To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.

Then come back here and refresh the page.

So it was an extraordinary moment last week when three of his highest profile appointees tasked with administering some of the biggest responsibilities of state government stepped up to all but say that Texas could no longer afford the Grover Norquist model of shrinking government until it was small enough to fit into a bathtub and drown.

No, Education Commissioner Robert Scott, Health and Human Services Commissioner Tom Suehs and Texas Transportation Commission Chairman Ted Houghton didn’t specifically refer to Norquist or his ideologically charged rhetoric.

But Commissioner Scott did personally and publicly apologize to educators for budget cuts that made it all but impossible to keep their schools properly functioning.

Commissioner Suehs did tell hospital administrators that Medicaid funding was going to be around $17 billion short next session and a third of that was because of smoke and mirrors adopted in the last session of the Legislature.

And Chairman Houghton did publicly propose raising automobile registration fees to help deal with traffic-strangled cities and suburbs.

Don’t get confused. These men have all proven their stripes over the years and could never be confused with liberals.

But damaging schools undermines the education and opportunity for the children of Republican rural and suburban voters. The majority of Medicaid funding supports the nursing homes serving our parents and grandparents. Nursing homes are particularly important to rural Republican voters. And the most reliable political base for Republicans is still the suburbs, the very communities most negatively impacted by insufficient transportation infrastructure.

These Perry appointees all delivered variations on the same message. They cannot execute the core missions of their agencies under current revenue constraints.

I don’t know what Governor Perry’s intentions are, but Texas has a $1.3 trillion economy. His appointees have been good soldiers, but now that national ambitions are off the table, his team seems to be asking for leadership in making Texas government work.