seliger won’t be bullied by Patrick now.

I see a certain similarity between these two pairings. I pulled for Combest in his fight with the House speaker and I am pulling for Seliger in this feud with the Texas lieutenant governor.

Both men stood and are standing with the men and women who elect them, not the bully who seeks to call the shots in the legislative chamber.

local news, political news

Gerrymandering: sometimes it works!

A blog item I just posted reminded me of one of the few regrets I collected while serving as a journalist for nearly four decades.

I remembered a C-SPAN segment I was honored to do regarding the former 19th Congressional District representative, Republican Larry Combest and the sprawling district he was elected to represent in 1984.

My regret? I didn’t resist my boss’s dogged insistence that Amarillo be “made whole” by the Texas Legislature. You see, the Democrats who controlled the 1991 Legislature split Amarillo into two congressional districts during its once-a-decade redistricting ritual. The idea was to peel off Democratic voters in Potter County to protect the Democratic incumbent, Rep. Bill Sarpalius.

The Amarillo Globe-News went ballistic over that arrangement. It hated the notion of the city being split into two districts, represented by a Democrat, the other by a Republican.

Sarpalius got re-elected in 1992. Then something happened in 1994 that no one foresaw when the Legislature gerrymandered the city’s representation: Sarpalius lost to Republican Mac Thornberry, who happened to be Combest’s former chief of staff.

Do you know what that meant? It meant Amarillo would have two members of Congress from the same political party — which now controlled Congress — representing its interests.

I arrived at my post at the Globe-News in January 1995, the same week Thornberry took office.

But still the newspaper insisted on redrawing the lines and putting Amarillo into a single congressional district. I went along with the publisher’s insistence on that change. For the life me as I look back on that time, I must’ve had rocks in my head for not arguing against it.

Thornberry and Combest comprised a sort of one-two punch for Amarillo. Thornberry’s district covered Potter County, Combest’s included Randall County. I get the difficulty when two House members from opposing parties were representing the city. But after the 1994 election that all changed.

Did the two GOP House members always vote the way I preferred? No. That’s not the point. My point is that our city could depend on two elected members of Congress doing our community’s bidding when the moments presented themselves.

Eventually, the Legislature did as we kept insisting they do. They redrew the boundaries and put the 19th District much farther south and put all of Amarillo into the 13th.

Combest resigned from the House in 2002. Thornberry is still in office. I’m trying to assess what actual, tangible benefit Thornberry has brought to the city all these years later.

Well, you know what they say about hindsight. It all looks clearer looking back than it does in the moment.

media news, national news

Recalling a long, lost journalism memory

I discovered something on the Internet I didn’t know even existed. To be candid, it blew me away to find it. So much so that I want to share it here.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?77319-1/texas-19th-congressional-district

The quality of the video isn’t great, but it’s watchable if you’re interested.

C-SPAN is the network that appeals mainly to political junkies. I am one of them. The call letters stand for “Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network.” Need I say more?

I enjoy the network and its utterly unbiased presentation of the discussion of the issues of the day. Its founder, Brian Lamb, is legendary in his insistence that his on-air reporters steer clear of any bias.

In 1996, I was new to the Texas Panhandle. I had started a job a year earlier as editorial page editor of the Amarillo Globe-News. C-SPAN was conducting a nationwide tour of every congressional district in the United States.

The network called me and asked if I would be willing to be interviewed for a discussion of the 19th Congressional District and its representative, Lubbock Republican Larry Combest.

“Sure,” I said. Here’s the deal, though: I had to study up on the 19th  District, learn enough about it to talk intelligently about it for broadcast on the air.

C-SPAN’s series featured a “school bus” that came to each congressional district. It contained a traveling camera crew. A reporter asked me questions; a cameraman video recorded it. The interview lasted about 30 minutes at the AGN offices in downtown Amarillo. The finished product was cut down to about three minutes on the air.

It was a fascinating “teachable moment” for this newcomer to the Texas Panhandle. It presented me with one of the more incredible experiences of my journalism career. I enjoyed doing it immensely.

In 1996, Amarillo was divided into two congressional districts. Combest represented the19th, which included Randall County. The northern portion of Amarillo was represented by the 13th District and its then-freshman congressman, Republican Mac Thornberry.

I honestly cannot remember who C-SPAN recruited to talk on the air about the 13th District; hey, it was a long time ago.

This is just a nugget that I wanted to share with you, given the many miles the world has traveled over the past two-plus decades since this segment aired in the delivery of news and commentary to the public.

local news, national news, political news, State news

Political ‘leaders’ too often become ‘tyrants’

Jay Leeson, writing for Texas Monthly’s Burka Blog, wonders how Texas legislators can stiff their constituents in favor of an agenda being pushed by the state’s second-leading politician, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

He wonders if state senators, for instance, are working for the people who they represent back home or for the lieutenant governor.

Implicit in his essay is the question about whether Lt. Gov. Patrick is running the Texas Senate — a body over which he presides — with too heavy a hand.

Read the essay here.

Indeed, we see this developing all too often. Politicians attain positions of power thanks to the votes of their fellow politicians and then decide that their voice is more important than anyone else’s. It’s a bipartisan affliction that crosses party lines.

A notable Texas politician, Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson, was famous for corralling fellow senators, getting right into their faces and “persuading” them to vote for a bill of his choosing … or else pay the consequences.

Another brief story involves another Texas pol, former Republican U.S. Rep. Larry Combest of Lubbock, who once refused in the 1990s to support legislation dramatically overhauling the nation’s farm program. House Speaker Newt Gingrich wanted him to support it, and pressured him to do so. Combest refused because he said it would do harm to the West Texas farmers and ranchers who sent him to Congress in the first place.

This dance is occurring now in Washington, D.C. Republican leaders want to overhaul health care laws. They have developed an alternative to the Affordable Care Act that has been getting some seriously angry reviews among voters in congressional districts and states all over the country. Senators and House members are hearing about it, too.

Do they vote for their constituents’ interests or the interests of the party leadership?

Democrats exerted the same pressure on their congressional members when they pushed for passage of the ACA in 2010. The law was unpopular out here in the land, but Democratic congressional leaders insisted on approving it. The ACA’s fortunes have turned; Americans want to keep it and they favor it over the alternative that Republicans are trying to shove down our throats.

But GOP congressional leaders won’t be persuaded by silly notions about public opinion or the principle of representing the desires of the “bosses,” voters who elect them — or who can unelect them if they are given the chance.

Political leadership — whether in Austin or Washington — is vulnerable to those who turn it into tyranny.

local news, medical news, national news, political news

Who works for whom in Washington?

Donald Trump thought he could strong-arm congressional Republicans into doing his bidding.

He wanted them to enact a repeal of the Affordable Care Act. GOP lawmakers — namely the more conservative members of their caucus — weren’t budging. Why? I believe it’s because they knew something that the president doesn’t understand: They work for their constituents; they do not work for the president.

When I heard today that Trumpcare went down in flames, I flashed back to another time, in an another era, when another lawmaker decided to stick it in the ear of his congressional leadership.

I recalled former U.S. Rep. Larry Combest, a Republican from Lubbock, who once defied the speaker of the House of Representatives who wanted Combest to back some legislation that he just couldn’t support.

It occurred in the late 1990s. Combest represented a largely rural West Texas congressional district that ran from southern Amarillo all the way to the Permian Basin.

GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich was pushing something called Freedom to Farm, a dramatic overhaul of national farm policy. If memory serves, Freedom to Farm would have drastically reduced the amount of subsidies the government gave to farmers and ranchers to help them through difficult years. We get those kinds of seasons in West Texas, as you might know. Drought has this way of inhibiting dryland farmers’ ability to harvest crops; such a lack of moisture also restricts the amount of grain that ranchers use to feed their livestock.

Gingrich pushed Combest hard to back Freedom to Farm. Combest resisted. He finally voted against Freedom to Farm.

Combest was left to remind the speaker that he didn’t work for congressional leaders. He answered to the farmers and ranchers who elected him to Congress. These folks back home would suffer from Freedom to Farm and Combest wasn’t about to let them down.

I applauded Combest at the time, remarking in an editorial — and also in a couple of signed columns — that he showed guts by defying his congressional leadership and standing up for his constituents.

Congressional Republicans today don’t work for the president. They answer to their constituents at home, the folks whose votes upon which these lawmakers depend. They hate the GOP alternative to the ACA and let their congressmen and women know it in no uncertain terms. Democrats hate it, too.

That is how representative democracy works, Mr. President.

Just ask Larry Combest.

local news, political news

Regretting a stance on Amarillo’s congressional alignment

Every now and then, as I wander through Amarillo, I encounter people I knew in my previous life as a journalist and with whom I maintain friendly relations to this day.

I ran into one of them today. He is former Bushland School Superintendent John Lemons. We chatted about this and that, about people we know and how they’re doing these days. Then the conversation turned to an old friend of his, former U.S. Rep. Larry Combest.

Our discussion pivoted to a position the Amarillo Globe-News had taken while I was working as editorial page editor of the newspaper: It dealt with congressional reapportionment.

I told John that I have grown to regret a position the paper had taken, and which I had expressed through editorials published on the matter. The G-N argued for the “reunification” of Amarillo into a single congressional district.

A brief history is in order.

***

The 1991 Texas Legislature, which was dominated by Democrats, redrew the state’s congressional districts. Seeking to protect Democratic U.S. Rep. Bill Sarpalius, the Legislature split Amarillo in half: Potter County would be represented by Sarpalius in the 13th Congressional District; Randall County’s congressman would be Republican Larry Combest.

The realignment outraged the G-N at the time. They paper began calling for the city to be made whole by being put back solely into the 13th District.

The gerrymandering worked through the 1992 election, as Sarpalius was re-elected to his third term in Congress; so was Combest. The paper kept up its drumbeat for unification. The city’s interests were being split between men of competing political parties, the G-N said.

Then came the 1994 election. Sarpalius ran into the Republican juggernaut. A young congressional staffer named Mac Thornberry defeated him. Thus, the city would be represented by two congressmen from the same party.

I arrived at my post in January 1995 — and the paper kept hammering away at the unification theme. Bring the city together, we said. I scratched my head a bit over that one. I couldn’t quite understand why we were so upset with divided representation, given that both Reps. Combest and Thornberry were of the same party. They were rowing in unison, singing off the same page, reciting the same mantra … blah, blah, blah.

I told Lemons today that the city was able to “double its pleasure, double its fun” with two members of Congress representing its interests. One of them, Combest, held a leadership position on the House Agriculture Committee.

But we kept it up.

I told my pal John Lemons today I regret not pushing my boss at the time to rethink the notion that Amarillo needed to be made whole.

So … now I’m sharing my regret here.

I had a wonderful — and moderately successful — career in daily print journalism. However, it wasn’t regret-free.

local news, national news, political news, State news

An end to gerrymandering? Sure, let’s do it

250px-TravisCountyDistricts

The Democratic Governors Association wants to back President Obama’s call for an end to gerrymandering.

I’m all for it. However, it’s not because the Democrats are for it. The practice has been used for political purposes since the beginning of the Republic. By both major parties.

The president was correct in his final State of the Union speech to demand an end to the practice of drawing districts to create a desired political outcome.

It’s just that Republicans who control most state legislators these days have turned the practice into an art form. Some of the congressional and state legislative districts in Texas, for example, simply defy all forms of logic.

There used to be a term used to describe how these districts should be constructed. It’s called “community of interest.” It means that all the residents of a particular district should have issues in common. They should be primarily rural or urban in nature. That’s how it’s supposed to go in theory at least.

But some of the districts in this state snake their way around street corners, winding their way from, say, Austin all the way to the Rio Grande Valley. What does someone living in, say, Laredo have in common with someone living in suburban Travis County?

Nothing!

There once was a time when Democrats ran the show in Texas. The 1991 Texas Legislature, thus, redrew congressional districts and created something of a monstrosity right here in the Panhandle. They split Amarillo in half, putting the Potter County part of the city into the 13th Congressional District and the Randall County portion into the 19th Congressional District.

The Legislature’s purpose? It was to protect Democratic U.S. Rep. Bill Sarpalius’s seat in Congress. The Legislature peeled off enough Republicans living in Randall County and put them into a district served by Republican U.S. Rep. Larry Combest, who lived in Lubbock.

The notion worked through one election cycle; Sarpalius was re-elected in 1992. Then came the 1994 Contract With America election. Sarpalius got beat by Republican Mac Thornberry.

There went the notion of protecting a Democrat.

The principle of gerrymandering really does stink, no matter who’s doing it.

There ought to be some rhyme or reason to the districts we create after every census is taking. The way it’s done now is meant to keep power in the hands of whichever party is in control.