Really, where it started, I think, was the total controls that the
speaker had. That was one of the things that we were starting out
against. If you weren't on the team, if you didn't vote, regardless of
what your constituency might be, if you didn't go along with the team,
you were just ostracized. It didn't matter what the merit of your
legislation was, you couldn't get started. And then, of course, early in
the term, so far as I was concerned, I could see conflict of interests
everyplace you turned. Because there was a kind of climate up there that
if you didn't exploit your public office, you really weren't with it,
you were sort of a square. For example, the things that you were hearing
about were appearing before agencies of your clients and so on, on down
the line. Investing in companies that might have something going on, all
that type of thing. There wasn't even
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it. I remember that on the floor of the house, a legislator telling me
how much a group in a big city here had turned over to the speaker, who
didn't have any "serious" opposition, as a campaign fund. These were all
campaign funds for people that didn't have opposition, to speak of. It
is all this stuff that you read about, but you just saw it firsthand
there.
So, it was a multi-faceted thing. It wasn't in the beginnings of it, but
the impetus for it came out of the so-called Sharpstown Banking Bills
and the disclosures made by the SEC about a year and a half after their
passage. And you know, you can look back and say, "Oh, it looks all cut
and dried and this was the reform session of the legislature," but it
didn't start out that way, that is all hindsight. You look at one thing.
I know that we were working for rules changes. For example, such things
as that the conference committee on appropriations would have to use the
guidelines of what came out of the house and senate bill, rather than
going outside those guidelines, which has been what happened. For all
practical purposes, the appropriations bill was written by the
conferees. We went through the exercise in the house and senate, but it
didn't mean anything. And this kind of thing didn't mean . . . and this
wasn't the first session that that had been pushed. I can recall that in
my first session, I had attempted as a rules change, to have at least a
record of the committee testimony. Because I had had firsthand
experience with my experience with the land commissioner where witnesses
would take an oath and then there was no record of what they testified
to, which made the matter meaningless.
So, it came from different problems like that, but then the substantive
matter came with the Sharpstown Bills. And again, we stay with procedure
because the procedure was so much a part of what went on and what didn't
go on. For example the consent calendar where
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time and we were passing something that averaged a bill a minute. So
that you had to do something about correcting the procedure before you
could get to the substantive matter. What happened in a sense with the
Sharpstown Bills, the speaker's head lieutenant got up and said that it
was a good bill, that it would help the small banks and that was it. And
because it was a speaker's bill, automatically, there would be whatever
number of committee chairmen that we had and the vice-chairmen. That was
part of getting those positions, so, I mean that there was no
substantive discussion.
And in a way, that's why I want to say that the procedural part was so
much a part of what we were trying to do. But again, you didn't know
where it was going to lead in the beginning and I still sometimes have
second thoughts about where it has led now. I think we have the veneer
of much, but I don't know if we have anything else. It wasn't cut and
dried in the beginning. When we tried to get an investigation of . . .
all I wanted when I asked the resolution, was to study the legislative
history of those two bills. I did that in March of '71. Because I really
wanted to know and I thought that it would be very informative to all of
us, if we could just find out what went into the passage of a piece of
special legislation. Who drafted it, where it came from, how it was
manipulated, if you want to call it that. And of course, we were stopped
there and I didn't intend to be stopped there. So, we went all different
directions around the problem. I don't think that we know very much
today.