Texas has loomed large over Washington for much of the past century, but that will change on Jan. 20. Texas losing stature, clout

When President George W. Bush turns the Oval Office over to Barack Obama, he might as well dump the Lone Star of Texas into the bed of his pickup and haul it off with him.

The 28th state has loomed large over Washington for much of the past century — think the president, his father, Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, John Tower, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay.


But at noon on Jan. 20, Texas becomes — please don’t throw things — just another state.

“I guess Washington can finally exhale,” half-jokes former Bush counselor Dan Bartlett, a born-and-bred Texan who escaped to Austin last year.

The past 20 years — a dozen of them with a Texan in the White House — have seen the introduction of Shiner Bock beer to Washington grocery stores, the regular stocking of Dr Pepper at Congressional Liquor, plus the arrivals of both a Capitol Hill Tex-Mex establishment (Tortilla Coast, in 1988) and a centrally located downtown barbecue joint (Nick Fontana’s Capitol Q, in 1997).

Those may be here to stay, but other aspects of Texas’ political and cultural influence are already on the wane.

From 1995 through 2005, Armey and then DeLay held the office of House majority leader. But Armey is now five years removed from power, and DeLay is entangled in a criminal case.

And while The Hammer’s redistricting crusade in 2003 certainly helped Texas Republicans at the time, it has come back to haunt the state under Democratic rule. If not for DeLay’s machinations, three Texas Democrats would likely be sitting pretty these days as chairmen of powerful House committees: former Reps. Jim Turner (Homeland Security), Martin Frost (Rules) and Charlie Stenholm (Agriculture).

Instead, they’re all now exes, living in Texas, having lost their elections in 2004.

“I guess it’s unrealistic for any state to continue to enjoy national influence dating back to the ’20s and ’30s,” says Frost. “Texas has had this unbroken run. And sooner or later, it had to come to an end.”

That the end has come should be clear on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, when the Texas State Society hosts its Black Tie & Boots Inaugural Ball at the Gaylord hotel at National Harbor in Maryland.

The last such hoodang, in 2005, drew 12,000 attendees, but there was a recently reelected Texan in the White House then. By contrast, on the night before Bill Clinton’s second inauguration, only about 7,000 people deigned to don their Tony Lamas.

Organizers are braced for another not-exactly-Texas-sized turnout in January.

Still, for those Democratic Texans who will remain in the nation’s capital, there’s a bright side to the changeover.

“I happen to be Republican,” says Jennifer Sarver, historian for the Texas State Society of Washington, D.C. “But most of my social friends are Democrats, and they are sick and tired of everybody assuming that if you’re Texan, you’re a conservative or a Republican.”

Democratic Rep. Gene Green says, “Our influence ebbs and flows, and I think we might lose some influence now.” Nevertheless, Green notes that he recently became the first subcommittee chairman from Texas on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Former Clinton adviser Paul Begala, who cultivated his twang while growing up in DeLay’s old congressional district, crows about this marking the “end of the Texas Republican.”

“When the majority of Texas Republicans voted against a Texas Republican president’s economic package, ... then I don’t know what it means to be a Texas Republican anymore,” he said.

Since at least the 1960s, Texans have been simultaneously admired and loathed by the rest of Washington. Their command, for the most part, has come on account of seniority. Their home districts were so safe that they were able to stay in Washington more or less all of the time and invest wholeheartedly in committee work.

“I think it played well back home. You find a very significant pride in the state, and I think the state was proud of it. I know in the case of my boss, [former Rep.] Bill Archer, when he became chairman of the Committee [on Ways and Means, in 1996], I never got a single complaint about him not being home. They were just happy he was chairman.”

Don Carlson, who spent 35 years as a Hill staffer to Texas Republicans, said that his bosses “left a legacy that the Texas delegation was a very powerful delegation, whether it was true in all the years after that or not. Certainly they left their mark on Texas with what they were able to do in terms of funding.”

Military bases and transportation structures and a space station in Texas stand as testimony to the legacy of might. According to a Houston Chronicle analysis, Texas received $2.2 billion in federal earmarks last year, second only to California.

So who carries on the Lone Star tradition in a Democrat-dominated Congress?



For the moment, the reins fall into the hands of Texas Republican Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn. Both have been known to wear the boots, but neither attracts the cult of personality Washington has come to expect from denizens of the state that calls itself a republic.

Republicans think they have a rising star in Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee. Democrats think they have one in Rep. Chet Edwards, who chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction.

Currently, only two Texas Democrats chair committees in the House — Silvestre Reyes (Intelligence) and Gene Green (Ethics) — and neither of them is standing.

“That’s almost unheard of,” says Carlson.

Without a Texan in the White House or in a top-level leadership spot, members from the state may have to work across the aisle if they hope to bring home the bacon like they did in days of yore.

“If it could get its s--t together as a group of 32,” says one Texas-born Democratic Hill staffer, “there are very few things it can’t get accomplished, even if most of them are in the minority.”

The Bush administration and the Texas delegation have one last chance this year to deliver some love for the folks back home: a new federally funded agricultural biosecurity lab is considering five proposed sites, including one in San Antonio.

Texans or no Texans, real pork will still be served in Washington. Nick Fontana says he’s not too worried about his barbecue business. He says Bush has never darkened his door, and that Washington is probably ready for a break from the stomp, stomp, stomping of big Texas boots, anyway.

“People don’t realize how big and diverse Texas is,” he says. “Europeans and foreigners here think that every Texan is a crazy, redneck cowboy.”

But Bartlett says even Washingtonians will eventually come around. “I won’t be surprised if there is a resurgence after this president rides off into the sunset and all those animosities and short-term issues around George W. Bush fade away,” he says.