Clay Robinson's piece in today's Chron helps sort this out:
Speaker Tom Craddick gained power and has held onto it (so far) with strong financial support from the business community, including Houston home builder Bob Perry.
Perry alone has been a major pro-Craddick force, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican speaker and the election campaigns of legislative candidates backing him.
The home builder and his business colleagues have been rewarded with additional protections against consumer lawsuits and a less-than-onerous regulatory climate.
But what happens to Perry's money if Craddick is unseated? Well — if the poor economy doesn't dry it up — Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, Attorney General Greg Abbott, many other Republican officials and selected Democrats will continue to get bushels of it.
And so, perhaps, would the next speaker.
At one time or another, the home builder or one of the political action committees to which he contributes heavily has given money to each of the nine House members — four Republicans and five Democrats — now challenging Craddick.
But two — Democrats Sylvester Turner of Houston and Allan Ritter of Nederland — have received much more of his money than the other would-be speakers.
In direct contributions alone, the home builder has given Turner, Craddick's speaker pro tem, $115,000 since 2002. That is almost double what Perry contributed directly to Craddick during that period. Turner received $31,000 of the total during the most recent election cycle.
Perry has given Ritter $67,000 since 2002. He gave most of that — $49,000 — during the 2003-04 election cycle, when Ritter beat a challenger in the Democratic primary, following the lawmaker's sponsorship in 2003 of the bill creating the home builder-backed Texas Residential Construction Commission.
That agency, designed to protect home builders from buyers' lawsuits in exchange for new state oversight over building standards, has been attacked as weak and ineffective by consumer advocates. And the staff of the Sunset Advisory Commission has recommended that the Legislature abolish it next year.
Ritter, who is in the building supply business, was honored by the National Homebuilders Association as the "State Legislator of the Year" in 2003, the year the agency was created.
There are reasons why some get involved heavily in politics. It pays.
Notice that Bob Perry has given money to each of the current candidates for Texas Speaker.
