Straus Won't Count his 114 Chickens

Krier: Part of Team Straus

If Sen. Barack Obama looked like he was being cautious on not acting like he's already in the White House, he's nothing compared to Rep. Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, who is very eager to note that he's not speaker yet, no matter what a done deal it looks like.

"Representative Straus is not in charge right now and only hopes to have the confidence of the members," said spokesman Russ Keene. So how many members have given him their confidence? At last count "114," said Keene, "and I'm not sure I have all the latest numbers." The plan is for an updated list to be released in the next couple of days.

Of course, there'll be a lot of interest in whether he decides to dump lightning rod parliamentarian Terry Keel (possibly the only person in the House less popular than Speaker Tom Craddick by the end of the last session.)

That doesn't mean Straus has sat on his hands. He's appointed two former legislators – Republican ex-senator Cyndi Krier and former Democratic state rep Clyde Alexander – as special advisers. In a press release, Straus' staff said they would help "to put in place several elements of planning and a review of House operations in anticipation of his election as Speaker by the Members of the House."

Alexander, the four-time chair of the House Committee on Transportation, was the member for Athens until 2003 (back then, it was House District 12: Now it's in GOPer Rep. Betty Brown's HD-4.) He also served on the Appropriations and the Local & Consent Calendars committees, as well as serving as vice-chair of Ways and Means. As such, his input on the pre-Craddick way of running the House could be invaluable.

Krier, on the other hand, doesn't have the House experience. Instead, like Straus, she did come up through the Bexar County Republican Party. The first female state senator from Bexar, she left the lege in 1992 to become a two-term county judge, then returned to state-level affairs when she spent a six-year stint on the UT Board of Regents. She even has a juvenile correctional treatment facility named after her.

It's an interesting selection: Both have deep policy experience going back decades, but both have been out of the lege long enough to have not been foot soldiers in the ugliness of the last few years. It is also a sign from Straus that his definition of bipartisan is not Craddick's "How many Dems do I need to get this done?" approach to reaching across the aisle.