Waning Clout in Congress Worries Texas

Texans strode into Washington last January confident that the Lone Star was in ascendancy--laying claim to the White House, the House speakership and a passel of Cabinet posts and congressional committee chairmanships.

They begin 1990 with their influence on the Bush Administration undiminished, but their clout in Congress has been reduced by death, illness, a retirement and the resignation of their most powerful member.

Rep. Michael A. Andrews, a Houston Democrat, says that Texas is coming off a “wind-shift year.”

Some Texans fear that their legendary clout--which, at the start of 1989, they had predicted would increase--has waned so much that the state is now at a disadvantage in fighting for the federal largess that has traditionally come their way.

Early on, the Senate refused to confirm President Bush’s choice of John Tower as secretary of defense after exploring allegations of womanizing and excessive drinking by the former Texas senator.

Three months later, in June, House Speaker Jim Wright abandoned a 34-year career in the House and resigned from the most influential position in Congress amid an ethics investigation of his personal finances.

In August, Democratic Rep. Mickey Leland of Houston was killed when his bush plane slammed into a remote mountain in Ethiopia on its way to a refugee camp.

In October, after suffering abdominal pains, Democratic Rep. Jack Brooks, dean of the Texas congressional delegation, was hospitalized for six weeks for treatment of an inflamed pancreas.

And, on Dec. 1, Rep. Marvin Leath, an influential Democrat on the House Budget and Armed Services committees, announced that he would not seek a seventh term in 1990.

Despite the setbacks, the Texas delegation still landed $225 million to begin building the superconducting super collider, a giant particle accelerator that scientists hope will help them understand the origins of the universe, and fended off a potential attempt to cut $100 million in Pentagon funding for Sematech, a national semiconductor research consortium in Austin.

In addition, the Pentagon chose Dyess Air Force Base as a site for rail-based MX missiles--a project that supporters say guarantees the Abilene installation a mission into the next century even as budget cutters slash military spending.

But Texans still face a tough fight to maintain research and development funds for another military project--the V-22 Osprey aircraft--and they failed to obtain tax breaks for the state’s troubled oil and gas industry.

Rep. John Bryant, a Dallas Democrat, said he is afraid that the delegation’s weakened presence in Washington leaves it vulnerable to new attacks this year by other members of Congress who believe Texas has long gotten more than its share from the federal government.

Bryant, who in April announced that he was a candidate for state attorney general, decided in December to pull out of that race and stay in Washington, where he can influence next year’s spending as a member of the House Budget Committee.

He said that the super collider, Sematech and the space station, being built in Houston, all may be under siege in 1990.

When Congress reconvenes this week, he said, it will do so “for the first time in modern history without a Texas member in a key position to protect our state’s interests in the budget process.”

Still, Texas is hardly without well-positioned members of Congress.

Its senior senator, Democrat Lloyd Bentsen, is chairman of the Finance Committee. In the House, Brooks heads the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez is chairman of the Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee and Rep. E. (Kika) de la Garza is chairman of the Agriculture Committee.

“We still have a lot of power there,” said Bentsen, the 1988 Democratic vice presidential candidate and a potential presidential candidate in 1992.

Bentsen’s fellow senator from Texas, Republican Phil Gramm, put it this way:

“Before all this happened, Texas had the greatest degree of influence in Washington of any state in the union. Texas still has the most influence of any state in the union.”