U.S. Rep Lloyd Doggett of Austin fills in some of the backstory that led to his call for President Joe Biden to step aside.
Before Austin’s U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett put his political neck on the line by becoming the first prominent national Democrat to call on President Joe Biden to end his bid for reelection, the wily and veteran Texas lawmaker whose career started a half-century ago made sure to touch every important base before going public.
On the morning after Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, Doggett went to floor of the U.S. House and talked face to face with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and current Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. He huddled with Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who had been Pelosi’s No. 2 during both of her speakerships.
Doggett spoke with Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, perhaps Biden’s closest ally in the House, and “with every other (House) member I could find.” The message was simple, clear and direct: “We must have another candidate.”
In his first extensive sit-down interview since the once-inevitable, but now-scuttled nomination of Biden for a second term in the White House – and last month’s Democratic National Convention that brought unprecedented unity to a party all but resigned to defeat in November under a newly energized ticket headed by Vice President Kamala Harris –Doggett said he understood well the peril he faced by dropping the bombshell that would scramble the 2024 political landscape.
“I was willing to take a substantial risk to do what I thought was necessary for our country,” Doggett told the American-Statesman over a breakfast at an iconic 62-year-old Mexican restaurant in East Austin.
Although there was nearly unanimous, albeit private, consensus among his fellow congressional Democrats, Doggett said he received blowback from Biden loyalists in his Austin-centered congressional district who were angered by his message to the president. And he watched as the White House and the president mounted a full-scale offensive to silence the insurgency launched by the Texan.
“If the Lord Almighty comes out and tells me,” only then would Biden step aside, the president told ABC News three days after Doggett’s July 2 announcement.
Lloyd Doggett as a young state senator
The headwaters of what would become the history-making collision course between Doggett and Biden got their start in 1973, the year that both men would assume public office at almost unthinkably young ages. For Biden, a still-green local prosecutor in Delaware, it would be an election to the U.S. Senate at 30, the minimum age to serve in the upper chamber of Congress as per the Constitution.
Doggett — a rail-thin, newly minted lawyer with a jurisprudence degree from the University of Texas Law School whose narrow, angular face conjured up an image of a young Abraham Lincoln — arrived at the Texas Senate at 26 after winning a special election to the fill the vacancy left by 17-year veteran Charles F. Herring, who resigned to become general manager of the Lower Colorado River Authority.
More: When Lloyd Doggett called on Biden to stand down, it was one old pro talking to another
On Wednesday, 51 years and three weeks to the day after that August 1973 election, Doggett told the Statesman that the art of retail politics he learned during his first campaign remains the anchor pier in his foundation for public life.
“I managed to go in every office building at every shopping center in the area in that campaign,” Doggett said, while sitting in a table booth at Joe’s Bakery just a few steps from the front door. “I spent a lot of time in 7-Elevens getting Slurpees.”
Doggett took office just a few months after the 1973 Legislature adjourned its 140-day, reform-minded regular session in which lawmakers — many of them freshmen elected in the wake of the Sharpstown stock fraud scandal — enacted Texas’ first open government laws and sought to trim the reach of lobbyists. Doggett, who just a few years earlier was UT student body president, said he entered politics to champion consumer rights and push for tighter regulations to protect college students from being “ripped off” by unscrupulous apartment owners.
In the minority wing of the majority party
Out-numbered by the old-bull conservatives in his party, the liberal Doggett adopted some of the tactics still used in the Legislature where Republicans have long supplanted the right-leaning Democrats of decades gone by. Doggett took to bringing comfortable tennis shoes to the Senate chamber to signal his willingness to filibuster legislation that he and his allies lacked the votes to defeat.
Texas politics in the early 1970s was ruled by Democrats, but it was very much a two-party state: the ruling conservative Democrats and the insurgent liberals. Doggett’s lot was cast with the latter.
Sometimes, Doggett recalled, he would filibuster. More often, however, the mere sight of the casual footwear atop his desk would be enough to discourage conservatives from bringing up controversial bills because it meant other, more important measures might die as the legislative clock ran out during the extended speech.
“Those shoes, by the way, are still on my (office wall) in Washington,” Doggett said between bites of his three breakfast tacos, two of them bacon, egg and cheese — a Texas morning tradition — paired with a decaffeinated coffee.
In 2013, the sight of sneakers in Texas’ upper chamber made a comeback when then-state Sen. Wendy Davis of Fort Worth, another liberal Democrat, wore a bright orange pair as she filibustered some 13 hours to temporarily kill legislation aimed at restricting abortions.
Doggett, who authored legislation outlawing Kevlar-piercing “cop-killer” bullets in Texas and the bill creating the Sunset Commission aimed at streamlining moribund state agencies, was also in the vanguard of the tactic known in the Legislature as quorum-busting. In 1979, he and his fellow liberal senators spent five days in hiding to derail a proposal that would have allowed conservative Democrats to vote in the 1980 Republican presidential primary and vote again in the Democratic primary for down-ballot offices.
In 2003 and again in 2021, modern-day Democrats tried the tactic once more in hopes of killing other election-related measures. The difference was, the 1979 effort by Doggett and company succeeded; the later attempts ended in spectacular failures.
More: VP Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump to meet for first time ever at debate
Perhaps surprisingly, Doggett did manage to defeat conservative Democrats at the ballot box. It happened in 1984 when he gave up his safe seat in the state Senate to try his luck in a statewide race for the U.S. Senate. Two better-known Democrats, U.S. Rep. Kent Hance and former congressman Bob Krueger, split the conservative vote and Doggett advanced to the runoff. Hance was the opponent.
By a skinny margin of about 500 votes, Doggett won and claimed the ironic mantle “Landslide Lloyd.” However, an actual landslide awaited him in November at the hands of another one-time conservative Democrat. Party-switching Republican Phil Gramm beat him by 17 percentage points.
The loss to Gramm put Doggett’s political career on a four-year pause that ended in 1988 when he won a statewide race to the Texas Supreme Court. Rather than seek reelection in 1992, a time when Texas Democrats routinely won statewide races, Doggett opted to leave to take advantage of a much different, but long-awaited opportunity.
The journey from Austin to Washington
Doggett was a student at Austin High School when J.J. “Jake” Pickle was elected to Congress in 1962 from the same district former President Lyndon B. Johnson represented for nearly 12 years in the U.S. House beginning in 1937. Pickle had been in office 32 years when he decided to retire. It was unusual for someone holding a statewide elective office to trade it in for a post that only represented a fraction of Texas, but Doggett decided to buck that tradition in 1994.
For years, Doggett recalled, he “really wanted for Jake to step aside.” And he wasn’t the only ambitious Democrat awaiting that time.
“We went through the years with a host of people that were going to take Jake Pickle’s seat,” Doggett said.
In Washington, Doggett would find it was far different being one of 435 members of the U.S. House than being one of 31 state senators or nine justices on the Texas Supreme Court. For one, Doggett said, Congress is regimented by the majority party, and although he’s coming up on 30 years in Washington, Democrats have had full control of both chambers and of the presidency for only four of them, he said.
In Austin, a state senator might be able to file as many as a dozen bills that would be signed into law each session. A member of the U.S. House often must be content with tacking an amendment onto a sure-to-pass bill or killing a bill that might harm the people back home. One of the best measures of success is to secure funding for a project in their district, as Doggett demonstrated in late August when he visited an Austin Community College campus to announce he had secured $1.5 million in federal funding for ACC’s semiconductor programs.
More: US Rep. Lloyd Doggett announces funds for ACC’s National Semiconductor Training Center
Another measure of success, especially for a Democrat in the Republican stronghold of Texas, is political survival. And at that, Doggett has proven himself a master.
In 2003, after Republicans gained full control of state government, the GOP-led Legislature tasked itself with erasing the Democrats’ sole remaining advantage: the majority of the seats in the state’s congressional delegation. The strategy was pretty simple. It involved making sure that any new Democratic-leaning districts were dominated by Texans of color, either Black or Hispanic.
White Democrats, like Doggett, would be squeezed out. While most were, Doggett outfoxed Republicans by running in a district that included Austin but stretched all the way south to the Rio Grande Valley. That meant he had to win over tens of thousands of Democratic voters who likely had little or no knowledge of who he was.
That’s where Doggett’s practice of retail politics paid off. Just as he did 30 years earlier, he went business-to-business, neighborhood-to-neighborhood, door-to-door in pockets of San Antonio and communities along the Texas-Mexico border.
“I spoke very little Spanish,” Doggett recalled. But the ability to make personal connections “was huge.”
Republicans in 2011 sought to draw a district Doggett couldn’t win. But he somehow did. By 2021, Texas’ blue footprint had expanded, and Doggett easily won in a district that did not extend all the way to South Texas.
Mark McKinnon, a political analyst and commentator who just a couple of years out of UT volunteered to work on Doggett’s ill-fated 1984 Senate campaign, called the congressman one of his enduring heroes.
“He was a huge inspiration and a great model for the typical sort of Austinite then,” said McKinnon, who went on to become an aide to the late Democratic former Gov. Ann Richards and then for Republican Gov. George W. Bush. “But it’s amazing how, over the years, as much as Austin and Texas have changed, Lloyd Doggett has remained the same.”
McKinnon, a co-host and co-founder of the Showtime political documentary series, “The Circus,” also was a senior member of Bush’s presidential campaigns but is no longer a partisan operative.
“I’ve worked for a lot of politicians in my life, and Lloyd is smart as hell, but he’s also the hardest worker I’ve ever seen,” McKinnon told the Statesman. “He just works his ass off. He never turns it off. He lives it, he breathes it, he eats it. And that’s the big part of it.”
At Joe’s Bakery, the “lives it” and “eats it” part of McKinnon’s observation was on full display. As customers walked in the restaurant or made their way out just after 8 a.m., they would drop by Doggett’s table to shake hands or make conversation. One man reminded him that a long-planned family reunion was coming up, and he hoped the congressman could stop by. A woman jokingly warned Doggett that his choice of breakfast was sure to add inches to his waistline.
Once the visitors had left, the conversation steered back to the concerns that led Doggett to call for Biden to step aside. Watching the debate from their second home in Washington, Doggett said he and his wife of 55 years, Libby, were aghast that the president seemed unable to mount a defense to Trump’s nonstop offense or to call out untrue statements.
“He had so many opportunities to push back on Trump … and hold Trump accountable, and he didn’t,” Doggett said.
Although he alerted the House Democratic leaders that he planned to make a public statement the next day, Doggett held back as he expanded his circle of congressional confidants. He called the White House, hoping to speak with the president and told top aides about what he planned to say. No callback ever came.
The irony of a 77-year-old man whose been in politics for more than a half-century telling an 81-year-old man with the same number of years behind him that it’s time to let it go was not lost on Doggett.
“I didn’t complain about his age, I complained about his performance,” Doggett said. “You saw the statement. It was very carefully worded to be respectful and to as well as acknowledge his accomplishments.”
Asked how long he planned to remain in office, given that he and the president are contemporaries, Doggett said he should not be judged on his age but on whether he is up to the task. Already the longest-serving Texan in Congress, Doggett is favored to win his 15th term over novice Libertarian candidate Girish Altekar. And he hopes for one more after that.
“I have no guarantee of this job,” he said. “I have to re-up my employment contract every two years.”
McKinnon said that whenever Doggett does leave the stage, the role he played in persuading a president of his own party to make way for new leadership will be a defining chapter in his legacy. And because of his longevity, loyalty and stature, the call carried far more weight than if it had come from a younger and less respected member of Congress, McKinnon added.
“If you had asked me at that time, who among the Democratic members of Congress might be the first to ring the bell, I would have put Lloyd Doggett at the end of the line,” McKinnon said. “He has always been an incredibly loyal party man. He is a big-D Democrat. So for him to step out, it was both surprising and effective.
“If Kamala Harris wins, she can thank Lloyd Doggett.”
Source link : https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/state/2024/09/09/lloyd-doggett-career-texas-call-president-joe-biden-withdraw-2024-election/74956461007/
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Publish date : 2024-09-09 00:01:00
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