LONGVIEW NEWS-JOURNAL

Sunday, March 05, 2006

One seat in the Texas House: The bidding is now up to $500,000.

First question: Will it go any further?

Next question: Did anybody ask if the real owners — the voters in Texas House District 7 — really want to sell it?

All we know for sure is that Tommy Merritt, Longview's five-term incumbent in the Texas Legislature must surely have turned his heel when he stepped on Dr. James Leininger's toe.

If one is to believe Leininger, a San Antonio physician who seems bent on shaping the Texas House to his own personal tastes, and Mark Williams, a Longview business executive who is challenging Merritt in Tuesday's Republican primary, they barely know each other — other than by reputation.

Williams told this newspaper a few weeks ago that he had only talked to Leininger once, and then only by phone. That call came after Williams' campaign had already been propped up by a massive infusion of cash from the Texas Republican Legislative Campaign Committee, which operates almost exclusively on donations from Leininger.

The pro-voucher activist told Austin American-Statesman writer W. Gardner Selby this past week: "I have nothing to do with the campaigns. I haven't even talked to a lot of these candidates. I don't even know them ... These House races are very local races."

Excuse us, but the local nature of this race disappeared with the first round of funding Leininger's political committee pumped into the Williams campaign. At $165,000, that donation guaranteed Williams was going to top the high end of the average spent on Texas legislative campaigns. At more than $500,000 now, the cash infusion from San Antonio makes this just about anything but a local race.

The fact that Leininger is funding five such campaigns around Texas — each one marked by a similar level of acrimony and campaign advertising reeking of disingenuous half-truths — makes it clear that our corner of East Texas has been drawn into a statewide battle for absolute control of the House.

Even if Leininger can succeed in swaying all five of the races he has targeted — and we are not sure that's a given — the five votes he might think he can count on probably wouldn't be enough to turn the tide if school vouchers rise to the top of the legislative agenda. We believe, however, that he is looking beyond just five legislators.

Other Republicans in the Texas House have seen what can happen if one fails to toe the Leininger agenda. There's not a single incumbent who hasn't taken note of not only the money that Leininger has injected into the chosen races, but also the vitriol that it has funded.

When the most recent campaign finance reports indicated that the political price on his head had topped half a million dollars, Merritt astutely observed: "It's just about controlling the Legislature and intimidating the Legislature and bullying the Legislature."

Exactly.

Tommy Merritt will survive if he loses Tuesday's election and East Texas will survive if a new representative can ride a cash cow into office. We wonder, however, just how long any semblance of good government can survive if its lawmakers become cowed by the idea that if they don't appease rich ideologues they could become targets of campaigns the nature of which we have seen over the past two months in East Texas.