To get a sense of the changing nature of the Texas delegation, it is necessary only to view two wildly disparate events: the monthly meeting of the Texas Breakfast Club and the extemporaneous orations of acid-tongued Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich. A recent meeting of the breakfast club, on a Thursday morning in April, drew about 280 Texans, pseudo-Texans, former Texans, staffers for Texas congressmen, and Texas media types, who crowded in to hear the day’s guest, Supreme Court justice and El Paso native Sandra Day O’Connor. The club began more than twenty years ago, when the Texas delegation was the most unified and probably the most powerful in Washington. Since then the breakfasts have been a nonpartisan exercise in good-natured fellowship and chauvinism. “I thought you might want to hear the inside story of how the Supreme Court really works,” said O’Connor after she was introduced by Congressman Ralph Hall. “But Ralph said, ‘No, this is a pretty sophisticated gr