Burnt Orange Report

Fred's a friend of Gammage's and the two of them fight to win. I'm extremely excited about him running!

ME TOO!

DTR, I like it. Seems they have good experience dealing with legislative corruption. We need some corruption busters to clean up the Lege right now.

Glad to see them running.

Sonia

Looks to me like Gammage was serious about taking back Texas for the Democratic Party.

How long has it been since we've had a Dem at the top of the ticket that actually cared whether anyone but themselves got elected?

Kudos to Gammage for breathing life into the race!

From Texas Monthly's Bum Steer Awards for the preceeding year, 1973 (the year the Chicken Ranch closed).

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

Bible-toting State Representative Fred Head of Troup kicked in the glass departure door at the Austin airport after having to go through the metal-detection machine twice.

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From the 1975 issue of the 10 Best and Worst Legislators:

In addition to the Ten Best and Ten Worst legislators, several members deserve honorable—and dishonorable—mention. In the Senate, Bob Gammage (37, Houston) led the fight for the new constitution and also sponsored other significant legislation, including authorization for health maintenance organizations (which passed) and a state alcoholism program (which died in the House). Gammage is a likely candidate for a future Ten Best list if he can learn to do his homework and work the floor; this session his press clippings were better than his legislative technique. Perhaps Gammage was just tired; his workload during the Constitutional Convention would have exhausted two lesser men.

10 Worst: #2. Fred Head, 36, Liberal Democrat, Athens. Has anyone fallen farther than Fred Head? Once a serious contender for Speaker, he has now alienated practically everyone in the House; even his former supporters won't defend him. A toxin in the legislative bloodstream. Not the least bit above using cheap, strong-arm tactics to get whatever he wants. Tried to bludgeon the Dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs into hiring his former campaign aide as a faculty member at $36,000 a year; unsubtly reminded the astonished Dean that he was "Chairman of the House Higher Education Committee" and gave him a 24-hour ultimatum to comply. Because UT appropriations were subject to Head's whims, the aide was hired; a few days later, Regent Allan Shivers found out about it and forced him to resign.

Head's pork barrel performance as committee chairman left other members thunderstruck; it had the wild abandon of Reconstruction carpetbaggers gone berserk. Took huge chunks of money recommended for UT-Austin and Texas A&M, then scattered it willy-nilly among his political allies; at one point, he and his fellow committee members had jockeyed $38 million worth of largesse into (or near) their home districts (much of it in defiance of Legislative Budget Board recommendations). Even tried to shut down the Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio by drying up its funds. Head apparently was hoping less-favored members would come submissively and try to make a "deal"; instead, they were repulsed.

Tries to play power politics without understanding what power politics is. Fights some of the right battles (stopping vague, "lump-sum" budgeting at UT) in all the wrong ways (his head-on confrontation was doomed to failure because he hugely underestimated UT's political clout, an error which practically anyone could have pointed out to him). Made exactly the same kind of mistakes as redistricting chairman last session. Said one retired lobbyist who has watched the legislature for years: "Fred Head uses power less effectively than anyone else there."

He also consistently abuses it. When the legislature passed an emergency appropriation for colleges and universities early in the session, Head claimed the schools were not supposed to use the money to increase faculty salaries—although the bill clearly permitted it. When he heard that some colleges were granting faculty pay increases, Head was infuriated. He tried to pressure the comptroller's office into blocking all funds going to the colleges, including physically retrieving the pay warrants. After the comptroller's office refused to comply with this extraordinary demand, Head voted throughout the session to cut the comptroller's appropriations.

Petty and venomous toward those who disagree with him. Is considered hopelessly untrustworthy by his colleagues, who have quit trying to make sense of him and now just hold him in icy contempt. Sees them (and the issues) as no more than vehicles for his own immense ambition. Works hard, but with an ulterior motive: "His homework consists of trying to find things that give him leverage on you," said one of the state's most powerful political figures. "His whole life is a series of demands on people."

Having ruined his reputation in the legislature, he seems to be looking toward new fields to conquer: recently moved out of Smith County, his legislative home base, into adjacent Henderson County, which not coincidentally happens to be in the congressional district of aging Wright Patman, a man whose integrity compares to Head's like platinum to lead. There ought to be a law.

From the 1973 10 Best and Worst.

In addition to the Ten Best Legislators, several members deserve an Honorable Mention award. The Senate is particularly well-stocked with contenders. Bob Gammage, 35, a freshman liberal Democrat from Houston, carried one of the largest legislative programs in the Senate (including a number of controversial measures like portions of the Speaker's reform package, consumer protection, and the eighteen-year-old rights bill), fought for it in the rough-and-tumble tradition of Babe Schwartz, and got much of it passed.

Although he LONG ago touted himself in the early '70's as a strongly liberal Texas Democrat in the state senate, any self-respecting Dem under the age of 55 today in this state should take big-time notice to the fact that Bob Gammage went on to Washington and became a horrible U.S. rep. The freshman congressman obviously got roughed up by a gang of conservatives on the Hill, 'cause he came out on record AGAINST all kinds of stuff like abortion rights, and the environment, and warrants for search and seizure, and consumer protection, and ethics reform and the-list-goes-on.