2003: When the Texas Senate broke quorum for its own getaway to Albuquerque
.JPG "Texas Senators Leticia Van de Putte and Mario Gallegos, Jr. look over a Texas map at the Marriott Hotel in Albuquerque New Mexico, Thursday, July 31, 2003. Democratic state lawmakers fled Texas for the second time in three months to stop a Republican drive to redraw the state’s congressional districts.")
This is no way to run a revolution.
The “Texas 11” vagabond Senate Democrats don’t even know whether they are coming or going.
All they know is that they are still stuck in New Mexico, making a noble stand for Texas Senate tradition in a cramped hotel meeting room between a racquetball trade show and a home mortgage sales convention.
The hotel help here at their Marriott Albuquerque fortress can’t even hang the Texas flag right-side up.
The sign outside the senators’ press conference Monday identified the event as the “Ramos/Orozco Wedding.” The next day, 11 of the most powerful lawmakers in Texas were bumped to a smaller room to make way for the World Senior Racquetball Championships luncheon.
What started as a last-minute vacation has turned into a monthlong holdout. Fearing trickery that would have locked them into the Senate chamber July 28, they instead raced for the state line.
Now, they are 11 Road Runners eluding Republican Gov. Wile E. Perry. They escaped again Wednesday, choosing not to fly back for a Laredo court hearing and risk walking into a Republican trap.
Instead, Texas’ most famous fugitives stayed holed up here in a city where their escapade is now bottom-of-the-page news.
The Democrats’ daily declarations are reported somewhere below the latest West Nile mosquito update and the preview for this week’s New Mexico Lobos college football opener. (One of Albuquerque’s many tourist attractions is the former home of much-traveled football Coach Dennis Franchione.)
Willie Nelson and a vanload of Democratic VIPs have come and gone. The Texans are still trapped here halfway between Austin and California, facing another weekend of hotel TV movies and another spaghetti dinner at the Macaroni Grill.
Gone too long and too far from Texas, they are not the celebrities that their fellow House Democrats were in Ardmore, Okla.
Albuquerque, essentially a collection of souvenir shops surrounded by a city, could not care less about the strange Texans or Texas politics.
Except at the Rattlesnake Museum.
“They were here!” shouted an excited Bob Myers, director of the American International Rattlesnake Museum.
He fumbled in the cash drawer and produced the business card of state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., D-Brownsville.
Myers grinned. “They sure seemed comfortable in these surroundings,” he said, planting tongue in cheek and pointing to a gallery of 50 different live rattlesnakes.
Must feel just like the Texas Senate, I said.
“Hey!!” he protested. “Now let’s not go putting snakes down!
“Comparing them to politicians — that’s not fair to the snakes!”
At the nearby National Atomic Museum — as in atomic bombs — the senators’ names were nowhere on the guest book.
Gift shop manager Tony Sparks said, “Are they still in town?” If they come by, he said, he’d sell them an Albert Einstein bobblehead doll or, for the ladies, a set of matching earrings shaped like tiny atomic bombs.
Doesn’t sound very Democratic to me. But this bunch may be desperate enough to line up some weaponry.
They had me worried the moment I walked in Monday.
The Marriott hallway was lined with men and women lying on gurneys. Doctors were racing around, stethoscopes swinging from their necks.
A very serious woman with a clipboard cut off my path.
She asked, “Are you ready to bleed?”
I feared the worst. The Texans must have been surrounded by bounty hunters, I figured. Guess they had to shoot their way out.
I was about to charge the hallway when I was almost knocked down by a large, billowy-red costumed mascot.
It was Ubie, the local mascot for United Blood Services, and the event was the Rock & Roll Up Your Sleeve Blood Drive.
Finally, I saw a guy with a radio microphone. I asked him where I could find the Texas senators’ press conference.
“Senators?” he asked, looking puzzled. “This is radio.”
He pointed toward a table for “Hot 95.1 — Old School & Today’s R&B.”
“We’re here for the blood drive,” he said. “Hey — take a refrigerator magnet.”
Eventually, I found the room marked “Texas 11” — alongside the sign left from the Ramos/Orozco wedding Saturday night.
By the time the senators finished railing about Texas Republicans, a barbershop quartet was outside serenading blood donors.
The chorus: “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”
By Tuesday, the racquetball championships needed that room for a luncheon. So the Texans were demoted to a smaller meeting room in Salon J, nearly out the back door onto Interstate 40.
For their triumphant press conference on a day when the Senate had to adjourn the special session, the senators faced a room big enough for three rows of six chairs.
Democratic aides stood on two of the chairs to adjust the Texas flag. (Hint: Get the star right and the flag will be right side up.)
The Texas 11’s leader, Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, a pharmacist, warned that restoring consensus rule to the Texas Senate will be “ a long process.”
Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, a lawyer, said prophetically that their stay in Albuquerque is “long from over.”
Afterward, in the hallway, he glanced into the mortgage sales training in the next meeting room.
“Somebody’s making money,” he said with a grin.
Then he looked wistfully down the hall.
“One of these days we’ll get back to Texas,” he said.
“One of these days.”
West’s thought was cut short when a man in a T-shirt and jogging pants raced by. He was headed to the racquetball luncheon.
