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George W. Bush wants to be President. At least that's what his advisers tell him. Four years ago, no one knew who Bush was, aside from the rich son of a former president. He was the relatively new governor of Texas who had unexpectedly upended Ann Richards in the Republican sweep of 1994. That's it. Not a figure of national prominence, not a lauded up and coming governor. Just a familiar name and a familiar face. That all changed about two years ago when the Republican establishment, desperate for a winner and for someone who might be able to out-Clinton Bill Clinton, tapped Bush to be the establishment man in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries. Now everyone knows who Bush is, but few people really know what he has done. There is a reason for that.

Bush has been governor of Texas for five years. That's the whole of his political experience. Not exactly a lot to base a run for the presidency on is it? It looks especially meager when compared to other recent presidents and his opponent. Al Gore, for comparison, has spent decades in public service as Vice President and as a Congressman and Senator. President Clinton was governor of Arkansas when he was elected, but he had held other state offices for decades before that. Bush's father, George H.W. Bush had an even more impressive (and sexy) résumé: Vice President, Congressman, UN ambassador and head of the CIA (that's the sexy part). Bush (Jr.) just has that governor thing going for him.

Bush did run for Congress in 1978, trying to follow in his daddy's footsteps. Bush came back to his hometown of Midland, Texas following his stint in the Air National Guard and several years of "young and irresponsible" behavior. Even though he had shown little previous interest in politics, Bush threw his hat into the ring against incumbent Democrat Kent Hance because "Jimmy Carter was president ? and I felt the United States was heading towards European-style socialism." Usually, a 31 year old with no previous political or business experience would be laughed out of town, but Bush had two invaluable assets: his father's name and his father's connections.

Bush ended up raising nearly $450,000 for that first Congressional race. That's not a terrible sum by today's crazy standards. By 1978 standards it was unheard of. Bush got most of his money from Midland and Houston oilmen and lawyers, his own family and a bevy of national (and rich) figures with ties to his father. You normally wouldn't see the likes of George Shultz, Nicholas Brady and Robert Mosbauer (all future Reagan-Bush officials) or A.W. Clausen of Bank of American and Don Kendal of PepsiCo on the donor list of a political rookie. They all gave to Bush.

With his overflowing war chest, Bush was able to edge out his Republican primary opponent in a runoff, but he was not able to beat Hance, despite exaggerating his own military service. Bush lost 53-47. That was the last Bush would see of politics until he became governor in 1994.

"So what?" You might ask. After all, Texas is a big state; as Bush keeps telling us, it would be the world's 11^th largest economy if it were its own country. That should be pretty good practice to run the nation, right? Unfortunately for Bush (and for us should he be elected), that just isn't the case. The governor of Texas is simply not as powerful or important as one might think. Heck, Bush himself must agree with this assessment - his "autobiography" (it was ghost written by his communications director Karen Hughes) glosses over his entire time as governor in a mere eighteen (out of 350) pages. Eighteen pages? That makes sense considering that, as governor, Bush usually worked only seven hour days and had enough time for a power nap after lunch (somehow I don't think the President gets nap time). Anyway, there's a reason Bush had to work so little: he didn't have much to do.

First of all, the Texas legislature meets only every two years - only 140 days over a two year period. That means that the governor of Texas already has only ½ the influence of your regular, run-of-the-mill governor. Aside from this, the governor is severely limited by the state's constitution. Governor is actually only the fifth most important office in Texas. That's right fifth! The constitution deems that the lieutenant governor (who run the Texas Senate and is the real power in Texas government), the attorney general, the state comptroller and even the land commissioner are all more important than the governor.

In Texas, the governor does not handle many of the most important responsibilities that his counterparts in most other states do. For one, he does not appoint judges (who are elected), the heads of most state agencies (who are usually holdovers form previous administrations) or most positions in the executive branch (like attorney general) who are also elected. Additionally, he does not prepare the state budget (it's prepared by a panel of legislators) and he cannot introduce legislation. Republican State Senator Bill Ratliff summed the powers of the governor up nicely in 1999: "Our constitution was written in the 19^th century by people terrified of centralized government. As a result we have created the weakest governor in the fifty states. I believe when the people of Texas vote for a governor, they think they are voting for that candidate's programs and philosophy and platform, but the governor has no real authority to institute those things." Texas house speaker Pete Laney aggress, "The Governor has no power, except what the legislature gives him or he takes with the force of his own personality." A 1997 University of Texas study also agreed, pegging the Texas chief executive as the 49^th most powerful in the nation.

Bush likes to argue that his tenure as head of the world's 11^th largest economy gives him the economic experience and his dealing with Mexico give him the foreign policy experience to be president. This is, quite simply, bull. Aside from a few photo-ops on the Rio Grand, the Texas governor does little in the way of foreign policy vis-à-vis Mexico. Treaties, economic agreements etc. are handled at the federal, not state level. And we have already seen that the governor has little power in directly implementing economic policy.

Still, the Texas governorship is not a completely impotent one. The governor still can exercise veto power over any legislation the legislature pumps out and he has a rather effective bully pulpit from which to try to influence events. Influencing the legislature is, admittedly, one of Bush's strong points. This being so, Bush certainly has a record to be judged by (and he tells us that is just what he wants us to do). It is not a good one.

To judge this record, we must first understand the state Texas was in when he inherited it from Ann Richards. Bush jumped on board at a high time for Texas, especially economically. The state was on the up swing economically and was set to receive budget surpluses that would come to $7.6 billion by 1999 thanks largely to a 1991 tax increase and the economic policy implemented by the Clinton Administration. Bush was also set to receive a windfall in tobacco money in the form of a $17.3 billion settlement with Big Tobacco that would generate $2 billion for the state for the 1999-2000 budget cycle alone. The state was also benefiting from state lottery (which Richards got passed with a one vote margin), that has produced $6.9 billion since 1992. Texas was doing well on other fronts too. The Richards administration had handled a court order to equalize funding for rich and poor schools and, as a result, test scores were on the rise. Richard's prison building spree had helped send Texas' crime numbers down. So, remember that Bush took over in an extremely enviable position. Let's see what he's done with it.

If there is one theme that can be taken from Bush's time as governor, it is this: he has consistently, on almost every issue, protected the interests of Big Businesses (who usually, coincidentally, happen to also be his biggest contributors) even when these interests have come at the expense of the people who elected him. Be it environmental policy or tort "reform," Bush has sold out Texans to the highest bidder. Bush's record, as Eric Pooley of Time says, is "a conservative record. One that assumes that what's good for business is good for Texas." John Judis, of The New Republic puts it even better: "Behind the mask of compassion he has donned for this campaign, he is a die hard conservative on issues that have been the most important to American voters - those that pit the interests of business against those of ordinary people."

Perhaps Bush's biggest failing, and his biggest gift to business, has been his handling of environmental matters, the centerpiece of which has been his "voluntary" cleanup plan for Texas' biggest polluters.

When the Texas Clean Air Act went into effect in 1971 it established certain standards for petrochemical plants, and the like, that produced the majority of Texas' air pollution. The measure, however, would only affect plants built after 1971; a loophole was left in place to allow plants already in existence a few years to come into compliance with the law. The exemption was originally meant to last three or four years. In 1997 it was still in effect and the 850 (that's right 850!) plants still benefiting from it were producing an astounding 36% of Texas air pollution (and that's 36% of a lot - Texas is the nation's biggest air polluter).

In 1997 the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (TNRCC or 'Trainwreck') finally decided that something needed to be done about these grandfathered plants. Pressure to regulate these plants was mounting from environmental groups as well as regular citizens because Texas' air was getting worse and worse and all of Texas' major cities were close to being declared in "nonattainment" of EPA standards. Thus, Texas was in danger of losing billions in highway funds. With all this in mind, TNRCC was set to implement an obligatory plan that would have required the grandfathered plants to reduce their emissions.

Unfortunately for Texas, the plants that would have been affected also happened to be some of Bush's biggest financial supporters. In fact, Bush had received contributions from ALL of the top 100 polluters among grandfathered plants. That's right, every single one had given Bush some sort of contribution or another for a total of $1.1 million since 1993. From the grandfathered polluters, Bush received over $260,000 for his 1998 gubernatorial campaign and $1.5 million for his presidential campaign - $300,00 of which came during the legislative session in which the cleanup plan was being discussed. Additionally, some of Bush's biggest personal fundraisers, his "pioneers" (that's the name he has given to people who have pledge to raise more than $100,000 for his presidential campaign) are members or representatives of this select group of polluters. One is Erle Nye, CEO of Texas Utilities. Texas Utilities operates some of the worst sources of air pollution in Texas. According to a report issued in 1998 by the Lone Star Sierra Club, the amount of pollutants coming from Texas Utilities' facilities amounts to more than 210,000 tons of nitrogen oxide per year. That's about equivalent to the pollution created by 3.8 million cars. Frederick L. Webber, the CEO and president of the Chemical Manufacturers Association, is also a Bush "pioneer." CMA is a trade group that represents nearly 200 of America's biggest oil and petrochemical companies, including Exxon Chemicals, DuPont, W.R. Grace and BP Amoco, several of which had plants affected by the loophole. Ken Lay, the CEO of Enron, has a long relationship with the Bush family. Enron also happens to be one of the Texas' worst polluters. Lay is another "pioneer;" he and Enron have given Bush close to $350,000.

It's not surprising, then, that TNRCC's mandatory plan never made it into law. As TNRCC prepared to act industry got wind and let Bush know that it was not pleased. Bush's environmental director warned him that industry was concerned that TNRCC was "moving too quickly." So Bush quashed TNRCC's plan and suggested they replace it with a voluntary program. That's right, these plants had 26 years to upgrade to meet the Clean Air Act's standards yet Bush decided to make their participation in any new plan voluntary. What's worse is that he decided that, instead of TNRCC, the polluters themselves should be allowed to write the plan! So, in early 1997, Bush's people held secret, closed-door meetings with executives of the oil, chemical and natural gas industries and invited them to draft their own plan. The executives gladly took them up and soon some two dozens oil, chemical and natural gas executives were gathered at Exxon's headquarters in Houston to discuss the plan already outlined by a more select group of oil execs. Even some of the executives themselves were shocked by Bush's brazenness; one DuPont exec who attended would later write in a memo, "the approach of the presenters was pretty much like, 'This is the way it's going to be. Do you want to get on board or not?' Clearly the insiders from oil and gas believe the Governor's Office will 'persuade' the TNRCC to accept what program is developed between the industry group and the Governor's Office." Notes from similar meetings, which were recently made public, also indicate that many of the polluters hoped to use the plan simply for good PR without ever implementing a single change. As you might expect, the plan that was produced was flimsy at best. The plan called for some fines, but according to the Environmental Defense Fund, those only applied to about 5% of the plants.

Bush moved to have the polluter written bill made into law in 1999, but he wasn't through gutting it of all meaningful protections quite yet. In an attempt to get at least an ounce of environmental clean up out of the bill, Democrats in the Texas House proposed a bill that would have required the grandfathered plants to use what environmental engineers call the Best Available Control Technology. Bush countered with a bill written by R. Kinnan Goleman, general counsel for the Texas Chemical counsel and lobbyist for energy companies. Goleman's version allowed the use of ten-year-old pollution control technology and made compliance with this law also voluntary. Unfortunately for Texas, Bush won out over the House Democrats and Goleman's bill became law.

Do you think the energy companies noticed? Within a month of the creation of the industry exploratory committee that would create its own voluntary plan, Bush received over $260,648 from the grandfathered plants for his '98 gubernatorial campaign and $243,900 more for his presidential campaign. Not bad for a day's work of helping to keep Texas' air the dirtiest in the nation.

What's the result of all this? Rather predictably, the compliance rate has been, shall we say, poor. Of the 850 plants only 74 have volunteered and only three have actually reduced emissions. That bears repeating. George W. Bush managed to keep 847 plants from doing a single thing to reduce their toxic emissions. And all for a measly couple of mil.

Allowing Texas' worst polluters to write their own clean-up plan may be the most egregious example of Bush putting big industry (and big contributors) first over Texas' citizens and its environment, but it is far from the only one. Bush has gone to bat for the oil, gas and chemical industries many times. A recent example was his first action of the most recent session of the Texas Legislature. As I will discuss in more detail later, Texas has a lot of problems that don't relate to Bush's big industrial backers. One of the highest rates of uninsured children in the country and an alarming rate of hunger are just two examples of Texas' myriad problems. Yet, Bush has never considered either of these problems emergencies; in fact he has taken action to make each of these problems worse (I'll get to that later). One thing Bush did consider to be an emergency, however, was the low price of gas and oil in 1999. So, Bush made a $45 million tax cut for the oil and gas industry his top priority during the 1999 session. The first bill to be signed did not help poor, hungry or uninsured kids; it did not improve education or clean up the environment. What it did was give Big Oil a nice fat tax break. According to Bush, "These are tough times for the oil and gas industry, and this legislation says our state is committed to helping this vital industry." The tax cut was supposedly designed to aid small companies at risk of going under. In fact, the biggest beneficiaries were Big Oil companies like Chevron, Texaco, Mobil, Exxon and Atlantic Richfield, all of which are also big time soft money donors to the Republican Party.

Let's move back, for a moment, to the voluntary clean up plan that Bush let Texas's biggest polluters write. One of the more amazing aspects of the whole situation is that TNRCC, which is supposed to defend Texas' environment, even decided that the loophole for grandfathered plants needed to be closed in the first place.

When Bush took office, TNRCC wasn't exactly some ultra-liberal, tree hugger agency - in a state like Texas that is never going to happen. It was established in the early '90s by Richards for the specific purpose of monitoring air quality and emissions and regulating the industries that most directly effected such things. Richards' appointees to the commission were a fairly balanced bunch: not active environmentalists but not entirely in the pocket of industry. Her three appointees were a gentleman with more than three decade's worth of experience in state environmental agencies, a county judge from West Texas (oil country) and a county administrator from Austin (what passes for the liberal center of Texas). In short, while this trio certainly had no desire to cripple Texas' oil, gas and chemical industries, it also was independent enough to decide when enough was enough. Bush changed that almost immediately.

Bush sent Richards' appointees packing and replaced them with hand picked representatives of industry. One of the new commissioners, Ralph Marquez, had spent thirty years working for Monsanto, a chemical company (and big polluter and Bush contributor). He had also been a lobbyist for the Texas Chemical Council in Washington, D.C. where he had testified that ozone is "benign." Ozone is actually one of the most noxious and dangerous chemicals emitted by gas, oil and chemical plants. Who knew? Marquez also adamantly opposed tougher federal air-quality standards. The second Bush appointee was John Baker, formerly of the Texas Farm Bureau, an agricultural interest group and large insurance company whose portfolio is top heavy in agricultural chemical stocks. The last, and worst, new commissioner is Barry McBee who was known around the Texas Senate as "the skinny Hitler" (I'm not making this up, I swear). McBee had worked as the deputy director of the Texas Department of Agriculture where he helped dismantle a policy that required farmers to warn workers when the fields they worked had been sprayed with harmful pesticides. According to one of that policy's creators, Rebecca Flores-Harringtion, it "was nothing radical?. We just wanted signs posted that would warn workers that ? for two or three days the fresh, active chemicals in the field could kill them." But McBee would have none of that, "It took us years to get the system in place," Flores noted. "He took it apart in one day." For the record, McBee would be a likely choice to head the EPA should Bush be elected president.

When the Bush trio took over, TNRCC immediately reduced public participation in its hearings to nearly zero, always a bad sign. It also started easing environmental regulation almost immediately.

Though it may seem silly, along with emissions from oil, gas and chemical plants, animal waste is one of the biggest forms of pollution many agriculturally heavy states face - it can wreck havoc on a state's water supplies including its drinking water (I think we can all agree that no one wants to be drinking chicken shit in the morning). This is a problem and most states have been tightening regulation of such matters. After Bush's election, TNRCC basically dismantled Texas' regulations entirely. Now Texas leads the nation in animal waste, "We're definitely No.1 in No.2" according to Reggie James, head of the Consumers Union of Texas.

TNRCC, after being gutted by Bush, also continued with Baker's history of opposing tougher national air-quality standards (who needs clean air anyway, right? Evidently Texas does because it now has one of the highest rates of death from asthma in the nation), reduced water quality monitoring in the state's streams and rivers to almost zero (probably so they wouldn't have to explain the sudden rise in chicken shit levels) and began providing advance notice of "surprise inspections" to large industrial facilities. It's a wonder that they even bothered with toxic emissions and grandfathered plants. Don't worry though. TNRCC has returned to its old ways. They recently characterized four regions in Texas as "unclassifiable" for clean air purposes. This action exempts the regions from federal clean air standards and keeps the public in the dark as to just how bad their air really is. What makes this so troublesome is that this action was blatantly illegal - the Clean Air Act (which governs such things) clearly states that an area may only be classifies as "unclassifiable" if there is insufficient data to determine if it meets minimum health standards. The TNRCC's own data shows that all four regions violate safe ozone standards. So now, instead of being able to rely on hard numbers and the thirty year track record of the Clean Air Act, the public in these four areas have to rely on vague promises by TNRCC that they will come up with some plan to fix things. They shouldn't hold their breath (or maybe they should considering the quality of their air) - TNRCC still hasn't come up with an overdue plan for Houston. By the way, as governor, Bush has the power to reject TNRCC's decision and thus classify the four regions as "non-attainment" (this would automatically put the basic safeguards of the Clean Air Act into effect in the troubled areas). He declined to do so.

When it comes to sheer audacity, it's hard to top allowing polluters to write their own clean up plan, but Bush might have done just that when he scraped an auto emissions reduction program in 1995. By 1995, Houston, Dallas and El Paso were among several Texas cities in "non-attainment" of EPA standards and, thus, in danger of losing federal highway funds. Desperate not to lose those funds (though not as desperate about the bad air itself), Texas decided to implement a vehicle emissions program like the highly successful ones in California and the Northeast. In fact, the state had signed a contract with the Tejas Testing Company and Tejas had already set up 65 testing centers complete with emissions testing equipment, as their contract with Texas required. Unfortunately for Texans, Texas' local answer to Rush Limbaugh went on a rant about how such a program was simply unacceptable government interference in the lives of Texans and that they had a right to breath dirty air if they wanted to. (Highly acclaimed Texas journalist Molly Ivins, in her book Shrub, tells a funny anecdote about a similar situation: Former Texas Representative Billy Williamson once crusaded on the floor of the House against asbestos regulations using the same type of argument, "I don't want a bunch of environmentalists and Communists telling me what's good for me and my family." He should have listened to those damned commies at the EPA; Williamson died a few years later of lung cancer - he had lived near one of Texas' most infamous asbestos plants.) Anyway, after a state senator jumped on the "we want our right to breath dirty air bandwagon," Bush decided to jump on too and decided that the state wouldn't pay for the testing program despite the fact that it had signed a contract and that Tejas had already gotten the testing centers up and running. Not surprisingly, Tejas sued Texas for breach of contract and eventually settled for $140 million. Where did Bush get the money to pay for this? He raided the state's already meager environmental projection budget. So, not only did Texas not get a much needed vehicle emissions program, it also had its environmental budget gutted. Now that's what I call leadership.

Gutting TNRCC. Passing tax breaks for Big Oil. Halting much needed vehicle emission reduction. Enacting what amounts to a nice big polluter protection package. This is George W. Bush's environmental legacy. Texas is already paying for it in a big, big way. Here's how:

• Over 800 grandfathered plants are still pumping a full 36% of Texas' air pollution into the air.
• Houston has recently passed LA as the US' smoggiest city.
• Houston, Dallas, El Paso, Beaumont/Port Arthur, Austin, San Antonio, Longview/Tyler/Marshall and North Texas have all violated federal clean air standards.
• The 34 worst smog days in the US last year were in Texas.
• The number of 8-hour ozone violations in Texas' major metropolitan areas has jumped from 508 from 1990-1994 to 679 in 1995-1999 - a 34% increase.
• Texas leads the nation in air carcinogens released.
• Texas leads the nation in toxic releases in the air, soil and water.
• Texas leads the nation in emission of greenhouse gasses.
• Texas leads the nation in pollution released by manufacturing plants.
• Texas leads the nation in pollution by industrial plans in violation of the federal Clean Air Act.
• In short, as Kara Land of Houston says, "This is what Hell looks like."

While the environment might be one of the most visible issues on the public's radar, tort law certainly is not. And while tort law isn't the sexiest of issues (I admit, it's downright boring) it plays a very important role in the way our society coexists with the profit drive of Big Business.

Tort is French for "wrong" and tort law is the basis by which members of the public can seek recompense when they have been wronged by the government, other people or, most important, businesses. It covers things like malpractice, negligence and liability. Again, it's not sexy, but it's important. We've all heard about how such laws have been abused - it's certainly absurd to force McDonalds to pay a woman millions of dollars because she spilled coffee on herself. But for every abuse, there is an important success story. If you have seen the movie Erin Brockovich then you know what I'm talking about. In the movie (which is almost entirely true), the heroine, played by Julia Roberts, uncovers evidence that a local chemical company has been polluting a town's water supply and covering it up for many years. This had caused almost the entire town to experience terrible health problems including many forms of cancer. Brockovich was able to force the company to acknowledge in court that it had caused the problems and won for the townspeople a large damage award that helped to restore some semblance of normalcy to their lives. This isn't fiction, it all happened out in California. Another example is the current battle between Big Tobacco and several states and cities. The tobacco industry, for decades, added chemicals to cigarettes to make them more addictive and also covered up mountains of evidence that showed just how harmful cigarettes can be to a person's health. As a result of their actions, hundreds of thousands of people have died and millions more have experienced sever health problems. Tort law is the only way for people to seek justice for these transgressions and this is important. What is more important, however, is that these laws and the threats of massive damage awards are just about the only measures in place preventing companies from taking actions similar to those of the tobacco industry and the chemical company portrayed in Brockovich, after all the threat of a multi-billion dollar damage award is a powerful incentive not be naughty.

When Bush was campaigning for governor he made reforming the tort laws one of his major campaign themes; in October of 1994 he said, "Probably the most important thing that I will do when I am governor of this state is to insist that Texas change the tort laws." After he was elected, he made tort reform an "emergency" issue. That may sound pretty innocuous; after all, tort laws could stand to be made somewhat more uniform and more fair. This is not, however, all Bush sought.

Before we get to that, however, we should take a look at the forces that have been driving for tort "reform" across the country. This movement has been funded heavily by oil and chemical companies, manufacturers associations, pro-business groups and conservative think tanks who want to create an overly pro-business landscape under the guise of reigning in "frivolous" lawsuits. Judis writes, "the tort reform movement was never about genuine reform. Instead, while railing against trial lawyers, it sought to prevent consumers and workers from winning large settlements against businesses" by limiting damages and contingency fees and raising the burden of proof on plaintiffs. In George W. Bush, the tort reform movement found someone who would willingly do their bidding.

The tobacco industry might have the most to gain from tort "reform" as can be seen by the recent Florida verdict that granted Florida smokers over $100 billion in damages. With more and more cities and states suing Big Tobacco to try to recoup some of billions of dollars in healthcare costs they have incurred treating smoking related illnesses, the industry in under even more pressure to stem the tide. During the great tort reform drive in the early nineties in Texas, tobacco giant Phillip Morris hired Karl Rove to be its political point man in Texas. Rove has admitted that he was paid $3000 a month for five years to: "advise them on elections, to give them my best feelings about what was going to happen in elections, what was shaping up in terms of candidates, political gossip about who was raising money and who was likely to get elected." Rove reported directly to Jack Dillard, Phillip Morris' Austin representative who also happened to be on the board of directors of two of the most powerfull industry groups who supported tort reform, the Texas Civil Justice League and the Texas Association of Business and Chambers of Commerce. What does this have to do with Bush? Karl Rove, who has a long history in Texas Republican politics, has been George W's brains from day one. He was the mastermind of Bush's '94 election and has remained Bush's number one adviser to this day. This period includes the time before and just after when Bush was elected - the same time period over which Rove was reporting to Philip Morris and Jack Dillard. Might Rove have helped push tort reform higher on Bush's agenda?

If Rove's presence wasn't enough to do just that, then money might have been. The tobacco industry has given big bucks (over $2 million) both to Bush and the Texas GOP both before Bush's race in '94 and after. That's not all though. The Texas Civil Justice League (the same body whose director Rove reported to) and Texans for Lawsuit Reform are two political action committees (PACs) made up almost entirely of big businesses (like oil, chemical and tobacco companies) who would benefit most from tort rollback. Bush received about $4.5 million from these lobbies for his two gubernatorial campaigns - over 10% of his total amount raised! To top it all off, Bush has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from law firms who represent the companies seeking reform.

What did these companies get for their money? They got what they wanted. Bush made tort reform his first major action as governor and he pressed hard for a bill that would limit the amount of punitive damages a defendant could be forced to pay to $100,000 (Democrats in the House were able to raise this limit to $750,000). The bill Bush pushed through also limited the fees lawyers representing the defendants could claim and raised the burden of proof to include malice (that means that plaintiffs had to prove that the defendants were maliciously intending to harm them - simple negligent behavior wasn't enough).

So, Big Business got what it so desperately wanted in Texas, but what did Texans get? Bush has made the audacious claim that, by limiting costly lawsuits, he has saved Texans $3 billion in insurance premiums (since insurers no longer had to cover the damages their clients incurred in court). Insurance experts have called this claim "preposterous." In fact, Texas insurance companies have reaped huge profits as damage awards have fallen and rates have stayed constant or even risen. Insurers' annual incurred losses were down an average of more than $600 million annually through 1998; their per premium loss dropped from 70.1 cents per premium dollar to 58.2 cents per premium dollar. That's a 40% increase in profits! Auto insurerss rates remained flat and they made a whopping $3 billion in the first three years after the law passed (that must be the same $3 billion Bush was talking about, maybe he just got confused). The price of Homeowners insurance in Texas has actually risen since tort reform passed and is now, by far, the highest in the nation at an average of $855 per year (compared with #2 Louisiana at $666 and the US average of $455). The insurance industry is so pleased with the result that it has rewarded Bush with over $1 million in contributions to his presidential campaign.

Texans haven't seen a dime of the savings from tort reform passed on, but insurers and Big Business surely have. Just like with the environment, Texas citizens are getting shafted so that W. could help out his buddies in Big Business. But the shafting they are taking in dollar terms is nothing compared to what has happened to their rights - they have lost their ability to receive justice and compensation for harms done them and, most important, Texas society has lost its best means to keep corporations from willfully harming people - Erin Brockovich would never have gotten of the ground in Texas. Reggie James, the director of the Austin office of the Texas Consumers' Union makes a living trying to protect the rights of regular Texans, "while [tort reform] was portrayed as a fight between honest businesses and greedy trial lawyers, the fight was really about businesses not wanting to be held accountable when they harm consumers."

With Karl Rove's ties to Big Tobacco and the tort reform lobby it's not surprising that Bush came through so strongly for Big Business. What is surprising, even for Bush, is that Bush didn't stop there with tort reform - not only did he help enact legislation that limited future tortious awards, but he also made a game attempt to reverse actions already taken.

While the push for tort reform was ongoing, Texas was involved in just the kind of lawsuit Big Business wanted to prevent: it was suing Big Tobacco. That lawsuit eventually ended up with a settlement that landed Texas a cool $17 billion. You'd think Bush would be pleased, after all, $17 billion is a nice chunk of change for a governor to throw around. But Bush railed against the fee collected by the lawyers who argued the case ($2 billion). Texas tort reform groups (the same ones who had given Bush a boatload of money) formed a coalition called Texans for Reasonable Legal Fees to fight against the fee. Bush took the drastic step of filing his own lawsuit to reduce payment to the lawyers by 90%. Bush's own attorney general, Dan Morales sued Bush (quite a tangled web: suing the suitor of a suitor!) to try to stop Bush's lawsuit! In the end, Bush's effort failed even after Morales was replaced in the 1998 election by another of Rove's stable of Texas Republicans, John Cornyn. What makes this unbelievable is that Bush's lawsuit threatened the collapse of the entire settlement and could have cost Texas billions. University of Texas professor Charles Silver, who worked with Morales on the original deal, estimated that the renegotiations it would have forced would have cost Texas $8 billion. "My position is that [Big Tobacco} did approach the governor over this lawsuit," Silver says. "The tobacco companies, the governor's people and Attorney General Cornyn's people have been working together all along." Morales knows what was driving Bush on this one: his action was "about one thing and one thing only: a Republican presidential nomination and political contributions from Big Tobacco."

One of the most contentious issues pitting the interests of business against the interests of the public in the news today is patient protection or, what it has come to be known as, a Patients' Bill of Rights. This, of course, is one of the more popular movements in politics today and, as such, politicians are lining up left and right to try to take credit for patient protection. Bush is no different. An early Bush ad proclaimed, "While Washington was deadlocked, he passed a Patients' Bill of Rights" and his campaign web site claims that "under Governor Bush, Texas enacted some of the most comprehensive patient protection laws in the nation." Were this true, Bush would deserve some credit for taking on HMOs on behalf of their customers. Unfortunately for Texas consumers (again), these claims aren't only a stretch, they're outright lies. With HMOs, as with everything else, Bush has been steadfastly in the corner of Big Business.

In 1995, Bush was presented with a Patients' Bill of Rights for consideration. It included a number of provisions that put new restrictions on HMOs such as requiring them to provide emergency room care and requiring independent report cards for all HMOs. Bush vetoed the bill, citing "numerous new regulations on managed care organizations." Bush did instruct the state insurance commissioner to create new guidelines that included some of the provisions of the bill.

In 1997, the Texas Legislature tried again, this time with a broadly supported and bipartisan package of patient protection legislation. The centerpiece of the package was a bill that would allow patients to sue their HMO if it improperly denied or delayed care. The bill was sponsored by GOP State Senator David Sibley and included provisions for an independent review of each patient's claims, a feature strongly supported by the business community. Even though the bill contained the independent review and other measures meant to protect HMOs from frivolous suits, "word got put out that this was extremely anti-business," according to former state representative Hugo Berlanga, who was chairman of the House Public Health Committee at the time. "It was totally unfounded, but business interests were all urging the governor to veto the thing. It was a mob mentality." Bush was under extreme pressure from his business buddies to derail the bill according to Kim Ross of the Texas Medical Association which backed the bill. He "was getting huge pressure from CEOs of major corporations who were flying into Austin, from umbrella groups like the Chamber of Commerce."

Bush did what he could, sending his staff to pressure Sibley. The bill's sponsor complained on the Senate floor, "I can't make them happy no matter what I do, unless I completely gut the bill." In the end, the pressure was not enough: there were enough votes in both the Senate and the House to override Bush's expected veto so, instead of becoming only the second Texas governor in modern history to have a veto overridden, he allowed the bill to become law without his signature (this is a sort of protest power the governor of Texas has).

Once again, Bush did his damndest to protect Big Business (who, once again, were also big contributors to both his gubernatorial and presidential campaigns). This time he failed but as James (the head of the Austin branch of the Consumer Union) said, "the reforms happened despite him, not because of him."

What we see here is a striking consistency: Bush has continually acted for the benefit of Texas' largest corporations (and his own largest contributors) even when those benefits have come explicitly at the expense of Texas' citizens. We've seen it on the environment, on tort "reform" on health care and HMOs and on the tobacco settlement. Bush has also come through for business elsewhere. For instance, he pushed through electric utility deregulation which stuck consumers with a $7 billion tab that should have been paid by the industry. Bush also managed to gut Texas's labor boards (which are supposed to protect Texas' workers from being mistreated by their employers) of anyone with any kind of pro-labor background. He replaced them with representative of industries they were supposed to regulate, making it a 'captive agency' just as he did with TNRCC. All of this demonstrates that Bush is, at heart, no different from many of the leaders and more extreme elements of his party on this important matter. When it comes to business, Bush is all conservative and no compassion. Peter Eisner of the Center for Public Integrity knows that we can expect more of the same from a Bush White House, "[big money donors] know Bush will work with them? when you look at the legislation, there is no reason for any of these corporations or industrial groups - tobacco, oil, insurance - to feel they will not benefit from a Bush administration."

Recently, the death penalty and its application in Texas have come into increased public focus as Bush has been forced to make highly publicized decisions on two questionable death penalty cases. Indeed, the entire justice system in Texas deserves scrutiny - especially Bush's role. In reality, "justice" is a complete misnomer for what goes on in Texas; real justice can be hard to come by in Bush's Texas, especially if you're poor. From some of the most draconian (and ineffective) drug laws in the country, to a court system completely tilted against indigent defendants to gun laws (or a lack thereof) that must warm the NRA's black heart, justice in Texas is a sad and pitiful joke. Bush has not only blocked attempts to improve the situation, but also actively made it even worse.

Up until 1973, Texas had the most draconian drug laws in the country. A first-offense possession of marijuana conviction was a two-to-life felony offense. Smoking dope just once could put you in jail for life. In one celebrated case a man got thirty years for passing a joint to an undercover officer - and he never even smoked it! Unsurprisingly, these tough laws did little to reduce Texas drug use. Just like everywhere else in the country, young people got stoned in record numbers. What does this have to do with Bush? Well, that five year span between his graduation at Yale in 1968 and the reform of Texas' drug laws in 1973 correspond to Bush's "young and irresponsible years" when he acted "young and irresponsibly." Now, Bush won't answer the question of his possible drug use, but he will, at least, admit, that he was friends with many people who did use drugs at the time. Who cares, right? Personally, I don't think smoking a little dope in one's youth is such a terrible offense. The point, however, is that Bush saw first hand in those "young and irresponsible" days just how little effect draconian laws had.

Bush, apparently, didn't learn his lesson. Or perhaps he simply just disregarded it. After all, if you are going to win in Texas you have to be "tuff" on crime. Regardless, when he took office, Bush returned Texas drug laws to near their 1978 standards. First time offenders can now get significant jail time for possessing less than 1/20^th of an ounce of cocaine. Even trace amounts of cocaine that can only be found under rigorous laboratory analysis can land a first time offender in jail for decades. Bush has instituted similarly "tuff" marijuana laws.

While throwing more recreational drug users in jail is "tuff" on crime in Texas, even better is not ever letting them out. Under Bush the Texas parole rate for first time, non-violent offenders has dropped to just 19.9%. It's one thing to throw these people in jail to teach a lesson, it's another entirely to keep them there with hardened criminals for decades. Bill Haber, the co-chairman of the parole and prison committee of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers' Association agrees, "In 28 years of practice, I have never seen the parole approval rate as low as during the Bush administration. It makes no sense?. Under 30% is a crime. This 'compassionate conservative' line is horseshit. It may be conservative but it sure ain't compassionate."

This isn't all theoretical either; Meilnda George was sentenced to 99 years in jail for possessing a tenth of a gram of cocaine. 99 years! For a tenth of a gram.

Hey, there's nothing wrong with being strict with drug users and especially many time offenders or dealers. But throwing first time and recreational users into jails and forgetting about them for years is no way to build an effective society. Where would Bush be, for instance, if he had faced a 99 year prison sentence for his "young and irresponsible" behavior (assuming that this includes drug use, of course). I doubt he'd be governor.

What is really troubling about the new draconian laws Bush has helped implement is that he has accompanied them with a complete dismantling of Texas' rehabilitation and prevention system.

Even though a full 80% of Texas' prison inmates now have some sort of substance abuse problems, Bush repealed the Texas prison system's drug and alcohol abuse rehabilitation program. He specifically targeted so called 'therapeutic communities' which focus on back-end rehabilitation (counseling inmates in their last year or so before release so that they would have a chance to make a drug free way for themselves when they got out). In fact, Bush campaigned specifically in 1994 against the drug treatment program, vowing to take $25 million out of it to incarcerate more juveniles. He has delivered his promise: at the end of 1994 Texas had 4261 beds for in-prison, back-end counseling with another 2000 or so on the way. There are now a grand total of 800. Some of these beds have been replaced with beds for short-term, front-end programs, but these programs are one shot deals at the beginning of a sentence with no follow up after care and are of limited, if any, effectiveness.

Think this makes a difference? You bet it does. A Rand Corporation study done in 1997 shows that treatments, like the one Bush has rid Texas of, reduce crime more than ten time more than conventional law enforcement and fifteen times more than mandatory minimum sentences of the kind Bush has imposed in Texas. That's right, the program that Bush has implemented fights crime fifteen times worse than the one he replaced! That study was backed up by a federal Bureau of Prisons study that says inmates are a whopping 73% less likely to be rearrested in the first six months after release if they have received treatment. The state of California has also shown that every dollar spent on treatment saves seven dollars in reduced hospital admissions and law enforcement costs. Hey but who needs results when you have to look "tuff" on crime, right? Not Bush, whose take on the subject is "incarceration is rehabilitation."

Bush has also de-emphasized prevention programs, especially in high schools. The percentage of high schoolers who have received any information on drugs or alcohol has fallen from 79% in 1994 to 65% in 1998. Bush also spearheaded the drive to rewrite Texas' juvenile justice laws and make them just as draconian as the state's drug laws. This effort included measures that forced more juveniles to be tried as adults and changed the juvenile justice system's priority from trying to rehabilitate young offenders to simply trying to punish them as harshly as possibly.

What are the results of all this? Now, in Texas, young, first time recreational users, who could have been turned away from drugs at this early stage by some sort of treatment or prevention programs, instead face long sentences in Texas jails. There they will be exposed for years to some of the state's hardest criminals. As studies have shown, once exposed to time in jail, people are much more likely to offend again. A Florida study showed that juvenile offenders who were tried as adults (and incarcerated in adult prisons) were over 50% more likely to end up as repeat offenders, primarily because they had spent such an impressionable time with hardened criminals.

This, of course, flies against every responsibility Bush has imposed on himself. His own youthful indiscretions were simply bad judgments from which he learned valuable life lessons (or so he says). Thousands of young Texans these days aren't getting the same opportunity to learn from their mistakes. In fact, there are 7,400 people in Texas state prisons for marijuana crimes (3,100 are in jail for nothing more than possession). 5,700 more people are in Texas's county jails for possession only. That's 8,800 people who aren't getting the opportunity to learn from mistakes but, instead, are being subjected to the horrors of the Texas prison system. 28,000 people were arrested for cocaine last year alone. That all adds up. An astounding 21% of Texas' prison population of 150,000 people are there for drug offenses. Remember, Texas itself has nearly 10% of the country's prison population - it's the world's largest prison system. 700 out of every 100,000 Texans are in jail (that's well above the national average of 452). Texas jails are overflowing with recreational drug users. But all this getting "tuff" on crime hasn't helped. In fact, the draconian measures Bush has taken have hurt. Drug use has not declined overall. Among the most impressionable group, teens, drug use is actually up a whopping 30% under Bush. I guess Bush's overhaul of juvenile crime laws is working splendidly.

While Bush's record on drugs is bad enough, what is truly shamefully are not the laws of the state (which are plenty bad) but the court system that imposes them. Bob Hebert of the New York Times said it best, "if more Americans were aware of what was going on there, Texas would be a laughing stock." From providing competent counsel for initial defense to the thoroughness of the appeals process to the life and death decisions about those on Death Row, Texas' system is completely lacking and Bush has acted to keep it that way. As state senator Rodney Ellis argues, "If we're going to lead the nation in incarcerations and executions, then we should at least make sure the defendants get effective legal representation." Unfortunately, this is not the case, especially for poor and minority defendants.

The major problem with the Texas judicial system is that indigent defendants receive absolutely terrible representation. In many cases, defendants can spend months in jail before they ever see a lawyer and then they only see him or her briefly on the day of the trial. Most states require defendants to see representation within 72 hours. One Texas lawyer claims that this problem is so prevalent, most of his clients had spent at least a month in jail. "My most recent client was in jail for 79 days before I was appointed to represent him." 79 days waiting in jail for a lawyer and this defendant was accused only of four counts of theft by check for less that $500.

Even when an indigent defendant in Texas can get a lawyer that does not mean that he will be getting a fair trial or competent representation. A study by Columbia law professor James Liebman found that the rate of reversible errors (errors that could have been avoided and seriously undermined the reliability of the sentence) in Texas capital cases to be 52%.

That the rate is so high is no wonder. The lawyers appointed to indigent defendant are often inexperienced, incompetent, unethical or some combination of the three. A Washington Post study of sixteen Texas death penalty cases (cases which should have received the most attention - after all lives were at stake) found several instances in which lawyers for the defense slept through key testimony, failed to file key papers on time (or at all) or were later cited for professional misconduct.

It's hard to believe that lawyers in a death penalty case could sleep through key testimony, but in Texas it apparently happens quite often. Calvin Burdine is on Death Row. His lawyer was Joe Frank Cannon. According to the clerk of the trial judge, Cannon "was asleep for long periods of time during the questioning of witnesses." Cannon was so incompetent that even the prosecutor thought that he should never work another capital case.

Carl Johnson was Bush's 12^th executee. He also had the unfortune of being represented by Cannon. As with Burdine, Cannon slept through almost all of Johnson's trial. David Dow, a law professor from the University of Houston who took over Johnson's appeal, studied the transcripts of the case. "It was like there was nobody in the room for Johnson," Dow said of Cannon's performance. "[the transcript] goes on and on for pages and pages and there's not a whisper from anyone representing him." Cannon's court appointed counsel, Phillip Scardino, was two years out of law school, "All I could do was nudge him sometimes and try to wake him up."

These are just two examples of lawyers sleeping through capital cases. There are more. And if this is happening when the defendant's life is on the line, imagine what is happening when the charges are more minor.

It's hard to believe things could be worse for defendants than having their representation sleep through their trial, but they could and are. Many defendants are appointed lawyers who are not only disinterested but also have a history of unethical behavior.

The Chicago Tribune did an in-depth study of the cases of the first 131 people Bush executed. It found that in 43 of the 131 cases the attorneys appointed had been sanctioned for unethical behavior either before or since their cases. 34 had been suspended or disbarred. Nine had been reprimanded.

The lawyer for death row inmate Joe Lee Guy has since acknowledged that, during the trial, he was "an active alcoholic" and cocaine user. He was later unable to file needed appeals on Guy's behalf because he had been disbarred by the State Bar.

The list of harms goes on and on. The lawyer for Ray Westley, Ron Mock, was arrested in court for failing to file legal papers in another death penalty case. He also neglected to even read the transcript of a previous trial that contained information that would have undermined the prosecution's case. Houston lawyer Brian Wice reviewed the case thoroughly as part of Westley's appeal. He thought Mock was so inept that "a breakdown of the adversarial process" occurred. Westley was later executed. Mock was disciplined a total of five times and was even thrown in jail. He represented four Bush executees.

Texas is not only providing its defendants with incompetent counsel, but it also often pays professional witnesses to testify against defendants even when they have no knowledge of the case.

Take the case of David Wayne Stoker. The star witness against him, Corey Todd, was paid $1000 by a crime stoppers group and had drug charges against him dropped. He lied to the jury about being paid. The police chief and the DA's investigator prosecuting the case both testified that the crime stoppers group didn't even exist. In actuality, the investigator, Riley Rogers was one of the crime stoppers group's founders and was directly linked to the payment to Todd.

Perhaps the worst example of this practice is "Dr. Death," James P. Grigson. Grigson is a psychiatrist who has been expelled from the American Psychiatry Association for unethical practices. He testifies in capital cases for a living - so far 166 cases including Stoker's. Grigson charges $150 an hour and makes $150,000 in a good year just from testifying in capital cases. The thing about his testimony is that he never actually examines the defendants. He has a scale of "sociopathness" (from 1-10) by which he rates defendants. He usually places defendants at 10 or higher on his scale even though, again, he has NEVER talked to them. In Stoker's case, Grigson testified that Stoker would "absolutely" be violent again. As always, Grigson never examined Stoker.

One of the major reasons that defense counsel is so bad in Texas is that counsel are appointed by elected judges. Unlike other states, there are very few public defender offices, so public defense is not an independent entity. Since judges in Texas need to win elections to get to be judges, they, like other elected official, need to raise money and make connections for their campaigns. Thus, appointments to defend indigent clients in capital and other cases, which can be very lucrative for the appointed attorney, are often handed out to lawyers who have helped the judge in previous elections. In a recent poll of state judges a surprising 25% even admitted that they operated in such a manner.

If counsel provided for initial defense in Texas is bad, the ability of indigent defendants to mount an effective appeal is equally limited. First of all, in Texas there is a limit to the amount of time a defendant has to present new evidence: 30 days. That means irrefutable proof of innocence could turn up on day 31 and the defendant would still be up a creek without a paddle. This happened in the case of James Beathard who was convicted on the testimony of his co-defendant who admitted to the murder and implicated Beathard as well. The co-defendant later recounted and admitted that he was solely responsible for the crime but the appeals court refused Beathard's appeal because it came eleven months too late.

It is so difficult to get an appeal in Texas that the reversal rate on death sentences in Texas in just 8 in 264. That's right. Of the 264 death penalty cases reviewed by the Court of Criminal Appeals, only eight were overturned. For comparison, Florida, which has the nation's second most populated Death Row, reverses 50% of its death penalty cases on appeal. The proper reversal rate is probably somewhere between the two, but you would think that when it comes to the death penalty it'd be better to err on the safe side. Apparently Texas disagrees.

The sixth amendment to the Constitution requires that all defendants receive the assistance of counsel. The Supreme Court has ruled that this counsel must not be "ineffective," or the conviction won against such counsel must be overturned. Texas must have a much lower standard of "effectiveness" than the rest of the country. The appeals court has upheld at least three cases in recent years which defense counsel has slept through the trial. In one of those cases the judge ruled that while the court requires that a defendant be represented by a lawyer, it "doesn't say the lawyer has to be awake." The Court of Appeals has rejected the requests of Westley, Johnson and many of the others described above even though the defendants had either incompetent or unethical counsel.

Perhaps the absolute rock bottom for the appeals court was the case of Cesar Fierro. The Court of Criminal Appeals rejected his request for a new trial in 1996 despite the fact that everyone involved with the case (the prosecutor, the local district court judge - everyone!) agreed that Fierro had confessed to the murder he was convicted for only after Mexican police had raided his parents' home and threatened to torture his stepfather with an electrical current applied to his genitals. It sounds unbelievable, but it's completely true. El Paso police record show that the police knew that Fierro's parents had been kidnapped and the prosecutor in charge of the case said in a sworn affidavit that El Paso and Juarez (the Mexican town where his parents lived) detectives had "colluded to coerce Fierro's confession." Prosecutor Gary Weisner had this to say, "our job is to do justice?. I cannot believe he hasn't gotten a new trial. It flies in the teeth of the Constiution."

If the Court of Criminal Appeals fails there is one last check before the case comes to the governor's desk: the Board of Pardons and Paroles. The Board is made up of eighteen members, all appointed by the governor. Its duty is to review cases in which the defendant has requested clemency or continues to maintain his innocence, both capital cases and other cases. That sound like a good idea and, indeed, it would be if the Board actually took the time to really look into these cases. Judge Sam Sparks, who sits on the Federal District Court in Austin, reviewed the actions of the Board in 1998. He found, incredibly, that in 25 years the Board had never conducted a hearing for a single case, capital or other. It had never conducted an investigation. In fact, the Board had never even held a meeting of its members, even by conference calls. Instead, the Board simply votes on each case by fax. It never had to justify its decision in any way to the public or anyone else, so there's no way of knowing its reasoning. Sparks called the Board's methods "appalling," and concluded that "the Board would not have to sacrifice its conservative ideology to carry out its duties in a more fair and accurate fashion."

Obviously the justice system in Texas is lacking. As Hebert says, it is a complete farce. People in Texas, especially poor people, don't get the effective legal representation the Constitution of this nation demands. Instead of trying to ensure that defendants in Texas have their rights preserved, the Texas legal system, at every level, is more interested in expedience and vengeance - even if that vengeance might be undeserved. The question is, of course, how does George W. Bush fit into this equation? What role has he played in making the justice system what it is? In truth, Bush cannot be blamed for making the justice system in Texas the monster that it is; it's been like this for quite some time. That being said, Bushhas had ample opportunity to make things better, to reform the system. He claims that he is a "reformer with results." When it comes to justice, he is anything but. He has blocked several attempts at the most modest improvements in the system. Instead, he has chosen to strongly defend and endorse the system as it is. Ivins, who knows a thing or two about Texas having written about it for decades, noted justly: "at every turn where he could have done something to make the system less savagely punitive, he went out of his way to do just the opposite."

As I noted earlier, most states require that defendants be appointed an attorney within 72 hours. In Texas there is no limit on how long a defendant can be kept in jail before seeing a lawyer. This remains to be the case because of Bush. The GOP controlled state Senate and the Texas House unanimously passed a bill that would have required that a lawyer be appointed for defendants within twenty days. We're not talking about bringing Texas standards up to the national norm here, we're talking about twenty days - a modest improvement at best but still an improvement. Bush vetoed the bill.

As I argued above, it's rather universally agreed in Texas that one of the root causes of the incompetence of the attorneys provided to indigent defendants is the patronage system at work with Texas judges and the defense counsel they appoint. The Texas Legislature passed another bill that would have taken the power of appointment away from the elected judges and given it to county officials who could have then created dedicated public defender offices. Bush vetoed this bill too, saying it "inappropriately takes appointment authority away from judges, who are better able to assess the quality of legal representation." In reality, Bush's veto had more to do with a desire not to piss off Texas judges who are a powerful political force.

There's more still. One important step in the criminal appeals process is the filing of a habeas corpus petition. Such a petition is usually filled by a new appellate lawyer and can ask the court to throw out the defendant's conviction based on constitutional violations that can include "ineffective counsel." Previously, Death Row inmates would wait for years until they were appointed a qualified lawyer to file such appeals. Bush pushed through a bill that "streamlined" this process by requiring the court to appoint a habeas corpus lawyer immediately upon conviction and requiring that the petition itself be filed within 180 days. (It's somewhat ironic that Bush would limit the time a defendant is allowed to wait in an attempt to get a competent attorney, but won't limit the time a defendant can be forced to wait in jail with none at all, isn't it?) The result of this bill is that, now, inexperienced and inadequate attorneys are handling these cases and defendants are having appeals filled on their behalf that are simply complete garbage. Even worse, some defendants are appointed such incompetent lawyers that they miss the deadline entirely and never have their appeal heard. This was the case for James Beathard. Bush managed to compound the damage of this bill even further by pushing for another clause that disallowed "successive" petitions. This means that once a habeas corpus petition is filled, the defendant cannot file a second. So, if an incompetent attorney fails to address some important issue in his original petition, the defendant can never bring up those issues again even if they are completely valid. That's what happened to Ricky Kerr. What makes this even worse is that federal courts, who often review cases after they have been heard at the state level, may only consider arguments previously raised in the state courts. Thus, this law means that arguments that aren't raised in the original petition are lost completely. Shouldn't we demand more than that especially if a man's life is on the line? George W. Bush apparently doesn't think so.

Bush also deserves blame for the nonchalant way the Board of Pardons and Parole approaches its duties. After all, it is Bush who appoints its members to their cushy, $85,000 a year jobs. One would think that he would demand at least a meeting or two out of them every now and then, but no. He has stated that he sees no need for change. He backed that position up in 1999, when representative Elliot Naishtat introduced a bill in the Legislature that would have made modest improvements to the system. It would have required only that the Board hold a single public hearing if a prisoner on Death Row requested his sentence be commuted. The board would still be allowed to vote in secret, would still not be required to make public its reasoning. No other guidelines were set. The only provision was for a single public hearing. Bush went ballistic, claiming that all a public hearing would do is cause people to "rant and rave" and get overly emotional about the issue. With the governor in full opposition, the bill died.

Bush himself, of course, has the power as governor to commute sentences and grant clemency. I will go into this in more detail below. For the moment, the knowledge that Bush has this power is sufficient. For some reason he has been very hesitant to use it even when the need for its use was clear. The best example of this is the rape case of Kevin Byrd. In 1985, Byrd was convicted of raping a pregnant woman on the testimony of the victim who saw him in a grocery store a full four months after the crime and identified him there as the culprit. There was no other evidence and this was before DNA testing could have proved his innocence. Twelve years later, all of which Byrd spent in jail, a friend of his gave him enough money to finally get a DNA test done. The test proved conclusively that Byrd could not have been the rapist. The district judge in the case, the district attorney, who was as big a "tuff on crime" Republican as you can find, and all eighteen members of the Board of Pardons and Parole all recommended that Bush pardon Byrd. Bush refused and demanded that "all other legal remedies [be] exhausted." Byrd had to raise money to send his case through the appellate courts even though the DA in the case had made it well known that he thought Byrd was innocent and would not retry Byrd if the court ordered a new trial (instead he would drop the charges). Bush eventually granted the pardon in the end, but only after Byrd was made to run in circles for a good while longer. Why Bush wouldn't grant a pardon when everyone in the case agreed Byrd deserved it is a total mystery? I don't know why anyone would do such a thing, but I will tell you this: it wasn't the compassionate thing to do.

The deficiencies of the Texas court system affect all of its cases, but the most egregious impact is, of course, on those defendants facing the death penalty. The mistakes made in Texas courts can't be taken back after a defendant had been given a lethal injection.

In Texas, as in every state, there is a final check to prevent against wrongful executions: the governor himself. In his five years as governor, Bush has presided over upwards of 130 executions. By the time November rolls around, that number will have eclipsed 150. Bush has taken action in exactly two of these cases and he has never opposed the Board when it has recommended death (though he was willing to oppose it when that meant keeping Kevin Byrd in jail).

Bush claims that he is 100% certain that no one has been wrongly executed during his tenure, saying "There's no doubt in my mind that each person who's been executed in our state was guilty of the crime committed." How can he be so certain when the state's judicial system is how it is? Others in the know in Texas are anything but certain and they have good reason. There is plenty of evidence that Bush has put his "tuff on crime" record ahead of the lives of quite possibly innocent defendants.

To make a decision on Bush's complicity in executing innocent people we must first be fair about his role in the process. The governor of Texas may grant a 30 day stay of execution of a defendant only once per defendant without the Board of Pardons and Parole's approval. He may also commute a sentence from death to life in prison, but he may only do so if the Board votes to recommend such action.

It does sound like Bush's power, in this case, is limited. In all actuality, however, he has more influence than it seems. First, you must remember that the Board is made up of Bush appointees who owe their cushy, high paid jobs to the benevolence of Bush. There is no doubt that, should Bush have wanted to oppose the death of any of those he has executed he could have simply directed the board to recommend such a stance. David Dow, the University of Houston law professor, certainly think this is the case, "all the governor has to do is communicate his wishes to the members of the Board who are, after all, his political appointees, and they will do exactly as he wants."

Acknowledging that Bush does, in fact, have the power to stop most executions should he chose, the question then becomes: has he chosen to allow the executions of any innocent men or women? Without even looking at any Texas cases (which we will) one could make a convincing argument, on national statistics and trends alone, that indeed he has.

Over the past three years, 27 Death Row inmates have been exonerated nationwide. Even though Texas is by far the nation's leader in executions, it saw a total of seven exonerations over the fifteen year period between 1983 and 1997. Something doesn't match up about those numbers. Another shocking statistic has been provided by the FBI. Of the first 18,000 DNA samples, taken from the principle suspects in rape or rape-murder cases, analyzed by the FBI a striking 26% excluded that suspect forthwith. That shows just how often the system can be wrong - fully ¼ cases wrong right off the bat. Seven reversals in 15 fifteen years is a lot worse than 25%. Indeed, attorney David Latimer, who represented Stoker thinks that "It is statistically inconceivable that no innocent people have been executed or will be executed. The Texas system is not infallible."

Illinois has seen a string of exonerations (13 since 1977) mostly due to the investigation work of a law class at Northwestern University. Its Republican Governor, George Ryan, who also happens to be Bush's Illinois campaign manager, made the politically courageous decision earlier in the year to implement a moratorium on executions until the state's system could be improved and the guilt of those facing execution could be assured. Ryan said, "I cannot support a system which, in its administration, has proven so fraught with error and has come so close to the ultimate nightmare, the state's taking of innocent life." Ryan didn't simply decide to let all his Death Row inmates out onto the streets. They're still in jail and they still will likely face execution some day. But doesn't it make sense to put a hold on things if you think your system is sub-standard? George W. Bush doesn't think so. Even though Texas' system is, by far, more fraught with error and even though Texas executes far more people than Illinois ever will, Bush believes that the kind of action Governor Ryan took in Illinois is not needed in Texas. This is especially troubling considering that at least four Texas inmates have, in recent years, been cleared of their guilt by the same kind of extensive outside investigation that occurred in Illinois. This, of course, happened only after the Texas judicial system failed to clear these innocent men.

The national understanding that there are major problems with our nation's death penalty system has been growing steadily and now includes many noted people from all over the death penalty spectrum. It's not just left wing, anti-death penalty protesters that are calling for moratoriums these days, but some of the most vocal death penalty supporters as well who, like Governor Ryan, understand that, while the death penalty may be an important deterrent to crime, it's just not worth it if innocent people are being killed. A group of decorated law enforcement officials and other public servants, including William Sessions, the former Texas judge and head of the FBI, have recently joined together to form the National Committee to Prevent Wrongful Executions. They have called for a reexamination of the entire process and sited four main concerns:

• Inadequate provision of counsel
• Short filing deadlines
• Limits on evidentiary hearings
• The execution of juveniles and the mentally ill.

All four of the concerns on their list are frightfully prevalent in Texas.

Of course, simply relying on national statistics to judge whether or not innocents have been executed under Bush would be unfair. Perhaps the execution rate in Texas is so high and the reversal rate so low because there have been a lot of guilty defendants and few innocent ones. It's an unlikely premise, but not impossible. But when you know what goes on in the Texas system it makes the premise seem even more far-fetched. Remember, Texas's system of appointment by patronage has led to an epidemic of incompetence at the trial level with lawyers sleeping through cases, missing filing deadlines or behaving unethically. Even knowing this, Texas has the lowest appeals success rate in the country. Remember, according to Texas appeals courts, sleeping lawyers are "effective" counsel. The Board of Pardons has never met and never discloses its reasoning. It too has a shamefully low reversal rate. And, just for fun, Texas is one of the few states that will execute defendants who committed crimes as juveniles as well as the mentally ill. Hell, Texas even took an inmate who was in intensive care off a respirator so they could inject him. Yeeeee haaaa!!!!

Those in the know about Texas certainly are skeptical about Bush's claims. Elisabeth Semel, who heads the American Bar Association's Death Penalty Representation Project, says, "at every stage of the death penalty process, Texas is far below any measure of adequacy in terms of the legal representation it provides." Judge Hayden W. Head, speaking of the case of Johnny Martinez specifically and Texas' system in general said, "I'll tell you something I don't like what we're doing. Somehow the rush to take Johnny Joe Martinez's life is unimpressive?.I don't know what's holding up the state of Texas from giving competent counsel to persons who have been sentenced to die." Paddy Burwell is a Bush appointee on the Board of Pardons and Parole. "I worry that we may execute an innocent person," he says. "I think our system needs to be improved." Judge Charles Baird, who sits on the Court of Criminal Appeals had this to say about Bush's confidence, "Everyone in Texas hopes and prays that that's the case. I do not share his view."

Simply knowing how the Texas system is and looking at the kind of national statistics I have provided is petty damaging evidence against Bush's claim on a clean conscience. The most damaging evidence, however, is found by simply examining a sample of the cases of the people Bush has put to death.

I've examined several cases above that demonstrate the flaws in processes of the Texas Justice system. But I've just delved into the system itself. Certainly these people deserved better representation. Still, it is quite possible that they were, in fact guilty, I really don't know (regardless, it's a travesty that a state like Texas could allow such terrible representation). There are plenty of cases whose facts show that guilt is, at best, uncertain and, at worst, almost completely unlikely. I'll look at three of them

Let's take a look at the case of Jerry Lee Hogue who was also executed in 1998. Hogue was convicted of brutally beating and raping a woman and then tying her up and burning her house to the ground with her in it. Two other residents of the house who survived, Steve Rennick and Mindy Crawford implicated Hogue, who had known the three residents for only a few days. Hogue said that Rennick had done it. Neither were given a polygraph test. The jury believed Rennick and Crawford (the record of Hogue's previous conviction for raping his ex-wife helped) and thus Hogue was executed in 1998. What makes this more interesting is not what happened 20 years ago, but what happened much more recently. First, Hogue's rape conviction had since been thrown out after new evidence cleared him. More important, just weeks before Hogue was to be executed, Rennick was charged with an arson eerily similar to the 1979 blaze that landed Hogue on Death Row. Joseph Stewart, who investigated the 1998 arson, looked into the 1979 arson as well and found the two very similar. Worried that an innocent man was going to be executed, he pressed on. On the morning of Hogue's execution, Stewart got a break. A female associate of Rennick's signed a sworn statement claiming that Rennick had bragged to her about the 1979 killing. "She had no reason to lie to me," Stewart says of the woman. "From experience, I've gotten pretty good (at judging) when somebody's being truthful. And from all indications, she appeared to be telling the truth to me." Now extremely doubtful of Hogue's guilt, Stewart faxed the statement to Bush's office and asked the governor to stay the execution. Bush did nothing. What is even more depressing about this case is that new technology meant that a DNA test comparing Hogue's DNA to evidence from the 1979 might have been able to decide the issue conclusively one way or another. The test would have taken eight hours and cost $4,000. Bush knew that too. When Bush did not stay the execution, Stewart was shocked. ."I was just in disbelief. I figured he'd been in there 20 years. What was 30 days if there was some doubt." The thing that irks me the most about this case is its similarity to the case of Ricky McGinn. McGinn recently received a stay from Bush so that DNA testing could be done. There was a lot less new evidence on the side of McGinn than there was on the side of Hogue. Why, then, did McGinn receive a stay but Hogue did not? McGinn's execution, of course, came smack dab in the middle of a presidential campaign in which Bush was trying to establish his credentials as a "compassionate conservative." What better way of doing that than giving a stay of execution to a man whom you know will end being executed anyway in the end, right? Did Bush spare McGinn but sacrifice Hogue due to politics alone? Who can say for sure? That is something you'll have to decide for yourself. Jim Harrington, the director of the Texas Civil Rights Project in Austin, certainly thinks so, "there seems to be a torrent of mercy now that there's a political campaign going on. I think his advisers look at it in the pure political calculus. He's been taking a drubbing on this issue, particularly in his outlandish position that the Texas system is just about perfect."

The death penalty case that has gotten the most press is the execution of Gary Graham. Graham was convicted of the 1981 murder of Bobby Lambert outside a supermarket in Houston. It was called a robbery. Gary Graham was a bad man, there is no doubt about that. He admitted to a crime and robbery spree over the weeks before Lambert's murder, so he makes a compelling suspect. The murder of Lambert, however, Graham never admitted to; as he was dragged to the lethal injection chamber he was still kicking and screaming in protesting his innocence. It's hard to take the side of an avowed criminal like Graham. But, in this case, there may be good reason to. First of all, the motive for the crime was given as robbery, but the victim was found with $6,000 in his back pocket. That's an awful lot of money to leave on a robbery victim. More troubling, Graham was convicted on the strength of a single eyewitness who saw the crime from about 40 yards away in her car and says she saw the killer only for a couple of seconds. She was able to pick Graham out of a lineup, but only after she had been shown his picture by police BEFORE the lineup (she wasn't shown the picture of any of the other men in the lineup). Two other witnesses to the crime were completely unable to identify Graham and did not pick him out of the same lineup. Graham's lawyer was the same Ron Mock who has arrested for incompetence in Ray Westley's case. In Graham's case he failed to ever even interview the two other eyewitnesses who were unable to identify Graham; thus the jury never heard of them. Additionally, the gun that Graham had on his possession when he was arrested was ruled out as the murder weapon which was never found. Three of Graham's twelve jurors say that they never would have voted to convict had they had access to all of the evidence. Juror Bobby Pryor: "my gut feeling was he wasn't guilty. I just believe he might be innocent." Graham had quite a record, and there's no way I am going to tell you that this evidence totally clears him. What it does do, however, is cast a whole heck of a lot of doubt upon his guilt, and aren't we supposed to be proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt? Shouldn't we be safe when it comes to executing people? Again, Bush did not think so even though he had all the evidence that the jury did not.

The case in which there is the most evidence that Bush executed an innocent man is that of David Wayne Spence. Spence was convicted by two separate juries of sexually assaulting and murdering three teenage girls at Lake Waco (a Waco, Texas park) in 1982. The evidence against Spence seemed to be overwhelming. Spence's two co-defendants testified against him. A forensic odontologist said that bite marks on two of the girls could only have been made by Spence. Seven jailhouse informants testified that Spence had bragged about the killings. That's pretty overwhelming. It was all a house of cards.

It was later revealed that the state had withheld evidence from Spence's original attorneys that there were other suspects. In fact, the police had identified several other suspects including Terry Harper. It also turns out that, of the twenty or so people on the lake that night, none had mentioned seeing Spence or his codefendants. Several said that they had seen Harper there that evening.

Several witnesses also claimed that Harper, who had a long record of assaults including several against teenagers at the same lake, had boasted to them about the murders including three who said he had done so before the murders were reported by news outlets. Harper's alibi was that he was at home watching Dynasty. But Dynasty was not on TV the night of the murders.

The bite marks had only been discovered a year after the victims were buried when a prosecutor looking at photos of the victims decided that lacerations on two of the girls' necks were actually bite marks. A blind panel of experts convened by Spence's appellate lawyers years after the trial could not even conclude that the marks were from teeth at all and ruled Spence's out if they, in fact, were.

The testimony of Spence's codefendants was suspect as well. At first, they testified that the bodies of the victims were transported using Spence's white station wagon. When the prosecutor found out that Spence had bought his station wagon AFTER the murders took place, the codefendants' testimony changed. They now indicated that the vehicle used was the gold Malibu Spence owned at the time of the murders. When investigators took a look at the car, though, they found zero evidence that the car had been used to carry three bloody bodies. The codefendants changed their testimony yet again, this time claiming that the trio used Gilbert Melendez (one of the co defendants, the other was Gilbert's brother Anthony) pick-up truck for the moving. The only problem with this is that Gilbert's mechanic testified that the truck was in the shop and up on blocks at the time.

Gilbert also testified that the victims were "screaming" and "hollering" during the attack. Yet, they were found gagged. Later Gilbert changed his testimony to say that the victims were gagged AFTER they were killed. Huh?

Well after the trial, Gilbert finally admitted that he had made the whole thing up because the detective investigating, Truman Simons, had promised him immunity. His brother Anthony had claimed he implicated Spence because he wanted to avoid the death sentence. The Court of Appeals ruled, however, that the Melendez' recantations were not credible because no one would be foolish enough to admit to a murder that they did not commit if would land them in jail for life. There have, however, been several examples of just such cases, especially when police intimidation was involved (like Cesar Fierro)

Two of the jailhouse informants who has implicated Spence also later admitted that their story was a complete lie. One, Jesse Ivy, signed an sworn affidavit in which he said: "You could say that Truman Simons and [district attorney] Ned Butler put the facts of the case in my mouth, and I put them into the mouths of the other guys in the jail." Ivy says that, in return for his false testimony, he was promised conjugal visits. Another jailhouse snitch corroborated this: "We all fabricated our accounts of Spence confessing in order to try to get a break from the State on our cases." It's worthy of note that, by admitting to false testimony, these inmates are subjecting themselves to perjury charges, so it's rather unlikely they are lying now.

This evidence is completely overwhelming. There can be no doubt in any reasonable person's mind that Spence was innocent. He simply did not commit the murder. He was set up by Truman Simons and his execution was nothing short of murder. Bush could have stopped it. He had all of this information. The jury did not, so it's understandable that they convicted. How the appeals court could not have ordered a new trial is completely lost on me. How Bush could have denied clemency is also beyond imagination. Spence's lawyer Raoul Schoenemann thinks so too, "The governor had a lot more information available to him than the jury, and there is no way a rational person looking at it would believe Spence was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The standard for a governor should not be less than for a jury. If there's significant doubt, he should commute. We're not asking that he let him go home."

Bush had his spokesman release a statement on the case that included this: "In reviewing requests for reprieve, the Governor examines whether the applicant has had full access to the courts and whether there exists any credible new evidence indicating that the applicant is innocent. Spence's application failed to meet these standards of review, and thus his application was denied." I guess none of the thirteen above pieces of evidence are credible in the mind of Bush. Personally, I find Bush's lack of action on this case disgusting.

All of this evidence on all of these cases. All of the problems with the system. All of this and Bush is still absolutely certain that he has never presided over the execution of an innocent man. Bush reviewed all of these cases. He has access to all of the information that was presented here. He still has decided that he was 100% sure that these men should die. Keep in mind that it's not like the other option is to let these men walk free - had Bush granted clemency they still would have faced life in prison. As Alan Berlow of Salon.com says, "what Bush and his lawyers seem to require from those on death row is absolute proof of innocence. Such a standard applied in a court of law would, of course, be viewed as un-American." What I wonder is, in all of this, where was George W. Bush's vaunted "compassion?"

Another issue that is almost as emotionally powerful as the death penalty, and one that certainly affects more people, is guns.

When it comes to guns, Bush has always known where his bread was buttered. He has always been lock, stock and barrel, in the pocket of the NRA. As Jake Tapper of Salon says, "Whether you agree with him or not, that's where he is, that's where he's been and no doubt that's where he will continue to be." When Bush won the governor's mansion in 1994, the NRA's magazine ran a huge headline declaring that "Gun Owner's Win Big!." His time in Texas certainly hasn't disappointed the NRA. It even says so. Ralph Talbot, who heads the Texas State Rifle Association, the state arm of the NRA, is all about Bush: "he's been willing to talk to the NRA over firearm issues since he's been governor?. He has not been against our issues." When asked if he could think of an instance when Bush had opposed the NRA, Talbot said no, "I can't think of any in recent time."

What exactly has Bush done that NRA liked to much? Allowing concealed weapons must top their list. He passed a bill that Richards had vetoed that allowed Texans to carry a concealed firearm if they had a permit. This original bill contained an exception that barred concealed weapons from churches and synagogues. Bush, apparently, thought that exception was still a threat to the rights of every red-blodded Texan. So, he got rid of the exception too and now, if you're in Texas, you can pack some major heat when you go to church on Sunday. This went over pretty big in Texas which must be the most pro-gun state in the nation (Texas Senator Phil Graham has one of the all time best pro-gunner quotes: [insert Texas twang here] "well, I got more guns than I need, but less guns than I want"). But, with a nation already awash in guns, with guns being brought to school, do we really need to allow concealed guns in church let alone anywhere else?

Bush also gave the gun industry (with the NRA's enthusiastic blessing) a big fat gift. He signed a law that bars local jurisdictions from suing gun-makers. We have seen how much Bush hates "frivolous lawsuits," he must hate it the most when they are directed at the gun or tobacco industry. As localities around the US have found out over the past few years, lawsuits against gun makers have been one of the best means of reducing the flood of cheap handguns into the hands of criminals (several gun insiders have come forward over the past few years admitting that gun-makers knew that a large portion of the guns they made were funneled directly to illegal and criminal holders).

Bush has also pushed "child protection" laws in Texas. That sounds like a good thing until you look at what is really in the laws. The laws call for schools to start "gun safety programs" based on the NRA model. In reality these programs aren't much more than pro-NRA indoctrinations. " When you read it," Joe Sudbay, the director of Handgun Control Inc., says about a 1995 law, "you see the specific provisions in the law saying schools should star gun safety programs modeled on the NRA program 'Eddie the Eagle.'" 'Eddie the Eagle' is the NRA's version of Joe Camel, "basically an indoctrination program for kids," according to Sudbay.

Bush claims all sorts of gun control positions on his web site, but he has failed to act on any of these "positions" in Texas. For instance, Bush claims to support a ban on juveniles owning assault weapons. There is no such law in Texas and Bush has never taken steps to introduce one. Bush claims to support an increase in the minimum age to posses a handgun from 18 to 21, but Texas is one of the few states that has no minimum age for handgun possession. Bush, again, has taken no steps to change this.

One of the more contentious issues in the gun debate is the loophole for background checks at gun shows. Currently, you must be able to pass a background check to buy a gun in a gun shop. But at gun shows there is no such requirement. Thus, a criminal who would not be able to buy a gun at a regular store is able to walk away with a gun from a gun show on the same day. In Texas, Bush actually opposed a bill that would have required background checks at gun shows. Without his support, the bill died in committee, ironically on the same day as the tragic shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. The day after Columbine, Bush announced that he was, in fact, in support of gun show background checks even though he had just helped kill a bill specifically for them. Did he ever attempt to help revive that bill? No.

Bush also reacted to the political climate of the nation on trigger locks. He had consistently opposed trigger locks, going so far as to ridicule John McCain in the primaries over his support of mandatory trigger locks, yet on the day of the Million Mom March for gun control, Bush came out with a voluntary plan for Texans to get trigger locks. It's somewhat ironic that Bush didn't come up with this program to help Texans until he was in the midst of a presidential campaign and faced with the pro-gun control Million Mom March.

One of Bush's arguments against gun control, and specifically against the Clinton administration, is that present gun laws are not properly enforced and that, if we did that, we wouldn't need new gun laws. Enforcement is certainly important, but suggesting that new gun laws couldn't help as well seems silly to me. What is really silly is that, while he is criticizing others, Texas itself has been negligent on the enforcement of its own gun laws.

In Texas, to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon you have to complete a training course in proper firearms use. To take the course you have to provide your own gun. During Bush's tenure, over 750 convicted felons have undergone this training and applied for the permit. They were, rightly, denied that permit but that is all. Texas should have referred their names to federal prosecutors as the law prohibits convicted felons from owning guns in the first place and these felons had to have owned guns to take the training course. That means that there are more than 750 felons running around in Texas with guns that Texas authorities know about. Nina Butts of Texans Against Handgun Violence takes Bush to task for such lapses: "If the Bush administration were truly serious about enforcing laws on the books they would go after these people."

According to Butts, Bush has also been lax on gun laws in Texas that are supposed to punish people who leave guns accessible to children. She says these laws are "woefully under enforced. I only know of one conviction."

Gun violence costs the US over $20 billion a year in medical costs and lost productivity. A young person is killed by a gun eight times a day. Four people are killed with guns every hour. We have stricter laws on lawn mowers and chainsaws. Yet Bush has opposed even the most moderate and sensible measures to improve the situation in Texas and it has had an impact. A study by the Violence Policy Center shows that since Bush's concealed carry law went into effect, an average of two licensees have been arrested for gun crimes every day. Violent crime has been on the decline all across the nation, but it has fallen only half as fast in Texas as it has in states without concealed carry laws. As John Rosenthal, the chairman of Stop Handgun Violence, Inc., says, when it comes to guns, "what you see with Governor Bush is as bad a record as one exists."

Bush's grandest claim is that he has presided over a Texas education "miracle." He sights rising test scores and a narrowing racial gap. But are there really improvements and, if so, was Bush really the driving force? Taking anything more than a cursory look suggests that the gains seen in Texas were minimal and that those gains that can be counted had more to do with polices implemented by Bush's predecessor than with anything he did. Moreover, there are some strikingly disturbing side effects that should worry anyone about what Bush would do to our children's education should he become president.

One of the biggest problems facing Texas schools in the early '90s was the incredible discrepancy between the funding Texas public schools in rich, predominately white, districts received and the funding schools in poorer, predominately minority, districts got. The Texas Supreme Court ordered the state to come up with a plan to fix this funding gap and it did during the Richards administration: Robin Hood. So called because it basically, like the hero of legend, took from the rich and gave to the poor, Robin Hood reduced the funding for some of Texas' richest school and sent that money to the poorest. Texas pays for education with property taxes; what Robin Hood basically did was use some of the taxes collected in rich areas (that have much more valuable property and thus much higher tax revenue) and funnel it to schools in areas with lower property values. It was approved by the Texas Supreme Court in 1994, before Bush took office. Robin Hood has been the driving force behind what improvement Texas has seen, and Bush simply hates it.

Before Robin Hood, rich, white districts in Texas were able to spend an average of $6,000 per student compared to the pitiful $3,500 per students that schools in poor areas could spend. With Robin Hood in effect, poor districts are getting about $2,000 more per student now. That is quite an increase and it is making a huge difference. These schools have been able to hire more and better teachers, build better schools or fix crumbling old ones and acquire educational materials, like books and laboratory equipment, that they didn't have resources for before. Meanwhile, richer school are having to deal with slightly less money per students, but they haven't seen huge decreases and the cuts they have incurred have largely taken away only luxury items like swimming pools. One of the major benefits of Robin Hood is that was enable Texas to get its class sizes down. Smaller class sizes, especially in early grades, are one of the few things education experts agree is vitally important for a better education. Thanks to Robin Hood, Texas is now able to limit class sizes to 22 students from kindergarten to fourth grade.

For an example of how well Robin Hood works, one need only look at the city of Houston. The Deer Park school district (which is 72% white), which includes the eastern suburbs of Houston, receives a veritable bonanza in property taxes mainly because of a collection of oil refineries within the district limits. This has allowed, for instance, Fairmont Junior High to build two sparkling gyms, high tech science labs an indoor pool and to pay teachers a nice $37,000 annual salary. On the other hand, the Alief district (which is only 5% white) on the western side of Houston was on the opposite end of the funding spectrum. Alief Middle School is so run down that many classes are taught in temporary trailers behind the school. Robin Hood, however, is now forcing Deer Park residents to send 42% of their property tax income to poorer areas. This, not unexpectedly, has caused an outrage among Deer Park residents. Fairmont and other school in the district will face some losses. Fairmont will probably lose its pool and the district will lose some teachers. The district's school, however, will remain top notch. The Alief schools, meanwhile can look forward to a rebirth. Robin Hood dollars are paying for a $10 million reconstruction of the middle school, new computer labs, after school programs, education specialists and, most important, are allowing the district to raise salaries to a more competitive $33,000 (still $4,000 less than the salaries Deer Park can pay).

What does Bush think of all this? He just hates it. He never mentions Robin Hood when talking up education in Texas, and tries to play it down when forced to talk about it. Of the program Bush says, "it's a court ordered system that I tried to change." He tried to get rid of Robin Hood even though many of his own supporters acknowledge that it has been an integral factor in what improvement Texas has had. "The fact we have been able to put more resources" in the poorer districts says Texas commissioner of education, Jim Nelson, "clearly has allowed them to do things they couldn't do otherwise."

Bush, then, was not the solution to Texas' funding gap; so what has he don? Well, quite a lot actually and not all of it good. Education is an area, unlike many others which Bush has virtually ignored, in which Bush definitely has made a real attempt at improvement. His reforms, however, have not brought the kind of improvement he had hoped and have even often taken Texas backwards. We'll get to that in a bit. First we need to finish with the things Bush has not done.

Thanks largely to politically unpopular tax hikes under Anne Richards and to the national economic boom, Bush has had huge budget surpluses to work with in the last couple of session of the legislature. Even though public opinion polls in Texas showed that Texans favored spending the surplus on schools and teachers, in 1999 Bush was pushing strong for a huge tax cut. His Senate allies tried to help him get a bigger one by taking $250 million out of kindergarten, pre-kindergarten and remedial programs for ninth graders. This proposal also scraped the prospects of universal and mandatory kindergarten for all Texas children. Bush supported removing mandatory kindergarten in favor of his tax cut. This exchange was reported in the June 11, 199 issue of the Texas Observer:

Reporters: What do you think about taking a quarter of a million dollars out of the education bill and putting it into tax cuts? 
Governor: Negotiations are still ongoing, when it comes to the final form of the education bill.  Let's just see what happens.  I'm confident I'm going to have a good education bill that I'll be able to sign.  I believe we are going to have a very good education package that will have teacher pay, and good strong property tax cuts, as well as sales tax and business tax cuts. 

Reporters:  If you had to choose between tax cuts and kindergarten, what would it be? 
Governor:  I think it's best, that you'll see, as the day works, you will see we will end up with a good package that all of Texas can live with. 

Reporters: Is mandatory kindergarten important to you? 
Governor:  Mandatory kindergarten will not be in the bill.  That's already been decided. 

Reporters: What is your position on mandatory kindergarten? 
Governor:  I'll be happy with the bill if it doesn't have mandatory kindergarten. 

Reporters:  What's wrong with mandatory kindergarten? 
Governor:  We can't afford it in the state of Texas.  As I understand it, about 85 percent, as I understand it, 80 percent of the children go to kindergarten anyway. 

Reporters:  But in your priorities, tax cuts are more important that mandatory kindergarten? 
Governor:   My priority is a fully financed education system should go hand in hand with tax cuts.  Wait until you see what the product is before you are guessing.  I know you're anxious. 

Reporters:  But there will be tax cuts and there won't be mandatory kindergarten. 
Governor:   There will not be mandatory kindergarten.  That decision was made a couple of weeks ago. 

Reporters:  So in your priorities, tax cuts are more important than mandatory kindergarten. 
Governor:   My priority is education funding.  There's $3.8 billion up for education funding.  My priority is teacher pay.  My priority is social promotion.  My priority is tax cuts.  And I think we're going to end up with a good session. 

While trying desperately to avoid the substance of the question, Bush admitted that tax cuts were a bigger priority than mandatory kindergarten. What is so confusing about this is that Bush explained this away by saying that Texas couldn't afford $250 million or so for mandatory kindergarten and other education programs. Yet, Bush obviously thought Texas could afford his $2 billion tax cut proposal. It sounds to me like Bush could use a little bit of mandatory kindergarten himself, at least the math part.

Mandatory kindergarten wasn't the only thing Bush sacrificed for his big tax cut, he also sacrificed a chance to improve compensation for Texas' teachers into the range of respectability.

Texas teacher salaries are so low that a full 28% of teachers there need to work a second job to make ends meet and 43% are either planning on or considering leaving the field at least partly because of pay. Raising teacher salaries is just about the most important step you can take in improving education. It is truly one instance in which the money really does matter. Having high quality teachers and a high enough quantity of them to keep class sizes low is just so important. You just can't attract teachers if you're not offering at least competitive compensation. With all of that surplus money to throw around, you would think that raising teacher salaries would be an important priority for Bush. He, admittedly, did push for a pay raise of $3,000. But he vehemently opposed a further $3,000 increase that would have brought Texas teacher salaries to the national average. Even with the $3,000 raise, Texas still ranks dead last in the nation (50 out of 50!) in total teacher compensation (salary and benefits). Again, Bush needed the money for his tax cut. That tax cut, by the way, ended up netting your average Texan a mere $60 a year. Do you think they would have preferred having mandatory kindergarten and better teachers to that? To be fair, Bush did get a nice tax cut to sell to voters in his presidential campaign, so maybe that makes up for it. Louis Malfaro of the Texas Federation of Teachers noticed this: "Texas had a real chance to bring teacher's salaries to the national average. But George Bush was the spoiler. He was more interested in looking good for the presidential race and he needed the money so he could boast about a tax cut."

If this were a movie, you would have just about the entire Texas education establishment shouting "SHOW ME THE %&@%# MONEY!" because no one got any. Kindergarten and pre-K? Nope. Teacher salary increases? Well, a little but far short of what was needed. How about higher education? Even though the state's colleges could sorely use an increase in funding, Bush gave them nothing. "This was supposed to be our year," one university president said. "We've been waiting for this [surplus] since Ann was governor." But hey, it was only a $7.6 billion surplus. Why bother spending any of that on education when you can hoard it all for big tax cuts?

Bush's main education "reform" has been to tie student test scores on a single standardized test to just about everything: student advancement, teacher and administrator pay and promotion and school funding. That test is the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills or TAAS.

Before Bush, the criteria for advancement (for grades K through 8 - high school advancement was based on earned course credits) was left up to local school districts. In Houston, for instance, student promotion was dependents on meeting two of the following three criteria: 1. passing TAAS; 2. passing a nationally recognized academic skills test; 3. having passing class grades. This kind of local control actually meshes nicely with Bush's stated philosophy that we should "trust local people to make the right choices about their schools." Why, then, Bush felt the need to impose the same single criterion on all of the districts in the state is a good question especially when almost every educator agrees that relying on a single criterion is simply bad policy.

What's more, Bush has tied TAAS to the compensation schools, administrators and teachers receive. So now, teachers and administrators only receive raises and promotions if their kids do well on the TAAS and school see their funding rise and fall based on the test scores their kids can produce. What Bush's precious "accountability" system has basically done is create huge incentives for teacher, principles and superintendents to place high scores on the TAAS in front of everything else. We'll delve into the side effects of this later.

Bush claims that this TAAS linkage has improved things dramatically. He says that test scores are way up and that the performance gap between minorities and whites is narrowing. This is all true, but only if you consider just score on TAAS. Indeed, TAAS scores are up (the failure rate has dropped from 53% to 22%) and the racial gap on TAAS in narrowing. There's a reason for this though, and it isn't necessarily because Texas kids are learning better.

The primary reasons TASS scores have risen so much is that the test has gotten extremely easy. If you give high school seniors a test on 6^th grade material they're probably going to do rather well. This is exactly the case in Texas.

The Tax Research Association, a conservative group, concluded that the exit level TAAS math exam asks question on a 6^th grade level. That's right, to graduate in Texas a student must be able to do 6^th grade math. Might this have something to do with rising scores?

It's not just the math tests that are easy. ABC News found that the average level of questions on the entire exit exam was fit for 8^th graders, not seniors. The director of Texas Family Research Centers looked at the US History end of course exam and found that over 60% of the questions didn't require the knowledge of history to answer! When 50% of algebra students were failing the end of course test the legislature simply eliminated the test.

Last year, the legislature finally realized that tougher standards were needed for TAAS and voted to pass an amendment that attempted to raise the bar. The Texas Education Association (whose members are appointed by Bush) did not implement the changes. After all, how would declining scores look in a presidential campaign?

Texas' TAAS scores are also inflated because schools, in an effort to increase their funding, have been holding some of their worst test takers out of exams so that their score would not drag down the school's average. Results are even further inflated due to the fact that many of Texas' poorest test takers (many of who are otherwise fine students) have been so discouraged by their TAAS performances that they have dropped out of school entirely instead of repeating grades. Texas' dropout rate has skyrocketed since Bush implemented his plan.

It's obvious that TAAS scores are artificially high. The question is: how much? And, despite this inflation, are Texas kids still doing better than they were before? The answer is a resounding "NO."

Boston College professor Walter Haney, who researches test statistics, certainly doesn't think the rising TAAS scores represent an improvement that could be measured by any other metric. "Texas has gotten a huge amount of press, but in my view it's largely a scam," he says. "The Texas miracle in education is a myth." This opinion is shared by a career expert on education at the US Department of Education, "Texas was near the national average on many measures of educational performance when TAAS was implemented and remains there."

Independent testing measures have upheld this view. While TAAS scores may be up, the SAT scores of Texas students have remained stagnant even while the percentage of students taking the SAT has declined significantly. In fact, Texas is now one of only five states in the country whose students post an average SAT score of below 500 in both the math and verbal sections. The NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) test, a nationwide test administered in several subjects to a random sample of students, has shown mixed results for Texas. Texas 8^th graders have done better in writing and 4^th graders better in math. However, in many other areas the NAEP has contradicted TASS, including 8^th grade science and math and, especially, 4^th grade reading. In the latter case, the NAEP showed absolutely no improvement between 1992 and 1998. Moreover, the NAEP shows that the gap between white and minority students, at least in 4^th and 8^th grade reading, is widening, not narrowing as TAAS shows.

Steven Klein, a senior researcher with RAND Corporation, and a group of colleagues wanted to study the racial gap as well. They administered a mixture of multiple choice and open-ended questions to a sample of students who had performed well on TAAS just a few weeks before. Even though TAAS showed that children of different socio-economic backgrounds scored similarly, Klein's test showed that the poorer, non-white, children did much worse. "We have the empirical data to show that there is something really out of the ordinary in terms of kids' behavior on these tests," Kelin said of TAAS. "Something is definitely screwy."

If that's not enough evidence to conclude that Texas children aren't learning then consider this. Over one third of all Texas freshman who attend Texas state universities are so ill-prepared that they are forced to take remedial classes to try to catch up with their classmates. One student agreed with some of the assessments given here, "I think a lot of the results are high because of the ease of the test." Another questions its usefulness for college preparation, "I don't think the TAAS helps prepare us for college because it is just really basic stuff." Janice Taylor, a high school math teacher in Houston, agreed, "[students] think they're prepared, but doing well on TAAS doesn't indicate that they know what they need to know to go college."

It's apparent that any gains in test scores are more a result of changes in the test than in any improvement in the education of the students taking them. Bush's emphasis on TAAS has done little of anything to improve these scores. Unfortunately though, that emphasis has done much to change education in Texas for the worse.

As was mentioned earlier, dropout rates in Texas have skyrocketed since TAAS became the be-all-and-end-all of Texas education accountability. Haney's study found that the dropout rate in Texas was 20% - fully one fifth of students dropping out every year - and as high as 50% for minority students. A study by the Intercultural Developmental Research Association, a San Antonio think tank that studies education equity issues, of students who entered high school in the 1995-96 school year found that the attrition rate of Texas students is enormous. 31% of whites, 48% of black and 53% of Hispanics never made it to graduation. Some of those who left probably ended up being home schooled or earning the GED at some point, but most are simple dropouts. Alber Cortez, the director of the IDRA's Institute for Policy and Leadership, blames the high drop out rate on the emphasis on TAAS, "they leave because they're not being successful and the reason they aren't being successful is because schools are not providing the programs they need."

The emphasis on TAAS, on the students end, has caused more kids to leave school. On the teachers and administrators' end it has proved to be a recipe for corruption. Recently, a Travis Country grad jury indicted Austin school officials for attempting to change student's test answers after they had completed the test and three Houston teachers and one administrator were forced to resign after doing the same thing. Who knows how much other corruption is out there? When teachers and administrators know that they can improve their own personal situation by getting higher TAAS scores, that's a pretty dangerous conflict of interests.

More important than an increase in corruption is just what TAAS has done to the learning environment in Texas schools. To put it bluntly, Texas schools, especially those in poor and minority areas, have become nothing more than glorified Kaplan centers who focus, not on real education, but on prepping students for the TAAS tests.

Two experienced experts on Texas education, Linda McNeil from the Department of Education and Center for Education at Rice University and Angela Valenzuela from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas, were tapped by Harvard University to do an in-depth study of the impact TAAS has on Texas education. They were not impressed.

Their study was based on their own decades of individual research, interaction with teachers and principles at many of Texas' schools and a continued presence in Texas classrooms along with analysis of emerging education research in Texas. The key results of their study, taken verbatim, were

• The TAAS system of testing reduces the quality and quantity of curriculum.
• The TAAS system distorts educational expenditures, diverting scarce instructional dollars away from such high quality curricular resources as laboratory supplies and books toward test-prep materials and activities of limited instructional value.
• TAAS provokes instruction that is aimed at the lowest level of skills and information, and it crowds out other forms of learning, particularly for poor and minority students.
• TAAS-based teaching and test-prep violates what is known about how children learn.
• The TAAS is divorced from children's experience and culture.
• The test is imposing exit measures that are particularly inappropriate for LEP (Limited English-Proficient) students.
• TAAS is widening the gap between the education of children in Texas' poorest (historically low- performing) schools and that available to more privileged children.

Jeny Jesness, a Texas teacher since the early 1980s believes that "TAAS has become the instrument that entirely drives the curriculum in too many schools" and McNeil and Valenzuela agree, "the pressure to raise test scores 'by any means necessary' has frequently meant that a regular education has been supplanted by activities whose sole purpose is to raise test scores on this particular test."

One repercussion of the emphasis on TAAS is that subjects and extracurricular activities that are not tested by TAAS have often been completely ignored by schools bent solely on increasing TAAS scores. Instead, the time that used to be used to teach science, social science, art or any number of other things is now spent doing repetitive drilling designed to increase scores on subjects that are tested by TAAS.

Some elementary schools "strongly suggest" that their teachers shorten social science and science lessons in order to make time for more "important" subjects. Apparently, subjects are only "important" if TAAS thinks so. McNeil and Valenzuela found that in middle and high schools many science teachers are instructed to suspend the teaching of science for weeks or even months in order to drill their students with practice math TAAS questions. The two found the same thing happening with social science teachers. At one school, history teachers were told months before the TAAS that they had to spend at least 20 minutes of their lesson time preparing for TAAS. One teacher at that school noted that "20 minutes is just too much. By the time we get to teaching our history lesson, most of the time is gone." David Henderson, another education expert who conducted a similar study, found just the same: "I've been everywhere and they say 'we're not doing much in social studies and we're not doing much in science because the TAAS focuses" on other things.

It's not just science and social science. Many 6^th grade math teachers are told not to teach specific lessons, like the multiplication of fractions, because those skills aren't tested. In some schools, art teachers are told to drill students on math or other subjects instead of teaching art. Even ROTC instructors often spend more time drilling multiplication tables than they do drilling formations. All sort of areas are beginning to suffer from TAAS as valuable learning tools like research and independent projects, science projects, oral histories and long-term writing assignments are all being phased out.

Teachers aren't the only resource schools are wasting in an effort to raise TAAS scores. Schools are also wasting dollars that are supposed to be used for things like textbooks, science equipment and computers on Kaplanesque TAAS drilling packages. One poor school, in a predominantly Hispanic area, which has no library to speak of spent almost all of its instructional budget ($18,000) on test preparation material that replaced its teachers' lesson plans.

Even in the subjects that are still taught and still have textbooks, instead of concentrating on actually teaching children the most basic and important material, teachers drill them on TAAS and teach them gimmicks that will help them beat TAAS but do little else. For instance, elementary students are encouraged to add or multiply by drawing pictures and counting them or to subtract by drawing sticks and crossing them off, and to divide by drawing sticks into groups. Since TAAS is not timed such stick counters can spend hours and hours on a test that should be able to be finished in under an hour by students who have actually learned the material. Poor readers are often taught to match words in the text with words in the answer choices. As one consultant frankly explained, "The TAAS doesn't care how students arrive at the answer."

Elsa Duarte-Noboa, a 7^th grade teacher, laments the rise of TAAS, "we don't have time to teach basic commonsense because we are trying to get the right answers on the test item?. Test prep is going to substitute for the kind of curriculum that we would normally expect our kids to get [like] reading literature, having a science project and using the library." Jesness notes that "Textbooks simply gather dust while students do reams and reams of sample tests."

The best example of all this is what had happened to reading and writing skills under TAAS. A University of Texas study shows that reading teachers spend eight to ten hours a week on TAAS prep instead of real teaching and principles still want them to do more. 85% of the teachers surveys think non TAAS subjects are being ignored. In reading, TAAS breaks things up into artificial pieces. Thus students can learn to pass the individual pieces of the test but can't apply those skills to actual reading at all. Just take a look at the "persuasive essay" that TAAS requires students to write.

Many schools throw out their entire curriculum (like reading novels) to focus on this beast they call the "persuasive essay." This is how TAAS tests writing skills and is now the main focus of English teachers in Texas. The essay must be written in the strict format TAAS requires: it must be five paragraphs long. The first paragraph should be a "topic paragraph," the next three should be "supporting paragraphs" and the last should be the "concluding paragraph." Each of the five paragraphs must contain five sentences which are broken down in the same manner. TAAS likes this test because it is easy to score large populations because what counts is the format, not the substance. So kids are becoming experts on writing this completely artificial type of essay but are learning nothing about actually composing substantive arguments, developing and expounding ideas within their writing or arguing their case in creative ways. Teachers hate having to teach this, "Just think of yourself as writing for someone sitting in a cubicle in a bureaucracy, counting sentences and indentations," one says. Students hate it too because they realize that knowing how to get a high score on test has zero correlation to actually having learned anything. One gifted senior told McNeil and Valenzuela:

The result of all this is that students can't write well and they can't read well, especially longer assignments (because TAAS focuses on reading small passages and answering multiple choice questions). In fact, middle school teachers say that their students have extreme difficulty reading novels that are two or more years below their grade level.

The results of Bush's education "reform" are staggering. What's even more staggering is that he is tying to make us believe that his actions have precipitated a "miracle" in Texas education. That is completely bogus. What Bush has done is precipitated a disaster. As a result of Bush's actions:

• Dropout rates have risen dramatically and Texas is now ranks 45^th in the nation
• Test scores have remained low and Texas is now one of only five states to post both SAT math and verbal scores of under 500
• The gap between well off and poor children is growing
• Corruption is on the increase as teachers and administrators are tempted to either blatantly cheat or rig tests to garner the highest score possible for their school
• Record numbers of Texas children are going to college and finding out that they have to take remedial courses in order to just keep up with their classmates
• Texas kids are missing out on things like science, history and art because they are not covered by TAAS
• Most ominously, under Bush Texas has fallen from the 29^th to the 48^th best place to raise a child according to the Children's Rights Council (which factors in child immunization rates, death rates, teen pregnancy and - most of all - education)

McNeil and Valenzuela sum it up nicely: "TAAS is reducing the quality of education offered to children in Texas and it is the most damaging to poor and minorities."

"Poverty remains an aching problem in Texas, and one that Bush has given scant attention." That's Eric Pooley of Time talking about Bush's record with the poor in Texas. Pooley is right, poverty is something that Bush just has not paid attention to in Texas even though it ranks near the bottom in almost every category of social well being. Whether it is health care, housing or hunger, Texas is brining up the rear and Bush hasn't done much about it. While the actions he has taken on issues like education and the environment have produced terrible results for Texas, at least Bush did something. On all too many pressing issues that deal with Texas' poor that is not the case and, when he has taken action, it has often been to make things tougher on the state's poor.

When it comes to healthcare, Texas is just about as bad as it gets. Over 25% of Texans have no insurance, that's one of the highest rates of uninsured in the nation. The percentage of 19-65 year olds rose, under Bush, and is know with second highest in the country. For 19-25 year olds the rate is nearly 30%. For the rest of the nation it's under 20%.

Things are even worse in Texas when it comes to children. Texas has the second highest rate of uninsured children in the country. It's even worse for the poorest of children, close to 40% of whom have no insurance. Unfortunately, the problem continues to get worse under Bush. A twelve state study by Families USA found that Texas had, by far the biggest decline of children covered by Medicare and the Children's Health Insurance Program since 1995 - a 14.2% decline. It's not because Texas has done a good job of raising families out of poverty either; a full 600,000 children who are eligible for Medicare still are not enrolled.

All these kids without health insurance are going without the most basic health care necessities. They don't have regular checkups, they don't see doctors when the get sick. In fact, they don't get any health care until they are so sick that they have to be taken to the emergency room for care. That's bad for these kids and it's bad for Texas because treating sick kids when they get to the emergency room costs a whole lot more than treating them before their problems spiral out of hand.

What makes these low insured rates even more troubling is that Texas also has extremely high rates of illness which means people need insurance more here than most other places. Texas ranks among the worst states in such categories as AIDS rates, diabetes rates, tuberculosis rates and teen pregnancy rates. Part of the reason that things are so bad is that Texas just doesn't spend any money on public health - it is also bringing up the rear in immunization rates and the availability of mammograms and physicians.

With all these problems and all the resources Texas has (like that $7 billion surplus) you would think that Bush would have addressed this problem. That's simply not the case, however. Even his own aids admit that healthcare has not been a priority for Bush. In his five years as governor, Bush is still yet to give a single speech on the topic. Even worse than his lack of attention is the attitude he takes when he actually does give this problem some thought. Apparently Bush doesn't think having a large number of uninsured people is a problem. When he was asked about the hypothetical case of single mother of two with no insurance, Bush said, "she's got accessibility, in my state at least, to health care in emergency rooms and clinics?. You go to emergency rooms in my state ? they're full of people. They're full of people. There's access." So Bush thinks that overflowing emergency rooms are a good thing and that such care is a decent replacement for health insurance? I'm not sure if he is simply callous or just completely ignorant, but if this is the kind of health care he plans for the nation we are in trouble and, indeed, it might be just what he is planning. You notice how Bush keeps harping on this concept of "access?" Listen to what Bush has to say about how he will handle health care as president: "But make no mistake: In my administration, low-income Americans will have access to high-quality health care." That's right, low-income earners can expect the same kind of access that low-income Texans get: overflowing emergency rooms.

The man Bush picked to head his state's health agency agrees with Bush's appraisal that health insurance is relatively unimportant. William Archer III, Bush's appointee as the state's Commissioner of Health, said that he doubted health insurance made much of a difference to public health. The doctors and nurses of Texas know better. Dr. Ron Anderson of Parkland Hospital in Dallas, said of Archer's views, "Then he hasn't read the literature. Shame on him!" Clair Johnson, the director of the Texas Nurses Association, also disagrees vehemently, "uninsured children end up in the most costly place, the emergency room."

When the governor and health commissioner of a state doesn't think health insurance is a priority, it's no wonder that so many people in the state are uninsured. This helps explain why Bush hasn't moved to get those 600,000 eligible children onto Medicaid and why Bush strongly opposed expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program to cover an additional 200,000 kids. The whole CHIP fiasco is another black eye on Bush's administration and I'll delve into that in more detail in chapter three. To put it succinctly, even though it would have cost his state very little, Bush wanted to cover only about 300,000 kids with the CHIP program instead of 500,000. There has been speculation that much of the reason he has opposed the expansion is that it would also swell Texas' Medicaid ranks (with people who applied for CHIP but found out that they were eligible for Medicaid) and thus make Bush vulnerable to attacks from the right in the Republican presidential primaries. This would also help explain his inaction on those 600,000 kids. Bush, for the record, says he opposed the expansion because it was fiscally irresponsible even though Texas had a huge surplus at the time and CHIP would have cost Texas far less than his tax cut.

Unlike his total disinterest in health care, Bush did take an active approach to Welfare in Texas. Over 3 million Texans live in poverty. As of 1999, Texas paid the lowest maximum welfare benefit of any state in the country. A woman with two children received $188 a month. That is not enough to live on by yourself, let alone if you have two kids. In October of 1999, the benefit increased all the way up to $201 a month bringing Texas up to 48^th in the nation (they passed Alabama and Louisiana).

What has Bush done about this? First of all, he opposed that very modest increase in benefits because he wanted that money for his tax cut. Bush also pushed for a two year limit on receiving benefits and twice pushed for a limit on the number of children you could collect benefits for. Specifically, Bush fought to end the $38 allowance received for each additional child, presumably because he wanted to stop all those Texan welfare queens from popping out more and more babies so that they could get that extra 40 bucks a month. I'm sure that's just an epidemic in Texas. Bush also pushed for the harshest penalties possible for even minor violations of Welfare rules, penalties that would have left the innocent children of offender with no benefits. Representative Glenn Maxey says that Bush's legislative director, Terral Smith, confronted Maxey and Nashitat in the House member's lounge and demanded that the legislature push the Welfare bill through with the harshest penalties. "Terral walked into the members' lounge," according to Maxey. "He must have forgotten he was no longer a member of the House. And he said we had to get the bill to the Calendars Committee and the governor needed the punitive measures so that Pat Buchanan wouldn't be able to beat him up in the Republican primaries."

Bush's treatment of hunger in his state is much more reminiscent of his treatment of health insurance. Like health care, hunger is a big problem in Texas and, as with health care, Bush seems pretty clueless about the whole thing.

The US Department of Agriculture released a study of hunger across the nation earlier this year that detailed just how bad the situation in Texas is. The study showed that 5% of Texas families are hungry (defined as suffering from pain or unease caused by lack of food) while 12.9% suffer food insecurity (unable to get safe and nutritious food). This compares with a national average of 3.5% and 9.7% and ranks Texas 49^th, behind only Oregon. Additionally, food banks across Texas are reporting shortages and heavy increases in demand as more and more hungry people are clamoring for assistance. Food bank officials say that distribution is up 38% in some areas over 1998 levels. The Texas Association of 2^nd Harvest food banks says that it is experiencing demand at levels 26% higher than 1996 when many of Bush's draconian welfare revisions came into effect.

How did Bush react to all this? With surprise: "you'd think the governor would have heard if there are such pockets of hunger." Umm yes, we would actually! After surprise, Bush reacted with indignance and blamed the Clinton administration for fabricating the report in order to embarrass him, "I don't believe 5% are hungry?. Yeah, I'm surprised a report floats out of Washington when I'm running a presidential campaign." The thing is, the Department of Agriculture report wasn't exactly a sudden thing - it had been commissioned by his father back when he was president and studied all 50 states, not just Texas. Somehow I can't picture George H.W. Bush sitting in the oval office in 1991 scheming up a plan to embarrass his son some 9 years later. But hey, I'm not that paranoid.

Bush may not believe that hunger is a problem in Texas, but those in the know think that the 5% number is actually too low! "It's unbelievable," Reverend Don Noble, who feeds between 700 and 1,000 people a month at his Alamo, Texas food bank, said of Bush's reaction. "[Hunger] definitely has gotten worse over the past few years." Jon Pruitt, the director of the North Texas food bank that serves 13 counties, says the 5% figure "seems low to me." Regina Careil, the executive director of the White Rock Center of Hope, issued a challenge to Bush to come and see the problem up close for himself, "I want him to come visit us." Amelia Gonzalez, the director of the Community Food Bank of Victoria, Texas, echoed those thoughts, "where can I get a hold of Mr. Bush? I'd like him to come visit our food bank to see how empty our shelves are right now. We're scavenging for food." Celia Hagert of the Center for Public Policy, summed up the common belief nicely: "It's ludicrous to say there's no hungry people in Texas. It's just ludicrous."

Again, Bush has been summarily unconcerned about this problem. That he showed such shock and indignation is especially appalling considering that, in 1995, Bush vetoed a bill that would have created the Texas Food Security Council, a body that was meant to help local officials study the problem of hunger. "You'd think the governor would know," Bush says. Well hell yes! If he hadn't vetoed the '95 bill then he would have known and been able to do something about it. Why did Bush veto the bill? He doesn't even know. When he was asked to justify that veto he brushed aside the question, "I'm sure there was some valid reason I did that." I can't say that I'm as sure.

As he has with health insurance, Bush has let programs that are in place right now become negligent in their duties. Food stamp receipts in Texas have fallen by 50% because people leaving welfare are no longer informed that they are still qualified for them. Bush also recently let $33 million in federal money that was earmarked to provide 1 million poor kids with lunch go unused. So 1 million poor kids in Texas who qualify for free or subsidized lunches didn't get them because Bush just neglected them. It's not like this money could go for anything else, it was federal money earmarked specifically for this purpose. Maybe he was just trying to make good on his 1978 campaign promise to eliminate child nutrition programs (he thought that they were busting the budget).

Bush has also been less than enthusiastic in addressing housing issues in Texas and his neglect has to allowed several major problems to fester.

First is the issue of Colonials. These are the very, very poor communities on the boarder with Mexico. There are roughly 1500 of these shantytowns, most of which have no clean water or sewage treatment. These communities stretch through 42 different border counties. In 1998, comptroller John Sharp issued a 200 page report on just how bad conditions were in these communities. Sharp concluded that, were these counties grouped together as a 51^st state they would be:

• 51^st in personal income
• 1^st in poverty (29.5%)
• 1^st in unemployment (8%)
• 1^st in percentage without a high school diploma
• 45^th in percentage without a college degree

Sharp also found that, though the region is 80% Hispanic, 86% of the residents are native born Americans - we aren't talking about illegal immigrants here.

Bush has not visited this region a single time as governor even though its citizens have continually lobbied the governor's staff for a visit. Carmen Anaya, a leader in Valley Interfaith (the local group that has been lobbying for more resources for the area), laments Bush's lack of interest, "Todos. Todos vinieron. They all came. Mark White came. Governor Richards came and walked in the mud with her fine boots. Henry Cisneros, Bill Hobby, Jim Hightower. They made promises and fulfilled them," Anaya says of the many pre-Bush governors and officials who have helped bring some modest improvements to the area. Even Kaye Bailey Hutchinson, Texas' combative, neo-conservative senator, visited and came away so shaken that she delivered $3 million in federal funding for the region. Bush has refused all invitations to do the same. He did send his Secretary of State once, but when Valley Interfaith leaders met with him again in Austin and asked him if he had made any efforts on their behalf he told them "I've been pretty busy."

Bush didn't have to visit the Colonials to help them though, he could have done so without getting his clothes dirty or leaving the friendly confines of Austin. GOP State Senator David Sibley recognized that conditions in the region needed serious improvement so he called for a billion dollar "Marshall Plan" for the region: a series of bills that would have provided $1 billion in bonds for highways, other important infrastructure, workforce training, adult education and better housing. The package passed the Senate but died in the house without any backing from Bush. "There was a sense that it would have been different it Bush had been there," one reporter said. "But there was nobody to push the border legislation in the House."

One of Bush's presidential campaign theme is that he is the first truly pro-Hispanic Texas governor. But it takes more than a few words of Spanish sprinkled into one's speeches to be truly pro-Hispanic. In the Colonials' "Marshall Plan" Bush had a real chance to demonstrate his support for an important Hispanic cause. He fumbled. Bush did recognized the importance of one program for Hispanics though. "Whatever you say we need to spend, I want you to double it. If you want $1 million, I want you to spend $2 million," Bush said. "I want to show Latinos there's a lot of opportunity in Texas." Bush wasn't directing his Secretary of State to solve the problems in the Colonials, he was directing Lionel Sosa, the adman who coordinated Bush's Spanish-language campaign ads in the 1998 election. I guess he didn't need that money for his tax cut.

While the Latinos who live in the Colonials continue to struggle along with no help from Austin, a potentially bigger sore spot has reared its ugly head a bit closer to home.

The Department of Housing and Community Affairs is one of the few agencies that Bush actually has direct control over. Because it was created during the Richards administration, the governor appoints its director and all nine of its board members. The department oversees Texas' low-income housing program. If working properly, the program is supposed to award contracts to developers to build affordable, low-income housing in return for lucrative tax credits. Unfortunately, the program is and has not been working properly. It is mired in a corruption scandal that is threatening its very ability to accomplish anything.

The Texas Sunset Advisory Commission, which reports on other Texas agencies, says the Department of Housing and Community Affairs in "not adequately serving as a governing body" and that board members' close connections to the housing industry have led to "meddling in agency operations and perceived conflicts of interest." It also finds that the agency's problems "preclude it from effectively serving low-income families." Robert Babinchuk, a developer who has donated $10,000 to Bush, has tried to bring allegations of favoritism to Bush's attention. "It's a genuine certifiable mess," Babinchuk says. "This could be the best housing agency in the country. Instead, it's a laughing stock."

What exactly is the problem? Basically the agency is run under a system of complete favoritism and cronyism. A cluster of the same few developers seem to continue getting all of the biggest tax credits and most of them have ties of some sorts to board members. Affordable Housing Finance magazine reported that the agency is known as "a stronghold of the good ol' boy network where tax credits are awarded with little regard for objective rankings." To developers with connections to the board. Some developers are pocketing credits worth $240 million over ten years.

Bush appointee Florita Griffin was indicted on June 7 on charges of accepting bribes and theft. Investigators accuse Griffin of using her influence to funnel deals to developers who were secretly her business partners. Griffin has refused to resign her post and the situation is threatening to shut operations of the agency down as HUD (the federal Housing and Urban Development agency) has told the agency that it will suspend all federal moneys for the program as long as an indicted member sits on the board. The former director of the agency (and Bush appointee) Larry Manley has already resigned amid charges that he, too, was awarding tens of millions of dollars in federal tax credits to friends and business associates.

All of this corruption has cause the housing agency to completely disregard its stated mission of providing affordable housing for low-income Texans. The Sunset committee found that the agency's programs "do not consistently reach Texans with the greatest need." Most funds that are supposed to go to low-income areas instead end up in middle or even upper-income areas because the developers getting the favors could make more money there. State Senator Chris Harris, a conservative Republican who co-chaired a bi-partisan review of the agency said, "I have major concerns that the rural areas, such as along the border [remember the Colonials?], aren't getting their share of the money." In fact, the legislature has directed the agency to spend 15% of its budge on the poorest areas but only between four and ten percent actually reach those areas.

Where is Bush in all this? Who knows? According to Manley, when he was appointed in 1995, he asked Bush what his thoughts on housing were. Bush told Manley "I don't have a housing agenda." Andre Shashaty, the editor of Affordable Housing Finance thinks that this is pretty evident, "This latest crisis is partly a reflection of a lack of leadership on housing by Governor Bush. Bush has been extremely blase about housing and this agency, and during all the time it's needed leadership from him, it hasn't gotten it." Bush has even ignored several appeals for action by people familiar with the agency including Babinchuk. Diane Glass, an agency employee who left on bad terms, was also turned away. She said that when she called Joe Allbaugh, the governor's chief of staff, to complain about sleazy deals with developers, he didn't want any documentation of her claims and told her to "go away." Allbaugh denied her account. Representative Harriet Erhardt asked Bush aide Terral Smith why the governor wasn't exerting himself at all on the issue. According to Erhardt (who is a Democrat), Smith told her that Bush wasn't interested because the issue "isn't on the political radar." Smith, like Allbaugh, denies the claim.

The results of Bush's inaction on the agency and on Colonials are pretty severe.

• The four worst metropolitan areas in the country, in terms of physically deficient housing for the poor, are Texas' four largest cities.
• 65,000 Texas households are classified by HUD as having dire housing needs.
• 600,000 Texans are forced to pay ½ of their income on housing.
• 400,000 Texans live in 3^rd world housing in Colonials on the boarder. 334,00 lack adequate sewer service

John Henneberger, the co-director of the non-profit Texas Low Income Housing Information Service tells it like it is: "There are massive numbers of poor people living in terrible housing conditions and there has been little or no leadership from the governor to solve these problems."

George W. Bush wants us to judge him by his Texas record. I say by all means. Bob Hebert, of the New York Times, says of the Texas judicial system "if more Americans knew what was going on there, it would be a laughingstock." He is wiser than he knows; that quote could be used to sum up almost the entirety of Bush's record in Texas.

Bush has consistently put the interests of Big Business ahead of those of the people he governs. In this, he has demonstrated himself to be a true conservative while managing to inflict little, if any, compassion on Texas.

Bush has also consistently put his own political interests over the interests of the people of Texas, be it implementing the most draconian drug laws anywhere, the most hard assed welfare "reforms" or fighting to keep uninsured children off of Texas' insurance rolls.

Most important, he has made Texas worse in almost every aspect. His education plan has turned the Texas public schools into glorified Kaplan centers, leaving Texas children unprepared for college, raising the dropout rate to record levels and widening the gap between Texas' haves and have-nots. He has sold his state's environment out to the highest bidder. He has worked to prevent Texas' morbid "justice" system from joining the rest of us in the 20^th (let alone 21^st) century.

The numbers speak for themselves:

• 1^st in nation in percentage uninsured - 25% uninsured
• 2^nd in children without insurance
• 1^st in percentage of poor children uninsured - 40%
• 1^st in percentage of working poor parents without insurance
• 1^st in toxic emissions
• 1^st in air carcinogens released
• 1^st in pollution released by manufacturing plants
• 1^st in number of manufacturing plants in violation of the CAA
• 1^st in greenhouse gas emissions
• 2^nd in incarceration rates
• 49^th in environmental protection
• 2^nd in hunger - 5% hungry
• 5^th in teen pregnancy rates
• 5^th in teen smoking rates
• 5^th in teen drug use
• 46^th in high school completion rates - as low as 60%. Worse among minorities
• 47^th in social services delivery
• 48^th in quality of life
• 48^th in per capita health funding
• 49^th best state to raise kids
• 50^th in teach salaries and benefits
• 30% rise in teen drug use
• Houston, Dallas, El Paso and Port Arthur all violate federal clean air standards
• 800 GF plants are still active and are still pumping a full 36% of Texas' air pollution into the air
• Houston has passed LA as the US' smoggiest city
• 679 8-hour ozone violations in five years, up from 508
• Violent crime has fallen ½ as much as states with no concealed-carry laws
• 65,000 households have dire housing needs
• Worst 4 US cities for physically deficient housing are Texas cities.