Pretend Edwards is LSU’s Tim
Quarterman, former Speaker of the House candidate Republican Cameron Henry is
OU’s likely Wooden Award winner for best college player Buddy Hield, Republican
Speaker of the House Taylor Barras
is OU’s Big 12 Conference blocks leader Khadeem Lattin, and the Republican
House delegation (most of it) is OU’s Isaiah Cousins. In a tie game with only
seconds left, the Sooners had the ball.
Hield went into the area near the Tiger
basket while Cousins brought the ball up court. Hield, a very marked man, then
broke away and carried his defender with him, freeing up space for Cousins to step
in and hit a short jumper. With fewer than five seconds remaining, Quarterman
raced the ball up the court and tried to fling a short bank shot to reestablish
the tie, but Lattin had slid back and rejected it as time expired to seal the
win.
This in a nutshell explains how
House Republicans rolled a greedy, if not clueless, Edwards last month to
neutralize largely any power he could exert legislatively. Edwards had a tall
order to assert dominance over the chamber when his party had only about 40
percent of the seats, but he could draw upon custom that allows a governor
major input into the speaker’s job and therefore committee chairmanships and
compositions. Part of that custom also dictates that the minority party gains
some chairmanships and even committee majorities.
Had Edwards truly understood his
position – elected
only because of a fluke that made personalities far more determinative of
the election than issues – he should have known that he needed to get the best
deal he could that meant considerably diluting his agenda. Several members of
the House GOP had supported him openly during the campaign, and had he ventured
to the House a name of one of a few of them, likely that would have peeled off
enough Republicans with Democrats’ voted to elect that guy Speaker, who then probably
would have followed many of Edwards’ priorities in committee selections.
Instead, after election almost
immediately he voiced support for Democrat state Rep. Walt Leger,
wanting to push hard for a much more liberal agenda than voters had assented to
in their choices for the House. Only Henry remained willing to oppose that
move, but as the days went by found too many Republicans would defect from his
candidacy to defeat Leger.
At the last minute, he and other
experienced GOP legislators got together and decided to run him as a diversion with
the intended GOP nominee, as it developed, of Barras. Except for a few sellouts
to Democrats, the Republican delegation agreed and during the contest Leger
fell a few votes short of winning against Henry, with Barras not far behind,
and another Democrat state Rep. Neil Abramson,
who presented himself as a less liberal alternative to Leger but who got just a
couple of votes. Henry then withdrew, leaving the runoff contest between Leger
and Barras, which the later won with the help of Abramson as the only crossover
Democrat vote for him.
Edwards and Democrats had lost, but
he still hoped, through various paeans to “bipartisanship” and “unity,” that
Democrats would receive significant committee chairmanships and control of some
important committees. Instead, without a direct pipeline courtesy of Leger,
Barras granted Edwards the chance to speak his piece, then slapped
his notion right out of the gym by appointing fewer Democrats as chairmen
than the during last session, fewer of them on significant committees, and Henry
and Abramson as chairmen of the two most important committees.
Because he mistakenly took his
triumph at the polls as a mandate, Edwards let what influence he could have had
over the House slip away. Now, rather than having not a large but decent amount
of control over its products, he can play at best a marginal role, especially
over the those two most important “money” committees when it appears any chance
he has for reelection as a liberal in a conservative state rests with how he
manages fiscally the state’s
over-spending and inefficient revenue-gathering that has created a
difficult budgetary situation.
The more pliant Senate, with the GOP
chameleon-like state Sen. John Alario
at the helm and with a higher proportion of less-principled Republicans comprising
it majority, will
provide some backup for him. But if the House sticks to its principles and
puts far more emphasis on spending reductions than tax increases, as well as
holds the line in issue areas Edwards wants to change such as education policy,
there’s little Edwards can do to pursue his agenda and reduces him to a
negative force against policy solutions.
It did not have to turn out this
way, but Edwards’ inner liberal could not let it go. Not a month has passed
since he assumed office and he stills shows no sign that the campaign image he
projected of leadership quality and lack of divisiveness in governance bears
any relation to reality.
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