Dems Under Siege

GOP Links Speaker Pro Tem to `Crack Cocaine
of Gambling' while Luna Takes Hit from Within

By MIKE HAILEY

The two highest ranking Democrats on the Texas House leadership team have taken a pounding from partisans for different reasons this week. While the Texas Democratic Party was pelting State Rep. Vilma Luna with spitballs to the ego, the Texas Republican Party was going for the throat when it opened fire on State Rep. Sylvester Turner with words of mass destruction for advocating the legalization of slot machines to help foot the bill for public schools.

The sniping between the Democrats' state office and the House Appropriations vice-chair couldn't match the war that the state GOP declared on the speaker pro tem for shock value, entertainment sizzle and relevance to actual issues under consideration during the legislative session. In a press release late Thursday, the state Republican Party taught Turner that clearing a video lottery gambling bill with a pastor before filing it is no guarantee for unlimited absolution once it's in the hopper. State GOP Chairwoman Tina Benkiser described Turner's legislation to allow VLTs at racetracks, Indian casinos and nine other designations around the state as "a corrupt idea from a Democrat lawmaker promising free money but delivering only suffering and despair to Texas families.” Benkiser suggested that Turner was peddling the “crack cocaine of gambling” with a bill that would turn Texans into addicted gamblers while leading to an increase in child abuse and neglect in the neighborhoods where slot machine junkies live. "Still Turner has the audacity to claim he is pushing this bill for children,” Benkiser declared.

The Republican Party opted not to confuse the statement with extraneous details such as the fact that Republican Governor Rick Perry had proposed the legalization of video lottery terminals to help pay for a public school finance bill in a special session last spring. It skipped the part about how Republican State Rep. Jim Pitts, who's now the Appropriations Committee chairman, sponsored the special session measure that would have put more VLTs at horse racing tracks in Texas than the big casinos have in places like Las Vegas and Reno. There was no mention of how Congressman Kenny Marchant and ex-Appropriations chairman Talmadge Heflin both cast votes in support of video slots when they were still in the Legislature and serving on a select school finance committee that needed money for the special session school bill last year. When the state GOP decided the time had come to reaffirm its opposition to gambling, it didn't see the need to waste time making excuses or apologies for sins of the past.

Democrats will accuse Benkiser and company of displaying a shameless double standard when attacking a Democrat for doing essentially what some Republicans have been doing and plan to do again if the roll is called this year on video lottery gambling. But while the state GOP's statement on Turner had several conspicuous omissions, it told the truth about what the folks at Republican headquarters and the vast majority of their party's grassroots activists think about gambling as a public revenue source. They hate it. The party faithful made that clear to Perry at the state GOP convention a couple of months after the VLT plan went down with the rest of the school finance bill. So far this year, the governor has wisely stayed away from that particular subject.

Maybe Republican voters will punish the governor in a GOP primary race next year against a challenger such as U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who skillfully played to the audience's anger with the governor on the VLT issue when touting her opposition to them during a speech to the state convention the following day. Maybe they will forgive.

Turner doesn't really have to worry about what Republicans think because he has so few of them in his Houston district, which is about 80 percent Democrat. He'd have trouble running statewide now even if he wanted because his own party leaders are mad at him and the others who've been on Speaker Tom Craddick's leadership team for the past two years. But Democrats aren't likely to try to run a candidate against Turner in the primary next year the way they did against fellow Democrat Ron Wilson and several others who'd held key positions on the GOP leadership team and are now former House members as a result. But while Turner may be off limits, Luna might have been on the mark when predicting a possible challenge from within her own party at the polls in 2006.

Luna, who's represented part of Corpus Christi for the past 12 years, wasn't the most popular person at the state state party office in Austin before she went from the end of the bench to the front of the class after supporting Craddick in his initial race for speaker. She didn't think that much of the job the party brass was doing and she wasn't afraid to say so. Since becoming a big shot in Craddick's circle of power, Luna has been a four-letter word with some of the more partisan Democrats. When Luna implied that the state party might be conspiring against her with a young county chair who's father serves in Congress, the Dems in Austin couldn't pass up the opportunity to rub her nose in the fact that she's a Craddick team player - as if she'd hocked her soul in exchange for becoming one of the House's most influential members after being a minor player for years before that. Luna dismissed the criticism as complaining from those who are "lobbing spitballs" from the sidelines.

She might be right about the Democrats going after her in 2006 - and it may be a moot point if there's any truth to rumors that she's eyeing a possible race for Congress against U.S. Rep. Solomon Ortiz, whose son, Solomon Ortiz Jr., is the Nueces County Democratic chair.

While the Democrats fight among themselves, state GOP officials have decided to be nice to other Republicans - including Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn - who they've invited to a big upcoming party after initial reports that she wouldn't be welcome there. The Republicans probably figure that they will have their share of in-fighting if and when either Strayhorn or Hutchison runs against Perry next spring. So for now, Benkiser is concentrating on trying to keep Democrats from bringing those video lottery terminals into the state.

Mike Hailey's column appears regularly in Capitol Inside