No voice in Washington?
Paul Kiel and I are digging into this story I noted earlier about how the State of Texas (specifically, the governor, House Speaker and lt. governor) hired one of Tom DeLay’s former Chiefs of Staff to be its lobbyist in Washington for a pretty nice chunk of money. That was in early 2003.
Before that, Texas had never had a private sector lobbyist to advocate for the state’s interests in Washington.
Now, we’re looking into the details of this now. And we’ll report back on what we find.
But the spring of 2003 seems like a really odd time to do this. You’ll note that the constitution provides Texas with two senators. They’d just seated another, John Cornyn, a few months earlier. And the new Majority Leader in the House, Tom DeLay, was a Texan too. He’d succeeded another Texas as Majority Leader, Dick Armey. And of course the president happens to be a former governor of Texas.
Why did Texas need to reach out of the private sector to gets its voice heard in DC precisely?
