God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (31 page)

The last day of the session, Memorial Day, is usually spent in presentations of proclamations, commendations to the staff, and good-byes among colleagues who have endured 140 of the most intense days of their lives together. Some of the members will retire; others may be defeated in the next election; those who endure will be back in eighteen months for another round.

Meanwhile, buses began arriving at the capitol. Hundreds of protestors, some from distant states, burst through the doors, filling all four levels of the rotunda and spilling into the House gallery. They blew whistles and unfurled banners (“See You in Court!”) and chanted “S.B. 4 has got to go!” One of the leaders of the protest, Stephanie Gharakhanian, explained to reporters, “We wanted to make sure we gave them the send-off they deserve.”

The House came to a halt amid the pandemonium. A few of the Democrats on the floor looked up at the chanting protestors and began to applaud. State troopers cleared the gallery and broke up the demonstration, but by that time the attempted bonhomie that usually characterizes the final day had blown up. Matt Rinaldi, a member of the Freedom Caucus from Dallas County, who is sometimes rated the most conservative member of the House, later told Fox Business Network that he noticed several banners bearing the message “I Am Undocumented and Here to Stay.” He says he decided to summon Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and then bragged about it to his Hispanic colleagues.

A shoving match broke out on the House floor. Curses flew, along with spittle. Afterward, Rinaldi posted on Facebook that Alfonso “Poncho” Nevárez, a Democrat from the border town of Eagle Pass, had threatened his life. “Poncho told me he would ‘get me on the way to my car,’ ” Rinaldi wrote. He said he made it clear that “I would shoot him in self-defense.”

I asked Straus about the clash between business and cultural conservatives, which was tearing the Republican Party apart, both in Texas and nationally. He quoted William H. Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, who described the forthcoming Civil War as “an irrepressible conflict.” The prejudices unleashed by the election of Donald Trump were mixing with the already volatile elements of Texas politics. Given that Dan Patrick had been Trump’s campaign manager in the state, there was bound to be a confluence of interests.

Referring to the bathroom bill, Straus said, “We came very close this session to passing a sweeping discriminatory policy. It would have sent a very negative message around the country.”

“That’s still possible, right?” I asked. Couldn’t the governor just put forward his own bill and threaten to veto any amendments?

Straus agreed, but noted, “The legislature is not obligated to act upon his agenda items within the thirty-day period. And the governor would have the option to call as many thirty-day sessions as he would like.”

“So it could stay in committee and not get voted out?”

Straus smiled.

The session was the most fractious in memory, and the bad feelings stirred up in the capitol will linger long after the lawmakers return home. Immigrant communities are fearful, lawmakers are vengeful, and hatemongers feel entitled to spread their message. And the bitter battle among Texas Republicans wasn’t yet over. Governor Abbott called a special session, to convene on July 18, and set forth a list of twenty items that he said required action. Most of them could have been passed in the regular session; none of them were a priority for him before the session began. In addition to the bathroom bill, his list of demands included education vouchers, caps on state and local spending, and new abortion restrictions. He asked for a thousand-dollar pay raise for public-school teachers, which the local school districts—not the state—would likely have to pay for. “I expect legislators to return with a calm demeanor, and with a firm commitment to make Texas even better,” the governor declared.

Straus was not intimidated. He told me, “We’re under no obligation to pass anything.”

Suburbs sprang up to accommodate the massive growth in Texas in the postwar decades, and they tended to be more like one another than like the cities they surrounded. Everything was new: the churches, the schools, the shopping centers, even the trees. “Think about Williamson County, or better yet, Collin County—these were cow pastures in the seventies,” Rove said. “You used to be able to go to Frisco”—in Collin County—“and there was one stoplight in it. Now it has ten high schools.”

Unlike the cities, the suburbs were largely middle class and overwhelmingly white. There was a great sorting out, which left the cities poorer and more concentrated with minorities. The suburbs were organized around families who were seeking affordable homes and good schools. Suburbanites tended to have white-collar jobs, which meant that they were less likely than laboring Texans to belong to a union. They were more religious, often intensely so, belonging to massive evangelical congregations. All of these suburban characteristics—their relative affluence, their domination by white, non-union, churchgoing families—coincided with the core demographics of the emerging Republican majority.

Rove also pointed to another factor—“the sequential flow of parts of rural Texas into the Republican column.” That process began in West Texas in 1978, then moved to the eastern and central parts of the state. By 1994, “rural Texas had moved from being solidly Democratic to solidly Republican.”

“That was where the progressives were, in the old days, right?” I asked. “What changed in their condition that caused them to turn Republican?”

“They were not so much progressives as they were populists,” he replied. “And populists think the system’s rigged against them. They went from being economic populists, who thought the system was rigged against the little guy, to social and conservative populists, who thought that government was the problem.”

“And also, the effects of the Civil War finally wore off,” Bill Brands observed. “But when the national Democratic Party embraced civil rights, then the Southern Democrats decided this is no longer my party.”

“The Democrats lasted longer in Texas than elsewhere in the South because the party remained relatively moderate,” said Rove. Under Governor Ann Richards, however, “the Democratic Party took a hard left turn.” It was Rove who engineered her downfall.

“What accounted for her popularity?” Steve asked.

“She was the aunt you loved to see at the family picnic every summer,” Rove replied. “Outrageous, say anything, do anything.” At the beginning of the Bush campaign, Richards had a 67 percent approval rating and more than $4 million in her war chest. George W. had lost one congressional race and had no experience in politics, but thanks in part to Rove’s political mastery, Bush beat the incumbent governor 53.5 percent to 45.9 percent, the widest margin of victory in twenty years.

Karl Rove was born in an elevator in Denver, on Christmas Day 1950. He was one of five children. He would later learn that his father, a geologist, who left the family on the Christmas Day that Karl turned nineteen, was actually not his real father—he had adopted the two children that Rove’s mother had in a previous, secret marriage. She was an unstable woman who eventually took her own life. According to reports, Louis Rove Jr., Karl’s stepfather, lived the remainder of his life as a gay man. Karl was close to him until he passed away in 2004.

Karl grew up in Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, and he imbibed the Republicanism of the Rocky Mountain West. At age nine, he stuck a Nixon bumper sticker on his bike, only to be attacked by a neighborhood girl who made her Democratic preferences known by giving him a bloody nose. It was his first political fight.

He attended the University of Utah, although he never graduated; his focus was on getting elected president of the College Republicans. It would prove to be a legendary campaign. Managing the vote on Southern campuses for Rove’s presidential bid was Lee Atwater. The two of them would one day reshape American political campaigns—Atwater, most notably, as campaign manager for George H. W. Bush in his brutal victory over Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign; and Rove, with his involvement in George W. Bush’s two gubernatorial victories, in 1994 and 1998, and his presidential elections in 2000 and 2004. But their first victory was getting Rove elected, in 1973, in the rawest political contest the College Republicans had ever seen. Both Atwater and Rove came away with a reputation for using dirty tricks to win.

Rove moved to Texas in 1977, at a time when the demographic changes in the state had not made themselves felt politically. But he was keen enough to recognize the trend. He was twenty-six years old, baby-faced, with wispy blond hair and pinkish skin. He went to work for George H.W., who had lost two races for the U.S. Senate but had formed a political action committee in preparation for an unlikely presidential run. John Tower was a Republican senator from Texas, but no other Republicans occupied statewide office. That changed the following year, when Bill Clements, a gruff and extremely wealthy oil-services provider who had been Nixon and Ford’s deputy secretary of defense, got elected as the first Republican governor in Texas since Reconstruction. He ran against John Hill, the courtly former attorney general and chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. Steve, who once profiled Clements, observed then, “Nobody really wanted a gentleman as governor of Texas when it was possible to have a roughneck. On election day the world as Texas had known it for a hundred years came to an end.” Clements hired Rove to be his chief of staff.

In 1981, Rove started a direct-mail business in Austin and began running campaigns in Texas. Many of the earliest Republican victors in Texas owe their success to him. Rove also turned his attention to down-ballot races that the Republican Party had never taken seriously. In 1988, he consulted on the successful campaign of Kent Hance for the Railroad Commission, a powerful agency that, despite the name, actually regulates the oil-and-gas industry. That same year, he got Thomas R. Phillips elected to the Texas Supreme Court (yes, we even elect judges in Texas). Although Republicans were still just getting established in the state, “we won in a landslide twice when Karl was helping me,” Phillips told me. Moderate and conservative Democrats began following voters into the Republican Party, and Rove was there to get them elected. Rick Perry, for one, served three terms in the Texas House as a Democrat, and even campaigned for Al Gore in his 1988 presidential bid, before changing parties the following year. With Rove’s guidance, he became agriculture commissioner in 1990. Eventually, Rove would elect seven of the nine justices, both Texas senators, the land commissioner, the lieutenant governor—nearly every statewide office had a Rove Republican inside it. “What he did in twenty-five years is remake the political face of Texas and give shape and substance to a ruling political class,” Bill Miller told me. In 1994, Texas elected its last statewide Democrat. “It was a complete rout of a political party,” Miller said.

I asked Karl where he thought the Republican Party in Texas, which he had done so much to create, was headed. “Look at the House,” he said. “Jonathan Stickland and the Freedom Caucus are a minority faction. The only reason they got that much traction this session is that Joe [Straus] didn’t have his act together.” He pointed out that there is still a bipartisan tradition in the legislature. This was true even under the extremely conservative Speaker Tom Craddick, who was overthrown by the coup that put Straus in the Speaker’s chair. “Joe’s election, I hope, portends the future,” Rove said, “where you have a reasonable Republican who’s backed by reasonable Democrats”—with the partisan extremists pushed to the sidelines.