Things started out well enough between Lyle Larson and Greg Abbott.

In Feb. 2015, just a few weeks after Abbott took over as governor, Larson, the San Antonio-based District 122 state representative, welcomed the stylistic contrast between Abbott and his brash predecessor, Rick Perry.

Larson said the “humility Abbott has brought (to the office) is refreshing.” He also praised the governor’s willingness to pull the plug on the Emerging Technology Fund and reform the Texas Enterprise Fund, two programs often derided as pay-to-play slush funds for Perry’s political donors.

By January 2017, Larson had cooled considerably on Abbott, stating that he found parts of last year’s State of the State speech “very demeaning, very condescending.”

Larson’s perspective changed because he watched with alarm as Abbott instituted what looked very much like a pay-to-play system of his own. In an op-ed for the McAllen Monitor last July, Larson pointed to the fact that gubernatorial appointees had donated more than $8.6 million to the governor’s campaigns and that more than 70 of Abbott’s appointees had made donations in excess of $2,500 since 2013.

In 2017, Larson filed HB 3305, a bill designed to end what he called “the most egregious ethics problem facing our state,” by prohibiting the governor from appointing any donors who contributed more than $2,500 to the governor’s campaign in the previous year. That bill sailed through the House, but never even made it to a Senate committee.

That’s the backdrop for the feud between these two Texas Republicans, a feud that hit a crescendo Monday when Abbott endorsed a little-known GOP primary challenger, Hollywood Park Mayor Chris Fails, against Larson, a four-term incumbent lawmaker so popular among local Republicans that he went unchallenged in his last three primary races. (Abbott has also endorsed the opponents of two other GOP ethics-reform champions in the Texas House: Sarah Davis and Wayne Faircloth.)

The endorsement announcement adds weight to Larson’s allegation that Abbott vetoed five of the six bills Larson passed last year just to get payback for the state rep’s ethics-reform effort.

Abbott has tried to dress up his animus as something more profound: a stand against someone he defines as a traitor to the conservative cause. Larson went on KTSA Tuesday and suggested that Abbott endorsed Fails without knowing much about the Hollywood Park mayor.

Sure enough, the next day Abbott went on the station and totally avoided the subject of Fails, simply explaining his endorsement by calling Larson a “liberal” who should “call himself the Democrat that he is.”

If Larson is a liberal, he’s had a funny way of showing it for the past 28 years.

He’s a fiscal conservative so obsessive that he refused a pay raise while serving on Bexar County Commissioners Court and took home $48,000 a year while his colleagues made $108,000.

His zeal for small government (and distaste for bureaucratic inefficiency) is such that he has long made the quixotic case for a consolidation of our local county and city governments. He hates income taxes so much that he pushed, during his 2008 congressional campaign in U.S. District 23, for a Fair Tax, which would replace income taxes with a national sales tax. He also wants to abolish the state’s General Land Office.

Larson is a conservative in the classic, Barry Goldwater sense. He has little time for social crusading or political moralizing. (Keep in mind that Goldwater once warned that when “preachers get control” of the GOP, “it’s going to be a terrible damn problem.”)

Abbott, like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, was more than happy to waste special-session time last year on a bill dictating which restrooms transgender individuals should use, an anti-conservative example of big-government encroachment if ever there was one. He also pushed to impose caps on municipal revenues and force local police officers to assume the roles of immigration officers.

Abbott declared ethics reform an emergency item for the Legislature last year, but chafed at reform when it came knocking on his own door. He talks about his commitment to education, but has done nothing to solve the structural funding problems with the state’s school system.

Like him or not, Larson always has stood for something. Three years into his gubernatorial tenure, Abbott is defined by the hollowness of his record. He is a bland chief executive more consumed with settling scores, pandering to extremists and protecting his fiefdom than addressing the true needs of this state.

ggarcia@express-news.net

@gilgamesh470