State Legislatures Magazine: April 2001

Editor's Note: This article appeared in the April 2001 issue of NCSL's magazine, State Legislatures. To order copies or to subscribe, contact the marketing department at (303) 364-7700.

Bill Ratliff, A New Texas Star?

Decision Is Close
A Little History Lesson
A Robin Hood Metaphor
Time Will Tell

Lieutenant Governor Role Varies

Bill Ratliff, A New Texas Star?

When George Bush went off to Washington, D.C., Texas senators got to pick the lieutenant governor. Their choice? A man they call "Obi Wan Kenobe."

By Dave McNeely
When George W. Bush moved from the Texas governor's mansion to the White House, it set off a ripple effect. And for the first time in history, it put someone in the most powerful lieutenant governor's office in the country who hadn't been elected statewide.

With Bush's election, Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry became governor. His replacement, selected by his colleagues in the Texas Senate, is Republican Bill Ratliff, a retired civil engineer from a small community in northeast Texas. He'll serve the remainder of Perry's term through 2002.

The Texas Constitution only says that the lieutenant governor will be the president of the Senate. It's the Senate's rules and the fact that Texas does not organize its Legislature along partisan lines, that make this such a powerful job. The rules give the lieutenant governor (who runs independently of the governor) the power to appoint Senate committees, to name chairmen, to set the calendar, and to have huge control over the Senate's side of the budgeting process.

Those powers, coupled with a Senate tradition of requiring a two-thirds vote to bring up a bill for consideration on the floor, have led many observers to consider the Texas lieutenant governor a stronger force in the state's government than the governor. Along with the votes of just 11 senators, the lieutenant governor can block anything he wants from passing.

DECISION IS CLOSE
Ratliff, 64, a gentlemanly, no-nonsense, moderate-conservative, won the very close election among his colleagues in the Senate Dec. 28 almost without campaigning. Ratliff had told his colleagues that he'd like to be the acting lieutenant governor if Bush won but thought it would be divisive for senators to start running for the job before a vacancy actually existed. Senators would have to take sides in a race that might never have to be run, which could cause the lingering bitterness that often accompanies House speaker races.

So he sat on the sidelines while his close friend in the Senate, David Sibley, actively courted his colleagues for a year before Bush actually won. Sibley, a Republican from Waco, traveled the state, wined and dined senators, raised money, hired a consultant and campaigned hard.

The Republicans hold a narrow 16-15 edge over the Democrats in the Texas Senate, and Sibley was considered the front-runner. Before the final vote tally was revealed, the two friends were called to the podium by Senate President Pro Tem Rodney Ellis who whispered the results. Ratliff had won, 16-15. An obviously disappointed Sibley returned immediately to his desk and moved that the senators elect Ratliff by acclamation, which they did.

Ratliff first came to the Senate by narrowly upsetting an incumbent Democrat in 1988. He was the first Republican senator from east Texas in the 20th century. Ratliff, who chaired the Education and later Finance committees, eventually came to be dubbed "Obi Wan Kenobe" by his respectful colleagues, after the wise old man in the Star Wars movies.

He is very highly regarded by his colleagues on both sides of the political aisle as a man of his word, a hard worker, fair and wise. And while he has run tough partisan races, he believes in the bipartisan tradition that lawmaking has enjoyed in Texas in recent decades.

"I am a Republican because I agree with the Republicans at least 51 percent of the time," Ratliff said several years ago. "It's the same reason I'm a Methodist: I agree with the Methodists about 51 percent of the time."

Texas Monthly magazine in 1991-the first of four times it named Ratliff to its list of "10 Best Legislators"-said Ratliff's stature "rests on a single trait that sets him apart from the great mass of the Senate. He's a totally free man-free of partisanship (he cast a rare Republican vote to raise taxes, but he protested1/4 when no Republicans were named to a crucial conference committee), free of egotism (a Ratliff press release qualifies for the rare documents collection), free of ambition, free of the lobby, free to act as every senator should but few actually do: Look at every issue from both sides and decide what is right."

Ratliff has done some battling with the religious right in Texas, including funneling money to GOP primary candidates opposed by ultraconservatives. In a rewrite of the state's education code, he quietly stripped the state school board of most of its textbook selection power after some board members, trying to dictate social policy through textbooks, turned the process into what some considered an embarrassment. Ratliff shifted most of that power to local school boards.

Though he is a supporter of school vouchers, Ratliff criticized a fax sent by voucher supporters blasting his Democratic colleagues who oppose them.

"I felt as one who is voting for vouchers1/4 compelled to stand and say to the world the members who vote on the other side of this issue are good, honorable people who have the best interests of the children of this state at heart," Ratliff said.

Ratliff's election as acting lieutenant governor marked the first time ever that Texas senators got the chance to pick one of their own for the job. In Texas, the lieutenant governor runs statewide separately from the governor, not as a ticket, and serves a four-year term.

A LITTLE HISTORY LESSON
Before 1984, the Senate president pro tem would have moved into the lieutenant governor's job. But that office was rotated among senators to the one most senior who hadn't held it before. In 1983, a senator got nervous that an unqualified member might move up into a leadership position and proposed the constitution be amended. Texas voters in 1984 agreed. So instead of having the Senate pro tem become lieutenant governor in case of a vacancy, the Senate would convene and have a vote to pick one of its members.

Perry, a former state representative, was the state's agriculture commissioner for eight years before winning a close race in 1998 over Democratic Comptroller John Sharp-with significant help from Bush's coattails. But Perry's tenure was short enough, as Ratliff puts it, that "he was still learning the job when he left, very honestly."

One thing Perry did do was try to get done whatever Bush wanted while he was seeking the presidency-or not done, as was the case with a hate crimes bill Bush didn't want to reach his desk. The bill, as passed by the House, would have enhanced penalties for crimes fueled by hate against minorities and gays, among others. It never came up for a vote in the Senate.

Perry had followed the late Bob Bullock, a legendary, mercurial Democrat with a scalding temper. Bullock ran the Senate with an iron hand for eight years, after 16 as the state's comptroller and a lifetime in and around Texas politics.

"Bullock, of course, was the ultimate information fanatic," Ratliff says. "He wanted to know everything that was going on in this building, and anywhere within a half mile of it. And in the beginning, wanted to control all of it. He quickly found out that was an impossibility, and he began to release the reins as years went by."

Bush, after beating Democrat Ann Richards in 1994, courted Bullock-who had had a rather testy relationship with Richards, even though he and Richards once were close friends and drinking buddies before both gave up drinking a decade earlier. Bush signed on to some of the bigger issues already under way in the Legislature, and Democrat Bullock became such a fast friend that he endorsed Bush for re-election over Democratic Land Commissioner Garry Mauro-a former Bullock political sidekick.

A ROBIN HOOD METAPHOR
It was Bullock who named Ratliff education chairman in 1993, at a time when the state's public education system had been declared inequitable by the Texas Supreme Court. Ratliff devised the state's so-called Robin Hood education spending system, which has property tax revenues from rich school districts helping equalize spending in poorer ones.

"You know, I've been dubbed the father of Robin Hood by those who are critical of it for close to 10 years," Ratliff says.

"I think those people who look at it with any objectivity know that we were in our third special session trying to pass something that was constitutional, and that what I did was to put together a plan that would meet constitutional muster, and that it was a necessity," Ratliff says. "I was the chairman of the Education Committee, and it was up to me to come up with a solution that would get us out of court."

In 1995, on his notebook computer, Ratliff rewrote all 1,100 pages of the state's education code except the financing section he'd written in 1993. He kept a no-pass, no-play requirement for school extracurricular activities, and a requirement the state maintain class sizes no larger than 22 students per teacher, but threw out most requirements about how teachers should teach. He replaced them with tests designed to see what students had learned.

"We removed all the methodology dictates and said, 'You go teach,'" Ratliff says. "All we want to do is say, 'This is what they need to know, and we're going to check to see if they know it.'"

Ratliff, who keeps his desk clean and wants his staffers to do likewise, says he'll probably try to style his tenure as Senate president after Bullock's predecessor for 18 years, Democrat Bill Hobby. Hobby was the first lieutenant governor under whom Ratliff served the first two years he was in the Senate.

Hobby was a former Senate parliamentarian. His own father had been lieutenant governor and governor half a century earlier. And with the help of his family's newspaper and television fortune, and a state scandal, Hobby beat three senators to become lieutenant governor in 1972 on his first try for public office.

"I always felt like Hobby's basic philosophy was his phrase that he loved to use, and that was 'Let the Senate work its will.'" Ratliff says. "He really got deeply involved in maybe three to five, maybe six, bills a session. Sometimes he didn't even really want to be involved in those, but he felt like he needed to if he felt a problem coming on, or if there was some kind of explosion building or something like that. He just didn't feel the need to try to be involved in all the pieces of legislation.

"I think I probably relate more to that," says Ratliff. "Coming out of the Senate, I think I have maybe a more secure attitude that the Senate can work out some of these problems-that I don't need to control them. There's a lot of talent there that can make them work."

Ratliff wasted no time in making committee assignments. He stunned some observers by picking Democrat Ellis to take over for him as Finance Committee chairman.

Ratliff also showed he will continue to listen to his colleagues. When he drew immediate and strong criticism from Hispanic senators after naming a new seven-member Redistricting Committee with none of the Senate's six Hispanics on it, he quickly apologized and added an Hispanic senator the next day.

As a measure of the trust he is afforded, when he was asked at a press conference following announcement of the committees about the lack of a Hispanic, Ratliff says he hadn't really thought about it until the reporter asked the question. And several of his colleagues said they believed him, saying they think he genuinely is ethnically color-blind.

TIME WILL TELL
Ratliff pledged while campaigning among his colleagues that he would not bring a personal legislative agenda with him. But even though the state's budget this year is tight, he quickly added that virtually every Texas legislator has, as a major priority, finding a way to provide health insurance for the state's teachers. Meanwhile, the billion-dollar tax cut Bush insisted on two years ago is money the state's budget writers wouldn't mind having this session.

Having Perry in the governor's chair (rather than the son of a president who wanted to be president himself and had just been easily re-elected to a second term as governor) certainly will be different, Ratliff says.

"I think that any time you have a governor that's been elected by almost 70 percent, there is going to be a certain amount of deference paid to his opinion," Ratliff says. "That's not to say that Perry's agenda won't be seriously considered. It's just that a governor that got almost 70 percent is kind of like the grizzly bear; he just sleeps anywhere he wants to. I think that did have some impact on the members.

"Probably more impact was the fact that we all felt like we were under some kind of microscope from all the national media," Ratliff says. He notes that Bush "has presented us and we have presented ourselves as a legislature that works across party lines, that works in bipartisan harmony. We were a little bit on tiptoes to try to make sure we came off looking as good as we could. Because we knew that, for instance, if we had had a huge meltdown of some kind, that would reflect not only on George W., but reflect on us and on the state."

Ratliff must decide by the filing deadline on Jan. 2, 2002, whether he'll seek re-election to his Senate seat or try to win election statewide as lieutenant governor. He knows that in the Republican primary, he could face Land Commissioner David Dewhurst, a multimillionaire who largely financed his own campaign for his current job and could do so again, or state Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander, who has been on the statewide ballot several times in recent years. And Democratic former Comptroller Sharp, who narrowly lost the lieutenant governor's race to Perry in 1998, appears to be gearing up to try again.

So, will Ratliff run?

"Well, it's impossible not to give thought to it," Ratliff says. "But it's a little early." For now he's set up an exploratory committee that includes Jan Bullock, widow of the legendary former lieutenant governor, to see if there is enough support.

"I think I will know from the comments from the committee," Ratliff said. "When they talk to their friends and associates, we'll get the feedback necessary to determine whether it can be successful."

"Right now," Ratliff says, "I'd say that the odds are pretty good that I'll run."

Dave McNeely, the dean of the Texas Capitol press corps, is political editor of the Austin American-Statesman.

Lieutenant Governor Role Varies

The office of lieutenant governor differs across the states.

The lieutenant governor's office is part of the executive branch of government in 42 states and American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands and U.S. Virgin Islands.
The governor and lieutenant governor run as a team in 24 states, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands and U.S. Virgin Islands. In 18 states, they are elected separately.
In Arizona, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Puerto Rico, West Virginia and Wyoming, there is no lieutenant governor.
In Tennessee and West Virginia, the Senate's presiding officer also bears the title of "lieutenant governor."
Lieutenant governors are elected statewide in 26 states, and preside over the Senate, a practice that stems from the English Parliament.
Most commonly, when a gubernatorial vacancy occurs, the lieutenant governor moves up to fill the position. In Arizona, Oregon, Puerto Rico and Wyoming, the secretary of state is next in the line of succession. In Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Tennessee and West Virginia, the president (or speaker) of the Senate assumes the job.

-Brenda Erickson, NCSL

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