That’s how Travis County Commissioner Ron Davis is known, and as a Sept. 8 American-Statesman story explained, on 26 votes cast in the 2014 budget sessions, Davis racked up a staggering 19 abstentions, four “no” votes, one “yes” vote and two absences. Setting the county’s budget is one of the most important functions of the Commissioners Court, so his failure to decide 19 of 26 times should not be overlooked.

Ron Davis debates before abstaining at a Travis County Commissioner Court meeting.

Perhaps Davis would have benefitted from my class with former U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan.

In 1979, she retired from politics at age 43 as one of the most revered politicians in modern history. So, when it was announced she would teach at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs, she and the school were inundated with requests to audit her classes.

She knew it would take an auditorium to accommodate auditors, but that was not her idea of meaningful teaching. She wanted her graduate seminars in policy development and ethics to be intimate with no more than 10 students. No auditors.

I will try to rectify that by inviting you to return with me into the spring semester of 1992, into the last policy development course the professor taught before her untimely death at age 59 four years later.

Jordan graduated from law school before she served in the Texas Senate and the Congress, so she knew firsthand what courts of law and legislative bodies have in common: both are set up on an adversarial system. Because of that, to teach us what making policy was all about, she gave us a syllabus with seven subjects representing democratic principles.

To thoroughly absorb each in a two-week period, our voluminous assigned readings included articles written by the most respected experts on both sides of the principle. During the two weeks, we would thoroughly dissect the topic. You had better be prepared for class because she would call on you. (I imagine law school is like that.)

The point was to study the issue, then take a stand and defend it. Serving the public interest was our guiding star in deciding. At the end of a two-week period, one by one she would call on us to state and defend our stand. There was no right or wrong stand.

Well into the semester, one classmate confidently declared, “I have thoroughly vetted both sides, and I am afraid I cannot take a stand on this one. Both sides make sense to me.” My classmates and I broke out into an involuntary sweat, and with hearts pounding, eyes widened and jaws dropped, we stared in disbelief at the student who would not take a stand. Professor Jordan furrowed her brow.

U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan opens the impeachment hearings on July 25, 1974. Her brow remained unfurrowed during the electrifying eight-minute and 45-second speech.

For context, never to that point had any of us seen Professor Jordan furrow her brow. And recall, gentle reader, than not once did her brow furrow during the electrifying eight minutes and 45 seconds on July 25, 1974, when she united a nation in turmoil with her speech opening the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment proceedings. We all know how that turned out for Richard Nixon.

[To view that speech, click here.]

“Not taking a stand?” she asked with furrowed brow with her voice that rang from the mountaintop, yet was impartial and gentle. “You have read the pros and cons. If you are developing policy or making, applying or interpreting law, then it is your job to take a stand. Riding the fence is not acceptable.”

Barbara Jordan studied all arguments for and against voting rights, civil rights and the articles of impeachment. She took a stand on each issue, defended it and changed the course of American history.

If elected officials frequently abstain, they are not governing. They are not making policy. They are not leading. They are not doing what the people sent them there to do.

At the age of 59, her candle burned out too soon. She helped unify this nation, and we need her now more than ever.

When she was sworn into office as U.S. representative in 1973, the Congress had about a 40 percent approval rating. Gradually the body has become fully polarized. With approval ratings of 10 percent, Americans were amazed last week when the Congress functioned enough to pass needed legislation extending payroll tax cuts.

During the Republican presidential primaries, we’re not hearing words to reaffirm our shared values or that try to unite us. Instead, the flames of the most disgruntled among us are being fanned. The chair of the Federal Reserve is treasonous; the president’s Christianity is not real; the government is waging war on religion; we should wage war on Iran; the free press is evil; Planned Parenthood and the U.S.-Mexico border should be shut down.

The essential message is that government is the enemy. Divided we stand. The most radical candidate will become the party’s nominee, driving the wedge down deeper into the body politic.

Yes, we need Barbara Jordan back now to unify this nation once again, like she did 38 years ago.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon was running for re-election against Sen. George McGovern. His campaign committee paid five men to break into the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. (Pretty unnecessary — Nixon’s victory was one of the most lopsided in history.) The men were caught.

Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the cover-up, and all the president’s men (the five burglars and two others) were convicted in 1973.

The ordeal rocked the political world. Hearings were called to consider whether to impeach the president. Jordan served on the House Judiciary Committee. Americans were glued to their televisions.

On July 25, 1974, a 38-year-old, relatively unknown black representative in her second year in Congress delivered the opening statement to begin the hearings. In 15 minutes, Jordan electrified and focused a nation in turmoil.

[To view that speech, click here.]

She united us and changed the course of history. Fearing impeachment or removal from office, Nixon resigned from the presidency two weeks later.

In 1992, the gods smiled upon me, and by some accident of fate, I was allowed into Jordan’s policy seminar at the University of Texas’ LBJ School of Public Affairs. A nursing graduate student, I was out of place among 10 confident political science graduate students, selected for their accomplishments. I was old enough to be their mom, and the only knowledge I had of government, beyond the basics, was from a UT government class that I slept through in 1965.

I’ll never forget how I felt when I actually saw her in person. Chills went down my spine when I heard her first words. Her voice rang from the mountaintop.

She assigned readings by the most respected authors on basic democratic principles, the Constitution and topics of national debate. We each argued a side and respected each other’s informed opinion. Riding the fence was unacceptable. She gave us each a little blue handbook of the Constitution.

I absorbed the conviction that public service is a high and honorable calling. I learned that the Constitution is a purposely vague and sacred document that forged a government in which our liberty was not entrusted to a particular branch, that one branch would check the others. I learned that in America’s great experiment in democracy, the people hold the power, and rightly so.

Above all, I learned what government of the people, by the people and for the people really means. We are the government, and the government is not our enemy.

As we remember Barbara Jordan on this day, we need to reflect on her clarity of thought, her voice, her message of unity.

Undoubtedly overlooked by most, that statement struck me as profound and rocketed me back to 1992. The gods had smiled upon me, and I found myself at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, out of place among 10 promising graduate students chosen to take the last policy seminar taught by the late Barbara Jordan. The first African American elected to the Texas Senate since Reconstruction, Jordan went on to a distinguished career in Congress, ended her public service teaching at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan opens the impeachment hearings on July 25, 1974. Her brow remained unfurrowed during the electrifying eight-minute and 45-second speech.

I was old enough to be my classmates’ mom, but I was as bendable as a wire hanger. We studied policy from every conceivable angle, dissecting it into many parts — politics (not a dirty word), democratic pluralism, congressional prerogative, the U.S. Constitution, the presidency, leadership, vision, interest-group impact, agency roles in the policy process, the judiciary and more. To this day, Jordan’s reverence for our democracy is as ingrained within me as her conviction that public service is a high and honorable calling.

One important lesson we learned is that Americans are not comfortable with fundamental policy change, and that’s clearly been in evidence during the past year’s health care reform brawl. The nation has not legislated fundamental change since the 1960s, and, unaccustomed, emotions have run high.

Members of congress yelled “you lie” and “baby killer” from the chambers of the people’s House. Congressmen were spat upon and were the target of racial and homophobic epithets by angry protestors as they walked the steps to the Congress to cast their difficult votes.

After the bill was signed into law, all hell broke loose. Several representatives who voted for the bill have received death threats, profane voicemails, white powder mailed in envelopes and bricks hurled through their home and office windows with hateful notes attached. Three days after the vote, attorneys general from more than a dozen states, including Texas, filed suit asserting as unconstitutional the mandate for individuals to buy insurance.

The late Jake Pickle, who represented the 10th Congressional District from 1963 to 1995, knew firsthand about difficult votes. As a new congressman, he was confronted with the 1964 Civil Rights legislation. His constituency was bitterly divided on the issue. He knew in his heart that forbidding discrimination based on race and sex was the right thing to do. He also knew as a new congressman, a “yes” vote could well cost him his seat. He voted his conscience: “Aye.” He remembered that vote in his 1997 memoir, “Jake,” as his gutsiest, proudest moment in the U.S. Congress.

The health care legislation was never about socialism, red versus blue, a public option, abortion, government takeover, poll numbers or midterm election fallout. Those are all abstractions or side issues. All along, this legislation has been about uniting around the principle of equality, so that, like all other industrialized nations, in America health care will be available for everyone, not just the privileged.

In her keynote address to the National Democratic Convention in 1976, Jordan said with her voice and wisdom ringing from the mountain top, “First, we believe in equality for all and privileges for none … But this is the great danger America faces: that we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups — city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. … But a spirit of harmony will survive in America … if each of us remembers, when self-interest and bitterness seem to prevail, that we share a common destiny.”

We also learned in Jordan’s class that true leadership is rare, that it requires a vision for the people along with the trust, skills, faith and perseverance to carry it out. How I wish she had lived to see a young visionary black senator swept into presidential office with the promise of “real” (meaning fundamental) change.

How proud the congresswoman would be that within 14 months of inauguration, Obama accomplished what three presidents had failed to do. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Richard Nixon each placed universal coverage high on their agendas and fought valiantly for it. The late Sen. Edward Kennedy called it the last great unfinished business of our society.

The president rightly could have added to his remarks, “This is what leadership looks like.”