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...if Governor Rick Perry and Speaker of the House Tom Craddick were off on press tour of the state without trim, bragging about the successes of the legislative session? Dewhurst's independence from his fellow Republicans had served him well. After all, the House under Craddick's iron hand had collapsed into rancor and chaos. The Senate, Dewhurst proudly reminded his guests, had operated like a well-oiled machine.
Fast-forward to August, when a very different Dewhurst-this one grim-faced and businesslike--briefed the press. A week before, he had prompted the flight of eleven Democratic senators to Albuquerque when he said that he would abandon the Senate's unwritten two-thirds rule, a parliamentary procedure that nurtures consensus by requiring that 21 of the 31 senators agree to debate a bill before it can be voted on. The Democrats had been using their votes to block Republican congressional-redistricting plans. Now Dewhurst had endorsed a plan by the nineteen COP senators to fine their absentee colleagues up to $5,000 for every day of their quorum-busting boycott. "Enough is enough," he sternly pronounced.
Watching the performance, I was struck by how Dewhurst looked exactly the same as he did in June--the same carefully combed silver hair framing the same tanned face, yet another meticulous suit draping his six-foot-five-inch frame--and yet he was espousing a fiercely partisan brand of politics he had eschewed his first five months in office. The transformation was so eerie that a thought seized me: Had Dewhurst's evil twin taken over the lieutenant governor's office? Was the real Dewhurst bound and gagged in a closet somewhere in the Capitol basement?
Sadly, I could find no evidence to support this theory, though it seemed plausible in the summer of 2003, which no doubt will be recorded as the high-water mark of U.S. political kookiness. After all, within the space of a few weeks, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy for governor of California on Jay Leno, and Republicans in the U.S. House called the cops on their Democratic colleagues for huddling in the congressional library. Things would only get wackier on the home front: Later in August, Dewhurst had the Senate sergeant-at-arms brave a hurricane to stake out the Brownsville home of Senator Eddie Lucio, one of the eleven quorum-busters, so that Lucio could be apprehended in ease he sneaked back into town to cheek on his family.
Though my diabolical-twin scenario may seem illogical, so did Dewhurst's unforeseen...
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