How the Dirty Thirty Cleaned Up Texas
Katz, Harvey
How the Dirty Thirty Cleaned Up Texas by Harvey Katz No session of the Texas legislature can be considered peaceful by nonTexas standards. The gold-carpeted chamber of the House of...
...It is interesting to note that the Memphis bank was controlled at the time by Barnes supporter Walter Mischer...
...Sure enough...
...That justification seemed slim indeed after $20 million of Texas taxpayers’ money went to build the LBJ Library at the University of Texas...
...The Dallas newswoman tugged at my sleeve...
...At the time of the 62nd session in 1971, Heatly was 58, a scrunched-up man with a large bulldog head...
...On September 23, 1971, a state grand jury in Austin indicted Gus Mutscher for accepting a bribe...
...Sissy Farenthold was its author and there were 22 co-sponsors, including Mad Dog Mingden and Curtis Graves...
...Mutscher allowed a total of 20 minutes of debate on the conference bill before it was passed by the House...
...Several bills were still sitting on Mutscher’s desk, and the Senate had not yet coughed up a bill for its own redistricting or for reapportioning U. S. congressional districts...
...The press table had been moved from the center aisle of the chamber just before the session began...
...The appeals are now pending...
...That’s one of the main problems with Heatly,” a legislator told me...
...But Moore went on, raising his voice above the noise...
...When Mutscher took plane rides at state expense, he failed to make sure that his name was left off the flight records...
...Unfortunately, their work is often overshadowed by the glowing tributes to a “dedicated public servant” that appear regularly on the Texas editorial pages...
...In defending their actions before the public, Mutscher, Smith, and the rest were incredulous that anybody would care...
...Since receiving his undergraduate degree, Barnes had been attending law school part-time, and by 1965 he had in effect completed two years of study...
...The Dirty Thirty met late the preceding afternoon to finalize its strategy...
...It weighed about five pounds and ran 400 legal-sized, single-spaced pages...
...Noticeably absent from the conference bill was the provision requiring state airplanes to keep passenger logs...
...Across the rotunda, Ben Barnes refused to comment...
...I’d appreciate your voting for it...
...But there were signs that the revelations as to what the bill contained, as to Heatly’s inability to defend so many of those provisions, were taking a toll...
...The final vote was 118-30 to bury the resolution in committee...
...He was a college professor from Houston and had once been a staunch ally of Gus Mutscher...
...Nearly half of the money Denton requested could have come from eliminating Heatly’s $1 1 1,000 for researching ornamental shrubs and his $120,000 for studying cotton-gin trash...
...In the 1970 elections, Heatly was opposed for the first time in six years...
...How many amendments...
...The Heatly team was advised by John Bigham of Temple that experts believed existing veterinary schools to be sufficient to serve the needs of Texas for the next 50 years or so...
...Just go north from Austin and follow the redistricting map...
...I see,” Graves said...
...I refer to this item providing $20 million to the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation for new construction...
...But where Mutscher was leading all these people began to bother at least some of them...
...The bill had emerged from committee 48 hours before...
...Then there was that $5-million item for a veterinary school in Lubbock, Preston Smith’s hometown...
...After the first emotional outburst, several Mutschermen rose to their feet, turned toward Moore, and applauded him with surprising enthusiasm...
...Longoria...
...Yet, when the Texas legislature gathered in January, 1971, for its 62nd session, the elected representatives were expecting a relatively tranquil five months...
...It was also agreed that if Barnes could get the tax through the liberal Senate, the House would fall in line...
...There was even a very suspect bomb scare, which stalled House proceedings for 90 minutes...
...At the time the House redistricting bill was passed, there were two days remaining in the 62nd session...
...One of these came when Gus Mutscher stationed armed state troopers at every door to the House chamber...
...There seemed to be nothing in common among the representatives who later came to be known as the Dirty Thirty-legislators like ultraconservative Walter “Mad Dog” Mingden and Curtis Graves, the flamboyant black from Houston-except opposition to Mutscher and the rest of the establishment Democrats...
...Only a handful of Republicans and liberal Democrats in the House of Representatives seemed aware that Smith, Mutscher, and Heatly, three of the most powerful men in the state, had been accused...
...The debate had lasted over 12 hours...
...In 1967 the logs of state Department of Public Safety airplanes revealed that Heatly had obtained more free air trips from the DPS than any other legislator...
...Mutscher could have overridden the knock-off slips with a two-thirds vote on each bill...
...Although the House coalition that opposed Mutscher and the rest during the session had begun with 30 votes and seemed to be steadily attracting more each day, the responsibility for continuing the fight had been left to a handful of representatives...
...There was 24-hour interrnim between passage of the bill by the Senate and its consideration by the House...
...The hope now was that the courts would rule the bill unconstitutional...
...Oilman Charles Ford, a Heatly friend who had tried to pressure Williams out of running, showed no sympathy for Williams...
...Braun’s amendment to provide for rat control and eliminate wolf control was tabled...
...The Heatly budget allowed $1.3 billion for highways, one sixth of total state spending...
...She won the primary after a runoff and defeated a powerful Republican incumbent the following November...
...Her fellow legislators showed their displeasure at her presence by repeating “Gentlemen of the House” as often as possible, with sly looks in her direction...
...County officials estimated that Mutscher’s plan would require revising almost every voting precinct in the county...
...Members of the House were forced to reavow their allegiance by signing a scroll honoring Mutscher on Speaker’s Day...
...In others, the amount of the expenditure was obviously too little or too much...
...This temper tantrum is rather like a child who cannot have the game played his way and then proceeds to tear up everyone else’s toys...
...They wanted a House investigation of the bribery charges...
...He was engaged in animated conversation with two other representatives, Richard Slack from Pecos and James Slider from Naples...
...The anger and tension were gone...
...On the night of June 3, 1972, Sissy Farenthold stood on the steps of her Austin campaign headquarters, surrounded by lights and cameras and microphones...
...Briscoe had picked up most of the votes cast for Smith and Barnes, as expected...
...In November, 1970, Barnes had been reelected lieutenant governor by a landslide vote...
...Meanwhile, an estimated 60 House candidates endorsed by the Dirty Thirty won election...
...Delwin Jones was Mutscher’s architect...
...After expressing his gratitude to Mutscher for making his dream come true, Nelms pulled out his guitar and sang a song of his own composition...
...Heatly gave no reason for this measure...
...The minor business of the House droned on and on...
...I’m sure that each of you recalls that for at least 115 of those days we sat around here doing nothing...
...For the rest of the day, bills were introduced and considered individually...
...One, an archeological museum at Clarendon, was explained with: “I guess there are a lot of old bones there...
...During the last few days of the session, Bill Heatly’s bill, the size of a telephone book, would emerge from conference and be plunked down on the desk of every legislator...
...There was, for example, the $ l-million appropriation for the LBJ State Park, a 269-acre tract across from the LBJ ranch that had already been landscaped, paved, and developed...
...The first few slips were received with puzzled looks from Mutscher and most of the members on the House floor...
...He’s gotten away with so many ridiculous things that if he ever goes crazy or becomes senile no one will know it...
...Mutscher also seized the opportunity to reveal a new concern for legislative reform: “Several measures on the calendar were the result of a great deal of time and study by the Senate General Investigating Committee,” he said in the release...
...When he used employees of the state Department of Agriculture to landscape his front lawn, he directed them to dump their rubbish on a vacant lot...
...Ben Barnes chastised those who were criticizing Heatly’s relatives “because of their service to the state...
...Jones took great pains to point out that he did not consider himself an “activist judge...
...And on the House floor, although the votes remained about the same, the asides against Mutscher from Curtis Graves were now received with much greater appreciation by Mutscher’s supposed defenders...
...But Heatly was back the next session with a rider that not only limited the size of the air fleet, but also prohibited the DPS from using helicopters in traffic enforcement...
...Similar proposals relating to liquor sales were blocked by Representative Dick Cory, who later became a lobbyist for the liquor interests...
...They did not explain why they did not realize this until Fisher announced his candidacy...
...Longoria swallowed several times and again glanced at Heatly...
...Surrounded by long-haired youths who were attracted by her interest in ecology, and by her 19-year-old political adviser, son Dudley, and bolstered by vitamin B-12 shots, she was going at it again...
...Incredible as it may seem, in a state where business taxes were among the lowest in the nation, Ben Barnes set out to solve the financial crisis by hitting the consumers with a grocery tax...
...The liberals blocked passage of a sales tax increase...
...The Dirty Thirty were becoming respectable...
...The change was prompted by an incident near the end of the 6 1st session...
...At a meeting of legislative leaders and lobbyists, during a 1969 special session convened by Governor Smith, it was agreed that a grocery tax offered the best solution to the financial crisis...
...He was a man of bulk, too broad for his undersized legs, and when he moved it was with obvious effort...
...They have plenty of help in mnning the state, however, from the Texas lobbyists, who provide a real alternative to months of constant toil in the public interest...
...When a man runs for office,” Ford told the press, “he ought to expect the roof to fall in on him...
...Both Mutscher and Shannon were defeated in their bids for reelection to the House, while Heatly was successful...
...Paducah has a population of 2,000...
...He tried numerous delaying tactics...
...A few days after the appropriations bill passed, with Slider’s moss-cutter provision intact, the citizen who had initiated the request wrote to a Capitol newsman that his request had been for $60,000, that this amount would remedy the Caddo Lake situation, and that he had no idea why Slider added an extra $160,000 unless it was to purchase two and two-thirds additional mosscutters...
...Apparently under advice from his brain trust on the floor, he declined to do so...
...In 1969, the State Bar of Texas presented Heatly with a plaque “in grateful appreciation for his distinguished service to the people of Texas...
...If a legislator tired of the Trial Lawyers’ fare, he could go down the street to the Stephen Austin Hotel where the Texas Brewers’ Association sponsored a fish-fry luncheon every Wednesday of the session...
...The gold-carpeted chamber of the House of Representatives has seen more violence in 50 years than similar rooms have known in a century...
...Bill Heatly’s appropriations bill was scheduled for House consideration on Thursday, April 22...
...He absented himself from the chamber more and more frequently, turning the gavel over to Tommy Shannon or DeWitt Hale...
...Look,” she gasped, “can they change the clock like that...
...There were also Heatly monuments, like the Paducah Airport, beautifully paved and lighted at state expense...
...I am unable to locate any information whatsoever as to what that sizable grant will be used for...
...I told her...
...State Senator A. R. “Babe” Schwartz managed to slip in an $800,000 item for the purchase of the Stephen Austin Hotel, which was owned in part by Moody and had been losing money for years...
...He then turned his full attention to mapping strategy for the Dirty Thiry, masterminding one of the most incredible events of the sessionthe debate over Heatly’s appropriations bill...
...Each item was assigned to a member of the Dirty Thirty to handle on the House floor, by either posing a question to the House leadership or submitting an amendment...
...Tom Moore had come up behind Graves...
...From the majority, there was fury over the knock-off slips and elation over what was seen as political redemption by Mutscher’s press release and an address by one of his allies...
...Delwin Jones, the Mutscherman from Lubbock, defended the item by claiming that most veterinarians were specializing in small animals...
...Is it always like this...
...The Knock-Off Revolt The leadership of the 62nd session did not begin to use a consent calendar until 10 weeks after the session began...
...Often he departed with gritted teeth, obviously enraged over the persistent demands from the Dirty Thirty...
...Fantastic,” she said...
...Longoria stared at Graves, looked down at his notes, and then glanced wide-eyed at Bill Heatly...
...The Dirty Thirty even slipped through a resolution praising the Boston Strangler for his efforts at population control...
...Lane Denton tugged at my arm...
...In most states, it is hiding the shady deals that demands finesse and skill...
...The bills are not debated and are seldom amended from the floor...
...He warned the press that if too much were made of the matter “innocent people could be damaged in the process...
...Almost all the items discussed that afternoon -and there were over 100-bore the unmistakable brand of a particular Heatly bias...
...When the museum had been authorized by the legislature two years before, the House was told that the industry would sponsor it and that it would cost the state nothing...
...Bass contributed organizational and analytical skills...
...I have a problem also, Mr...
...A young newswoman from a Dallas radio station had perched herself beside me on my riser, beneath all the television equipment...
...The murmur became an angry roar and several Mutschermen near Bass advanced toward him menacingly...
...The SEC also alleged that Sharp had arranged loans and stock purchases for Gus Mutscher, Governor Preston Smith, House Appropriations Chairman W. S. “Bill” Heatly, state Representative Tommy Shannon, and two Mutscher aides in order to obtain passage of two banking bills that would have helped Sharp...
...There was silence...
...Lane Denton estimates that another 15 House members will join his reform caucus next year, giving the Dirty Thirty close to a majority in the House of Representatives...
...Lyndon Johnson and John Connally had already selected their leader for a new era...
...Roy “Nick” Nichols, from Houston, rose slowly from his chair and went to stand beside Bass...
...Always present in the crowd that congregated at the door of the House chamber was chief beer lobbyist Homer Leonard...
...But the margin of loss had narrowed significantly since the appropriations debate...
...We simply want to call the attention of the people of Texas to the way this House is being run...
...Now, rather than ignoring a demand or accusation from the floor, he would pale or wince...
...There was also a very deep and very bitter hurt on her face...
...A few weeks later, Williams’ wife was fired from her job with Texas A&M University...
...A delegation of five Dirty Thirty members had already met with Ben Barnes and requested that he block passage of the bill in the Senate...
...Among them was Sissy Farenthold, who had not been raised for such political warfare...
...Curtis Graves was at the back microphone...
...Both opponents quickly learned that in opposing a man like Heatly they were risking much more than a political defeat...
...Mutscher still had more than a hundred state representatives riding with him to the end...
...In 1968, a few hours before the filing deadline, a friend suggested that she run for the legislature...
...To the casual observer, the dealings of Smith, Mutscher, and most of the rest of the Texas legislature might leave the impression that these were skilled political hucksters of the highest degree...
...Its walls have shaken with the filthiest words, men have been beaten senseless on that carpet, and those polished desks have been struck with an incredible variety of missiles, from ashtrays to chicken legs...
...The Fat Chicken Attack The appropriations debate proved to be a turning point...
...It was here that the Texas Trial Lawyers’ Association rented five rooms during the 62nd session to stuff and mellow every member of the legislature on every day of the session...
...The special session lasted four days, and in addition to passing the redistricting bill, the legislature found time to honor Tommy Shannon, Joe Shannon, Rush McGinty, Sonny Shulte, and Audie Murphy...
...He initiated the so-called “Last Supper,” when, after weeks of private meetings with lobbyists and bureaucrats, Heatly would invite his committee members to dine at his apartment and listen to the proposed legislation that he had drafted and that they would a-pprove...
...Bud Sherman from Fort Worth, wearing his traditional garb of a black suit, black shirt, and white tie, wiped the perspiration from his shiny scalp and snapped still another photograph of Representative Tommy Shannon...
...The SEC’s complaint alleged that Sharp and his friends had effected a stock manipulation scheme involving three state banks, two insurance companies, and a computer firm, all owned or controlled by Sharp...
...The 1969 legislature was forced to meet this problem head-on, and it failed miserably during the regular session...
...Just a moment, Mr...
...Joining with him to sign those slips were original members of the Dirty Thirty or proud converts...
...Heatly’s Republican opponent had no better luck...
...Women in Texas are expected to remain in their place...
...But the map was still sitting there on the easel, and it was being mightily defended by 90 or more elected officials who would later pass it into law...
...she asked me...
...During the last few weeks of the session, it all began to have a noticeable effect on Mu tscher’s demeanor...
...Do you want to be responsible for throwing away $1 million...
...In Briscoe, Mrs...
...What in the hell is going on...
...In canvassing the House membership, Mutscher suddenly discovered that his majority had flaked away under the onslaught...
...Only 15 of these had passed, most of them insignificant, and almost all of them introduced by members of the House majority...
...Many of the most crucial bills of the session were passed that dayelection law revisions, the appropriations conference bill, a motor vehicle inspection law, the conference ethics bill (such as it was...
...In some cases there was simply no explanation for the spending item...
...So Smith notified the legislature that there would be a short special session to deal with congressional redistricting...
...Now, that item seems to be three times the amount granted to that agency two years ago for that purpose...
...The museum was destined for Parker’s district...
...Legislative veterans tell the grisly tales from other times and the young politicians nod with a little amusement and a lot of pride, but with very Harvey Katz is an investigative reporter...
...To effect this incredible result, county lines, voting precincts, natural boundaries, and socio-economic distributions were completely ignored...
...The conservatives blocked a corporate profits tax...
...Indicted with him were Tommy Shannon and Rush McGinty, both for conspiring to accept a bribe, and state Insurance Commissioner John Osorio, for submitting false information to the Insurance Commission...
...We have been in session 149 days,” Moore said...
...I was curious about the reason for that slight increase...
...The debate ground on...
...She had intended to concede the election from those steps...
...Battle fatigue had wiped out one fifth of the Dirty Thirty before the final vote...
...Actually they were just average men, often of below-average intelligence, who were just doing what Texas legislators had always done...
...By now, Slack and Slider had been joined at the front of the chamber by Heatly, a dozen members of the Ap propriations Committee, and the staff of the Legislative Budget Board, the supposedly non-partisan agency that drafted the budget for Heatly...
...This journey has not ended,” she said...
...For close to a century, the Texas political establishment had managed to maintain its loyalty to the liberal national Democrats while supporting a pro-business government in Austin...
...Tom Bass had 102 knock-off slips inside his desk, one for each bill on that afternoon’s calendar...
...Several visitors had stopped abruptly in the middle of departure and were returning to their seats...
...Some slick-talking fellow came to this committee and said, ‘I come to you with a heavy heart,”’ Johnson cracked...
...And on the Speaker’s platform, Gus Mutscher, Jr., tentatively raised his gavel, glanced around the chamber, and then lowered it slowly to his side...
...Tom Moore zeroed in on a total of $6 million in appropriations to create two new museums...
...That was his biggest mistake,” says an Austin lobbyist...
...If we don’t come up with the other million, we’ll be throwing away their generous contribution...
...A seldom-used House rule provided that five members could remove any bill from the consent calendar by presenting to the Speaker a written objection with their signatures, a socalled “knock-off slip...
...On May 28, 197 1 , three days before the end of the 62nd session, Mutscher and his henchman, Delwin Jones, unveiled their House redistricting plan and placed it on a little easel near the front of the House chamber...
...The first bump is Lane’s house and the second one is ours...
...James Slider admitted responsibility for appropriating $220,000 for something called a moss-cutter...
...The House and Senate passed the Sharp bills during a special session of the 61st Legislature in September, 1969...
...As a matter of inquiry,” he said, “I wonder if someone can tell me how many knock-off slips these people are holding...
...Honoring the Boston Strangler Now there was no holding back...
...Madeleine Olds, a friend of Sissy Farenthold and, like myself, a Dirty Thirty volunteer, had combed through the Heatly opus for 48 hours, uninterrupted by sleep...
...Heatly was hunched in his chair at the back of the chamber, staring down at the floor, “ I . . . I don’t know,” Longoria said, still staring at Heatly...
...However, when liberal Representative Neil Caldwell voiced an objection to the bill, Barnes pulled him aside, and offered to push one of Caldwell’s bills through the House if he would withdraw his objection...
...The bill’s sponsor claimed he had someone other than Barnes in mind, and Barnes disclaimed any interest in the bill...
...Heatly undoubtedly realized that qualified and experienced people would not work for that price...
...He could not explain why the original $100,000 request for the park was hiked to $1 million by Heatly just after James Cross, Lyndon Johnson’s former Air Force pilot, became head of Parks and Wildlife...
...His name was...
...Among other unusual provisions,” Graves said, “I notice that the bill includes a little item here for maintenance of airplanes of the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation...
...When the laughter came, Gus Mutscher, already frazzled, turned the gavel over to Tommy Shannon and retired from the chamber...
...Since legislators earn only $4,800 a year from the state, they are allowed to conduct their own businesses and professions on the side...
...But the road was becoming increasingly 1 a bori ous . “I’m going to get Tom Bass if it’s the last thing I do,” he told Harris County Commissioner Jamie Bray in late May...
...His amendment was tabled, 112-30...
...Longoria hesitated, then nodded...
...But in the end, she just couldn’t do it...
...Instead, the House spent the next two hours watching each bill on the consent calendar come up for consideration and meet the same fate as its predecessors...
...In defending the item, Slider told the House how difficult it was to fish and water-ski on his lake with so much moss around...
...In a scathing point of in,quiry, a Dirty Thirty member castigated Mutscher and demanded removal of the guards...
...There were only a few angry incidents...
...As each bill was called by Mutscher, Tom Bass announced the objection and brought the slip to the Speaker’s platform and Mutscher removed the bill from the calendar...
...Mutscher’s Defeat On August 2, 1971, state Judge Herman Jones voided the House redistricting plan...
...And up in the gallery, very few people had remained in their seats...
...Loud applause came from the gallery and Mutscher raised his gavel...
...We started out this afternoon with 102 slips and we intend to use every one of them until some sanity is restored to these proceedings...
...The other museum was planned as an exhibit of the history of the oil industry...
...Proposals to remove the beer exemption were adamantly opposed by Gus Mutscher, whose chief patron was Homer Leonard...
...He should have become a lawyer a long time ago...
...But the Texas Good Roads Association was one of Heatly’s staunchest defenders, and that group was very much opposed to anything that might interfere with the highway program...
...I want y’all to come up and visit Tom and me,” Natalie Moore said after the session...
...Its inhabitants are mostly poor farmers, many of them retired...
...Heatly had of course rewarded himself for the monumental effort required to write the telephone book...
...Curtis Graves, the black representative from Houston who later became a member of the Dirty Thirty, had leaped atop the press table after Mutscher refused Graves’ repeated requests for recognition...
...Katz researched the book with agrant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism...
...A few months earlier, in the wake of the newspaper revelations about the number of Heatly relatives on the state payroll, Preston Smith, Ben Barnes, and Gus Mutscher rose as one to praise Heatly and defend him against the charges of impropriety...
...At the front of the room, beside the Speaker’s platform, the members of the Capitol press corps sat in a line across their long table, doodling and yawning...
...Mutscher and the lobbyists were preparing for those last few days when all the banking bills and drug bills and whoknowswhat would roll through the House to the staccato beat of Gus Mu tscher’s gavel...
...Since lobbyists were owed favors, and since there were more and more of them, it took a creative legislator to seek out those obscure crannies where no favors were owed, and from which money could be extracted...
...Longoria...
...An unknown listener repeated the remark, and the Dirty Thirty was born...
...On January 18, 1971, the Fort Worth office of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed suit again st Houston promo ter-banker Frank W. Sharp and a long list of his friends and associates...
...He has 10 children and is not wealthy...
...We’re not concerned about our personal problems...
...Does anyone here know...
...I looked at the Mutscherman, dangling over the edge of the garery...
...Nevertheless, Sissy Farenthold had given it everything she had...
...Gus Mutscher, Tommy Shannon, and two of Mutscher’s aides were convicted of bribery by a state court in Abilene on March 15, 1972...
...And yet, it did serve the interests of Bill Heatly, who commuted regularly between home and Austin by state airplane...
...Few of the members seemed to be listening...
...The buzzing from the floor had grown very noticeable...
...The provision inserted by Slider made clear that the moss-cutter was to be used exclusively on Caddo Lake, where Slider has a residence...
...Something for Everybody The appropriations bill was introduced immediately...
...Gus Mutscher rubbed his nose...
...This article is adapted from Shadow on the Aamo, to be published by Doubleday this fall...
...Fifty House members were on their feet, clapping and shouting...
...As a practical matter, that possibility was remote...
...Connally vetoed the measure, and the attorney general declared it unconstitutional...
...Molly Ivins of the Texas Observer came down from the press table to where I was sitting...
...Heatly was making a rare standing appearance at the rear of the chamber...
...Rex Braun from Houston asked why Heatly was spending over $1 million on controlling wolves and nothing to control the rats that were killing children in Houston...
...It required a second special session in September for the legislature to pass a tax bill...
...Does the gentleman yield...
...The Bread Tax All this private lobbying, and the gratitude it created among legislators, made the work of finding the money to run the state very difficult...
...Governor Smith had addressed the female representative from Corpus Christi, “Hey, Farenthold,” throughout the 61st session...
...Jake Johnson, the liberal-turned-banker, explained away the appropriation on Heatly’s behalf...
...The sun was definitely breaking through for the “suicide” politicians, who had been chided and belittled for refusing to play the old, corrupt games...
...Bass slipped back to the microphone...
...Although only about 20 refused to sign-all members of the Dirty Thirty-many of those who went along resented being pressured into taking a stand...
...Both were liberal Democrats...
...During the 62nd session, the Texas House passed a bewildering array of these “congratulatory resolutions,” praising such diverse personages as former Presidents Truman and Johnson, the Texas Junior Miss, the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts, the Odem Ukulele Players, almost every class of almost every public school in Texas, the Capitol City Little Dribblers, and Gus Mutscher...
...Heatly vowed vengeance against the DPS for listing his name on the logs, a requirement of state law...
...Officers of the bank later claimed that the arrangement was an unethical one...
...In the first place, it solidified the Dirty Thirty and even won a few converts to the rebel cause, including several borderline members of the Capitol press corps...
...He first faced Leon Williams in the Democratic primaries and then Republican Zack Fisher in November...
...The day after Williams announced his candidacy, he was fired as director of the Quanah Chamber of Commerce...
...It was her first political loss and there were tears in her eyes from the disappointment...
...This is probably the only place in the world where 180 elected officials can kiss the ass of a maniac and never realize it...
...Meanwhile, Mutscher invited one of his allies, Johnny Nelms from Pasadena, to entertain the 150 representatives and the crowd of visitors with a song...
...The Mass Transportation Commission, created in hopes of finding some cure to the highways and autos that threatened to overrun the state, was treated most harshly...
...On the other side, there was the Dirty Thirty’s satisfaction of their last bold move, tempered against the nagging fear that Mutscher might somehow pull a final deception on the people and successfully paint himself as a true public servant...
...He had the support of the Austin lobby and a seemingly endless supply of campaign funds...
...After graduating from Vassar College, she took a step away from tradition by moving on to law school...
...Bass called it quits when Mutscher refused to explain his dealings with Sharp or allow an investigation of the SEC charges...
...He yields,” Mutscher said...
...Not all the additions came from Heatly...
...First came the gasps, then the laughter, and finally the shaking heads and little smiles...
...The appropriations conference committee served as the core of Bill Heatly’s power...
...on April 22, the Heatly appropriations bill, five pounds and $7 billion, was passed by the House with only 24 representatives voting against it...
...After obtaining a press release on bond, Mutscher told the press that “the big fish are still swimming” and that the indictment was “a politically motivated thing, designed to destroy me politically and completely destroy my future...
...While Barnes served as Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives between 1965 and 1968, he gathered all the powers of the House into his hands and maintained complete control over almost every facet of its lawmaking...
...When Mutscher had the SEC documents copied at state expense for his personal use, he warned everyone who handled the matter to keep it confidential, thus casting more suspicion on the transaction...
...He’s been a chicken-shit from the beginning...
...Yes,” he said, “but I don’t know...
...As the tally lit up the voting board, one of the . lobbyists said to the others in the gallery: “The dirty bastards-those 30 dirty bastards...
...Do you intend to use armed force against elected officials of this state...
...Yet, he ruled, “whatever we do, we still have to do our best to do it in the c o n s ti tu ti on a1 way . ’ ’ Attorney General Crawford Martin appealed the ruling and Jones was upheld by the state Supreme Court...
...Would you believe it...
...In the waning hours of the session, Gus Mutscher made his first serious appeal to the people of Texas...
...She seized an extra copy of our game plan and ran back to the press table...
...It is listed in the House Journal as HCR 87, but it is known to anyone associated with the 62nd session as the “Farenthold Resolution...
...Then I obtained one of the cards and discovered that a stamp on the back entitled me to a free case of beer or domestic wine of my choice...
...In the primaries, he had won 44 per cent of the votes to Farenthold’s 26 per cent...
...As usual, Heatly’s generosity to pet projects and political allies was balanced by extreme tight-fistedness toward agencies in his disfavor...
...The real activity, of course, was going on behind the scenes...
...During her first term, she attracted considerable attention by being the lone House dissenter on a resolution commending Lyndon Johnson for his handling of the Vietnam war...
...But he had not yet heard from the Dirty Thirty...
...Most of them were slouched behind their desks, whispering into dictaphones, reading mail, or even dozing into their chests...
...During that time, labor and consumer groups organized in opposition...
...Sissy Farenthold had filed as a candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination...
...I’ll answer that gladly, Mr...
...Farenthold faced a man she called “a member of the same political school as the others, just from a different graduating class...
...This is incredible,” she said...
...How the Dirty Thirty Cleaned Up Texas by Harvey Katz No session of the Texas legislature can be considered peaceful by nonTexas standards...
...Texas newspapers bannered every move in the case for weeks afterward...
...Quanah is, of course, in Heatly’s district and several of Heatly’s closest associates are powerful businessmen in the area...
...New Bones for Old Even more apparent than those vote totals were the helpless stares, damp and stumbling tongues of the men who were deciding the fate of the people of Texas for the next two years...
...There’s nothing new in this section from other sessions,” he said, and made a move as if to leave the microphone...
...She now briefed the Dirty Thirty on each dubious item in the bill...
...little surprise...
...One by one, the members gathered round...
...The session had ended...
...Coverage of rebel activity slowly began to increase and move from the dark corners of Texas journals onto the front pages...
...At the sound of Mutscher’s gavel, I turned back to the House floor...
...But the two representatives from McLennon were Lane Denton and Tom Moore, and a priority item for the House leadership was to force those two upstarts to run against each other for reelection...
...They fly through the House machinery so quickly that the Speaker can obtain approval for any action he wishes without anyone on the floor really knowing what has happened...
...The rare Mutscher press release read in part: This demonstration by a few members who were unable to sell their viewpoint to a majority of the House members on redistricting is a perfect example of their conduct during the session...
...A short time after the session ended, Jones told a group of Texas businessmen what was already obvious: that he had done his “dead-level best to eliminate liberal House members,” and accused liberals of being the most dangerous threat in government because “they’ll give away your tax dollar...
...On votes to table those amendments, the red lights were climbing to 40, 45, sometimes to 50 and more...
...Tom Moore of the Dirty Thirty had risen at a moment when emotions on the House floor had been stretched taut in every direction...
...A bill was introduced in the 1965 legislative session that provided that anyone who had served four years in the legislature and completed two years of legal study could take the bar examination without completing a third year in law school...
...The grocery tax passed the Senate by a one-vote margin, after Barnes induced two liberals to absent themselves from the chamber while the conservatives killed a filibuster...
...I told her...
...Relocation of the press table removed all possibility of Graves’ placing himself above the rest of the membership...
...They remember similar scenes from more recent sessions...
...They began taking turns at the front microphone, trying to defend their committee chairman and the House leadership against that long line of Dirty Thirty members at the back microphone...
...There are also the lobby groups that provide regular praise and vehement support...
...Conflict of interest” was cited as the reason for both dismissals...
...Even though the park was in an out-of-the-way corner of Texas, the Parks and Wildlife Commission wanted to acquire more land for it, build guest cabins, concession stands, and put in greens and a bandstand at a cost of $750,000...
...The appropriations bill that emerged a few months later included a rider that limited the size of the DPS air fleet...
...While effectively blocking these and other efforts of the Dirty Thirty to bring real reform to the legislature and investigate charges of corruption, the House leadership seemed to have hopped on the bandwagon with its own half-hearted measures of reform, which were now being rushed through the legislative machinery...
...A $5-million favor...
...It was called: “Everything You Touch Turns To Dirt...
...Smith and Delwin Jones were good friends, and of course a large part of Jones was in that bill...
...This left one major exempt item that was not protected by a powerful legislator...
...Governor Barnes in the primary elections, winning a run-off spot against millionaire-rancher Dolph Briscoe...
...An airport there is as useful as a synagogue in Cairo...
...Now, Tom Moore was told by Carl Parker: “Well, it’s gonna cost $2 million and they’re gonna pay $1 million...
...No such effort was thought necessary in Texas...
...Mutscher and the rest of the House establishment had decided to remain silent and wait it out...
...Sure they can,” I told her, “it’s their legislature-for now, at least...
...This meant that a new plan would be devised by a special redistricting group, which, because Barnes hadn’t gotten reapportionment through the Senate, was already working on a new scheme...
...Aid to Dependent Children received the same allotment as two years before, even though experts found it grossly inadequate, and even though the number of needy children had increased significantly during those two years...
...The growing possibility of Mutscher and Heatly emerging unscathed was drawing them first into a joint commitment, and then into a pact of defiance...
...At 11 p.m...
...While most state legislators are content with passing public resolutions which also indirectly benefit them, the Texas legislator often takes an even more personal approach to his work...
...But it attracted so much publicity that Barnes publicly announced he would not take advantage of its provisions...
...It is nothing more than friendship extended from one person to another, regardless of the outcome, socially, financially, or whatever...
...There was just that pile of bills, just that relentless plodding through the last hours of one of the most turbulent legislative voyages in Texas history...
...Despite a severe dearth of funds and an oftentimes disorganized campaign organization, she defeated both Governor Smith and Lt...
...Her superior first asked for her resignation and instructed her to avoid talking to reporters...
...Now she was in her second term...
...Farenthold, the most active Dirty Thirty were Tom Moore, Lane Denton, and Tom Bass...
...Caldwell agreed and Barnes’ bill was passed...
...The Governor vetoed the bills after an uproar from the banking commissioner, the state banking association, and former Governor Allen Shivers, who controls several banks...
...A Maniac’s Ass The Texas political establishment was not accustomed to losing fights to the public, over grocery taxes or anything else...
...That’s because it included men like Gus Mutscher and Bill Heatly of Paducah, the House Appropriations chairman...
...Some were very important and controversial measures...
...Those who disdained organized social functions could easily engage in private entertainment throughout the session...
...He worked as a volunteer for the Dirty Thirty...
...Our house is really easy to find...
...He had studied Barnes well, and emerged from the 1969 session of the legislature as a master of power politics in his own right...
...When the Houston Chronicle demanded Mutscher’s resignation after the indictments were handed down, the story hit the front pages throughout the state...
...The rest of the voters in McLennan were tacked on to two rural districts...
...To solve the problem, Mutscher simply sent a henchman up to the gallery to set the House clock back an hour...
...The possibility of a veto by Governor Smith was almost nonexistent...
...Have you ever seen a sick cow...
...Texas was nearing its 10th decade of rule under the conservative Democrats...
...As I have stated previously, these reforms in the banking laws have been long overdue...
...Tom Bass is, of course, a college professor, teaching at a state university...
...Incredible,” she said...
...Surely, if you can use $5 million of the taxpayers’money to exhibit old bones, you can spend one-tenth of that to save bones that are living now...
...When she refused to resign, she was fired...
...During the 19603, Heatly eliminated the appropriations subcommittees and assumed absolute control of all decision-making...
...It was here that he increased the appropriations for the bureaucrats who had met his demands, and where he inserted his most dubious appropriations items and a long list of riders that he used to wreak vengeance on those who had displeased him...
...Undoubtedly, the most memorable statement of all came from Governor Preston Smith...
...Nor could anyone offer any justification for the item other than the gratitude of the people of Texas to their only President...
...Slack tried to hide his frequent inability to defend particular spending items with lame jokes...
...The Dirty Thirty was making its first real dent on the establishment machinery since the challenge of the first Farenthold resolution...
...My two-month stay in Austin during the 62nd session began in April, 1971...
...You know, the only time this bill was debated was two years ago and that was only for a couple of hours...
...asked Jones angrily...
...The annual salary of its director was cut from $22,000 to $12,000 and of its assistant director from $18,000 to $10,000...
...A loud murmur erupted from the floor and Mutscher leaned over his gavel...
...Beer, liquor, and groceries had always been exempt from state sales tax...
...The presence of the former steelworker had an immediately discouraging effect, and the Mutschermen turned away...
...He whipped his sheet of notes off the lectern, crumpled the paper in one hand, and stalked from the floor...
...Ben Barnes...
...These state employees hovered around the appropriations chairman and scurried in and out of the chamber at his command, lugging piles of records from their offices for Heatly’s inspection...
...I don’t know why public officials should be singled out for exposure,” Smith said...
...During the debate, he admitted under cross-examination that he had read none of the court rulings or opinions of the attorney general that set the redistricting guidelines he should have been following in drawing that map...
...Perhaps more important, it removed the battle in the House from the stock-fraud arena where Texas publishers had been most reluctant to venture, and therefore, in effect allowed Capitol newsmen greater opportunity to report the conflict between Mutscher and the Dirty Thirty...
...The troopers disappeared...
...A resolution calling for an investigation was filed in early March...
...Look there,” he said...
...As the 62nd session ground its way into March, it seemed that Mu t s c h e r ’s may b e-it-will-go-away attitude would work...
...She decided to try...
...During the 1960s’ several Heatly relatives moved on and off the state payroll, and by the time the 62nd session began, the family take amounted to about $200,000 in taxpayer money...
...At lunchtime, there is booze and barbecue at the Westgate, a plush office building beside the Capitol...
...But time and again, Heatly’s representative at the microphone turned to him for help, only to find the entire crew leafing through documents and shaking their heads helplessly...
...A few days after he announced his candidacy, a business arrangement between him and the First National Bank in Memphis, Texas, was terminated by the bank without warning or explanation...
...Theoretically, the “Local and Consent Calendar” is a listing of minor, uncontested bills periodically presented to the House and quickly passed by a voice vote...
...Previously unshakeable Mutschermen were privately expressing their doubts and their embarrassment...
...Preston Smith’s interest in this regard was quite understandable-two of his brothers were also on the state payroll...
...Mutscher took the urban cores of McLennan and extended a large blob from each side to create one-representative district No...
...And their place is not the floor of the Texas House of Representatives...
...Without that law degree, everything he gets either has to be hidden or explained...
...The House leadership had yet to perpetrate its final insult on the people of Texas...
...Lane Denton, a freshman representativefrom Waco, and Frances “Sissy” Farenthold, the only woman in the House, serving her second term, had been working on the problem every night for over a week...
...In the wake of a bribery scandal in which he was deeply involved, Smith was still demanding payoffs for bank charters over the telephone...
...I know that certain members of the Appropriations Committee regard this particular agency as most worthy, but I still think the people of this state are entitled to some explanation, don’t you...
...Members of the Capitol press corps have done a good job of exposing He at ly ’s activities...
...The result resembled a fat chicken, with Denton’s house at the end of the beak and Moore’s at the tip of the tail...
...The appropriations bill was soon referred to a House-Senate conference committee...
...Littering laws are strictly enforced, and the police immediately began investigating...
...The Dirty Thirty were discovering that there were swing votes in Mutscher’s usual majority of 120 and more...
...On the other side of the fence, only eight of Mutscher’s more than 100 supporters were paired with incumbents...
...McLennan County, for example, has the right population for two state representatives...
...His successor as Speaker, Gus F. Mutscher, Jr., was a Barnes protege...
...A Fool’s Porkbarrel On the surface, however, business went on as usual in the legislature...
...There was another way, though, to get the Dirty Thirty...
...Tom Moore’s amendment to return McLennan County to its tworepresentative status received the highest total-65 votes...
...On Saturday, May 29, 1971, the House redistricting bill was passed 90-51...
...A Mutscherman pushed past Tom Bass at the back microphone...
...Even the Texas voters, reputed for an intense disinterest in politics, started to wonder...
...This was a formidable task since Moore and Denton lived at opposite ends of the county...
...Ben Barnes notified Governor Smith that there was no way the Senate could come up with the redistricting bills...
...The amendment was so obviously aimed at him that even the staunchest Mutschermen balked and it was soundly defeated...
...We of the Dirty Thirty are perfectly willing to sit here nonstop until midnight Monday, fully debating these bills and weeding out the kind of legislation that brought that scandal to Sharpstown and to the government of this state...
...Halfway through the debate, Curtis Graves introduced an amendment to extend Mutscher’s district to include the Sharpstown bank...
...Slowly, understanding began to creep through the chamber...
...The amendments to the reapportionment bill from the Dirty Thirty were defeated one after the other...
...She came from one of the oldest families in Texas and had been nurtured on all the modes and .ideals of elite southern womanhood...
...Lane Denton, moved by appeals from the people suffering from a fatal kidney disease that takes the lives of 500 Texans each year, submitted an amendment to appropriate $500,000 with which to acquire the machinery to save those lives...
...From state Representative Tommy Shannon: “If I move in circles who are influential or have money and so forth, they are in a position to help me if they want to...
...In the end, the opposition held, and Mutscher withdrew the Senate bill...
...When I first noted Leonard’s penchant for handing out business cards, I assumed this was merely an odd public relations technique...
...Seven would slip through only because they came from metropolitan districts that could not be altered...
...But they knew there was no way to obtain such an investigation through ordinary legislative channels so long as Mutscher was intent on silencing the merest mention of the SEC charges on the House floor...
...Then, if any of us wanted to support him, we could pay him legal fees...
...Does the gentleman yield for a question...
...Then a little rumbling from the floor and many glances back at Heatly...
...Some of the younger male members were leaning back in their high swivel chairs, ogling the girls in the galleries...
...Longoria seemed frozen...
...Very interesting,” Graves finally said, and left the microphone...
...When Mutscher refused to step down, most articles dwelt more on the Dirty Thirty than on Mutscher...
...These are not local bills and they obviously don’t belong on the consent calendar...
...Such was the Barnes Bar Bill...
...Heatly has actually gotten off his chair...
...On May 30, the consent calendar contained 102 Senate bills, one tenth of the total Senate bills introduced during the session...
...Mutscher made as if to reply, hesitated, and then merely shrugged...
...When the House convened, its members were greeted by stacks of angry telegrams and .a gallery jammed with hostile citizens...
...They demanded an investigation, but Mutscher ignored them...
...The one finally passed raised the sales tax 0.5 per cent, twice the increase originally contemplated-groceries, beer, and liquor exempt...
...Although some of the most ridiculous Heatly items had been reduced in amount, the committee had managed to add $81 million to the House bill...
...Among the 150 state representatives, Mutscher could count close to 100 who had sworn to follow him anywhere and another 20 who would do so with the right inducements...
...Outside the rail, aides and secretaries joined the ovation deliriously...
...And a few months later, Mutscherman Delwin Jones introduced an amendment to a college aid bill that would prohibit state representatives from teaching at state-supported colleges...
...I glanced up at the galleries...
...Up to the microphone below the Speaker’s platform went Mutscherman Raul Longoria to explain the first section of the bill...
...Close to 100 amendments had been introduced, although the official number was listed at 68...
...More than half the members of the Dirty Thirty had been placed in districts with each other and most of the others wound up in districts composed of voters clearly antagonistic to their political philosophies...
...Finally I just shrugged and gave her a tired smile...
...Barnes refused...
...In addition to Mrs...
...The rest of the appropriation was allocated to such unexplainable items as “fees,” “contingencies,” and the like...
...Speaker,” he said...
Vol. 4 • July 1972 • No. 5
