January 9, 2007

Craddick Prevails in Bitter Speaker's Race
after Pitts Folds When Secret Ballot Fails

By Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside Editor

The close race that renegade Republicans and Democrats had promised for more than two weeks failed to materialize when House Speaker Tom Craddick and his allies turned back a move to keep the election results secret then watched as the challenge to his re-election bid fizzled during a six-hour marathon on opening day of the regular session.

The Midland Republican who's served in the House for the past 38 years entered the day armed with pledges of support from 85 members and ended it when 121 members voted to give him a third term at the chamber's helm as speaker. Twenty-seven Democrats voted against Craddick despite Republican State Rep. Jim Pitts' decision to drop out of the contest after losing a series of votes in his team's push for a secret ballot.

While Pitts appeared doomed from the start of the voting on whether individual votes would remain sealed beyond the day they were cast, the highly-ballyhooed race was more competitive initially than the lopsided final outcome suggested. The true measure of the support that Craddick and Pitts going into the election came when the House voted 80-68 to table a proposal by State Rep. Charlie Geren to keep the way each member voted under wraps until after committee assignments had been announced.

The bipartisan coalition that Pitts had strung together began falling apart from there when four Republicans and seven Democrats sided with Craddick's supporters on the next key vote related to a secret ballot. Pitts' hopes to oust Craddick had collapsed by the time the challenger threw in the towel before his name could be placed in nomination. The Waxahachie Republican who's chaired the powerful House Appropriations Committee for the past two years said he didn't want to put his colleagues through any more fighting and declared that he'd be voting for Craddick himself.

With Secretary of State Roger Williams presiding over the contest, State Rep. Will Hartnett turned in a stellar performance as the leader of the floor fight on Craddick's behalf. The Dallas Republican's pitch revovled on the battle cry for open government - and he argued that the public's right to know how their lawmakers vote outweighed the need to shield members from possible consequences that some feared they would face if they ended up on the losing side.

When pressed by Craddick opponents about concerns about fairness and possible punishment, Hartnett suggested that the push for a secret ballot stemmed from the fact that some members had pledged to more than one candidate. Hartnett, a lawyer who's been chairing the House Judiciary Committee, asserted that the secret vote was designed to give cover to "double-pledgers" who wanted "to have their cake and eat it, too."

Hartnett had assists from a cadre of Craddick lieutenants including Republican State Reps. Phil King of Weatherford, Fred Hill of Dallas and Dan Branch of Dallas as he fended off appeals for a confidential vote by a politically-diverse collection of Pitts backers including a pair of attorneys - Republican State Rep. Robert Talton of Pasadena and Democratic State Rep. Craig Eiland of Galveston. A secret ballot would've been no help to House members such as Eiland and Talton, who'd gambled their posts as the chairs of the Pensions & Investment Committee and Urban Affairs Committee respectively on the move to replace Craddick. But Pitts at that point appeared to have little or no chance of winning without a closed vote.

The vote that signaled the end of the uprising came when the House shot down a move to keep individual votes cast in the speaker's race sealed until committees had been chosen. The 80-68 vote against the amendment to the House rules governing the speaker's election was considered tantamount to a vote for Craddick or Pitts - and the challenger lost blocks of votes on both sides of the aisle at each step of the way from there.

Craddick had 41 more members in his corner by the time the House voted 121-27 to keep him in charge after Pitts bowed out of the race when it became obvious that his bid was dead. But it's the first vote - not the one-sided one that made the victory official - that the speaker will use to delineate the members who remained loyal to him from those who wanted to oust him from the leadership office he's held for the past four years. If there's a price to be paid for turning against Craddick as his critics on the floor seemed to fear, the initial vote on the Geren amendment to an amendment will be the loyalty gauge - not the runaway final outcome when the speaker suddenly had unanimous support from Republicans including more than a dozen who'd wanted to replace him less than an hour before.

The House members who sided with Pitts on the key first vote included seven moderate Republicans who've voted with the Democrats on a fairly regular basis since the GOP claimed control of the lower chamber in 2003. Four of those House members - State Reps. Pat Haggerty of El Paso, Delwin Jones of Lubbock, Tommy Merritt of Longview and Geren - were targeted in their bids for re-election last year by GOP super-donor Jim Leininger and other wealthy conservative interests as retaliation for their opposition to school vouchers and other positions backed by the leadership in recent years.

Two of the House's most conservative Republican members - State Rep. Bryan Hughes of Mineola and Talton - sided with the moderate Republicans and 54 Democrats who voted for the Geren amendment. While Talton and Hughes are both trial lawyers, speculation that they'd been pressured to oppose the incumbent by fellow members of the plaintiffs bar appeared to be largely unsubstantiated.

Some individual trial lawyers had turned on the pressure with Democrats who'd pledged to Craddick in an attempt to convince them to switch their allegiances from the incumbent to Pitts. Craddick's Democratic supporters were aware that Corpus Christi's Mikal Watts - one of the country's most successful and politically active plaintiff attorneys - was on the House floor behind the rail as an guest of one of the Democratic members from his area during the opening day ceremonies and subsequent battle for speaker.

Most of the Democrats on Craddick's pledge list held their ground in the face of intense pressure from within the party that manifest in threats of well-funded primary opponents. While Craddick lost the support of a couple of House Democrats during the past week, the only Democratic member who switched sides on the day of the vote was State Rep. Chente Quintanilla of Tornillo. But Quintanilla had been viewed by some fellow Democrats as a "floater" who could go either way when it came time to vote.

But Craddick picked up more than enough support to offset the defections in the days leading up to the vote - and he would have had one additional vote if Republican State Rep. Fred Brown of College Station had not been absent on opening day as a result of the death of his mother on Monday.

The speaker lost three Republican members who'd been in his camp when State Reps. Gary Elkins of Houston, Joe Straus of San Antonio and Buddy West of Odessa voted with Pitts and his team on the Geren amendment. But on the second pivotal vote on a secret ballot amendment, Hughes, Straus, Geren and Republican State Rep. Todd Smith and seven Democrats sided with the House members for Craddick after voting initially with Pitts and his supporters.

State Rep. Patrick Rose - one of the Democrats who stuck with Craddick despite pressure to switch - acknowledged in a speech seconding the speaker's nomination for a third two year term that he agreed with some of the criticism that had been leveled at the incumbent. But Rose, who's based in Dripping Springs outside of Austin, attributed some of the blame for strife in the lower chamber to Democrats who he said hadn't worked as hard as they should have to get along with the Republican speaker.

In the final analysis, the Democrats who'd backed Craddick were in a position to hold their ground and be on the side of the winner. It was a different story for Pitts' supporters as all of the Republicans - including Pitts himself - and half of the Democrats who'd been with him initially abandoned their opposition as the challenge quickly unfurled and cast their final votes for the winner.