San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Straus waiting for a Texas that values reason
Nearly seven months ago, state Rep. Lyle Larson penned an op-ed for the San Antonio Report that touted his old friend Joe Straus as the “leader our state needs.”
Larson was trying to draft Straus, the San Antonio-based former speaker of the Texas House, as a candidate for governor or lieutenant governor. By that point, Straus was hearing similar words of encouragement from other friends across the state.
Straus was flattered at the suggestion and gave it some thought.
But the very elements that make Straus so appealing to political observers across the ideological spectrum — his unflappable demeanor; his refusal to sling mud; his distaste for culture-war grandstanding; and his innate tendency to search for bipartisan solutions to policy challenges — also put him at odds with the way Texas currently elects its leaders.
Although he is a lifelong Republican who served two GOP presidents (Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush) and whose mother, Joci, played a huge role in building the Texas GOP, it’s hard to imagine Straus participating in a statewide Republican primary, where candidates are measured by the megatonnage of the verbal bombs they drop on Democrats.
Of course, he could run as an independent. Voters always say they’re frustrated with the twoparty system and love the idea of strong independent candidates. But as they get close to Election Day, many of those voters will conclude that a vote for an independent candidate is a wasted ballot.
Straus is a realist about these things.
He’s also not the type of politician who is addicted to the limelight. He didn’t run for elective office until he was 45, and he gave up his House seat three years ago despite the fact that his constituents in Alamo Heights, Terrell Hills, Olmos
Park and North San Antonio would have re-elected him to as many terms as he wanted.
“I haven’t sworn off politics or entering public service again in some way,” Straus told me last week in an interview for “Texas Talk,” a new KLRN talk show produced in partnership with the San Antonio Express-News. “But it wasn’t the right time for me right now.
“My approach to politics and to governing is not very much in fashion at the moment. I believe that bipartisanship is not a dirty word. I believe that pragmatism is not a dirty word. And I think empathy in politics is missing today. But it’s not very fashionable, it’s not very popular.”
It’s been so long since we’ve heard rational thought and common sense from our statewide leaders that it was vaguely jarring to hear Straus dissect our state’s problems in a nuanced way that was not loaded with phony machismo or desperate culture-war virtue signaling.
He made a simple, logical case for this state to stop leaving federal dollars on the table and accept a Medicaid expansion that would bring health coverage
to more than 1 million uninsured Texans.
“The business case for accessing more federal dollars is clear,” he said. “Whether you call it Medicaid expansion or you negotiate something else with the federal government that avoids the term ‘Medicaid,’ it doesn’t matter to me.”
He talked about the need to fully fund public education and make sure our long-term water supply meets the needs of a rapidly growing state.
Unlike many Republicans, he acknowledged the reality of climate change and the environmental challenges that come with it.
When I suggested that Republican lawmakers appear to be fixated on targeting transgender
children, he didn’t hesitate to call out the GOP.
“There’s no other way to describe it. It is a fixation,” he said.
“In my view, it’s going after a very vulnerable population, a population of people who have a much higher risk of suicidal thoughts, if not action. I thought it was mean-spirited, I thought all of these (bills) are examples of legislatures trying to pass laws to address problems that don’t exist.”
Straus spoke wistfully about his experience as a 17-year-old Capitol Hill intern for legendary Republican Sen. John Tower in the summer of 1977. One of his fondest memories of that period was the way the staffs of Tower and Lloyd Bentsen, the state’s
Democratic junior senator at the time, set aside partisanship.
“(They) worked together very cooperatively on issues that mattered to Texas,” Straus said.
“They always put the political differences aside when it was something that mattered to the state that they both represented. And that’s something that’s sadly missing today, but an example that I learned a lot from.”
Federal and state governments had their share of problems at the time, but they functioned. Straus remembers what functional governance feels like.
If Texas voters get to a point where they’re ready to give it a whirl, he’ll be around.