[8] Additionally, while in the Texas Senate, he served as president pro tempore between March 31, 1965, and January 14, 1966, during part of the 59th legislature.

In a dispute with Hilmar Moore, the longtime mayor of Richmond, Texas, over Moore's appointment to the state's Public Welfare Board, Schwartz said, “You can have that job over my dead body.” Moore replied, “Senator, I can’t think of any other way I’d rather have it.”[11] In the 1979 legislative session, Schwartz helped lead the "Killer Bees," a group of state senators who brought the legislature to a standstill by going into hiding and breaking the Senate quorum.

[4] Schwartz lost the 1980 election to Republican J. E. "Buster" Brown, a candidate who was recruited by then 29-year-old Karl Rove, working at the time for Texas Governor Bill Clements.

At the ceremony, Mayor Jim Yarbrough said, “We should have done this for Babe Schwartz many years ago...You've given a lifetime of commitment not only to Galveston and our community, but to this state.

The 1900 Galveston hurricane that devastated Galveston, he said, was a “message from God.” He explained: “God’s message was, ‘man wasn’t meant to live on no damned island.’”[14] In an Associated Press story after Hurricane Ike about the fact that the 1959 Texas Open Beaches Act, a state law protecting public access to beaches might cause some Galveston-area homes to be seized by the state, Schwartz said, "We're talking about damn fools that have built houses on the edge of the sea for as long as man could remember and against every advice anyone has given.

When Republican congressman Tom DeLay was first indicted in October 2005, many commentators predicted that he would bounce back politically; Schwartz, however, told The New York Times that "He's been gut-shot politically",[19] and was proven right as DeLay never again sought office.