The Texas Legislature Will Come to Disorder

The House Speaker’s race was a proxy for the MAGA/oligarch faction locking up state government. But it did not work out that way.

Welcome to another installment of Life Its Ownself. I offer insight, analysis and context on Texas and national politics, as well as entertaining stories of life its ownself in the Lone Star State. If you like what you read, please 1) smash the Like button at the bottom of this installment, 2) subscribe to this newsletter, and 3) tell your 1,000 best friends to read and subscribe. Also, feel free to comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

But first, your moment of Zen … The Milky Way, as seen from the cemetery in Terlingua, Texas on September 27, 2024. Photographed by Mark Cunningham.

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Thursday, January 16, 2025

Quote of the Day:

“This is the People’s House.”

- Rep. Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) after being selected as House Speaker for the coming legislative session

This platitude about the “People’s House” is a very common and ordinarily fatuous statement, right up there with “baseball, mom and apple pie.” But it took on new significance in Burrows’s acceptance speech, for his selection fended off an attempt by the wealthiest and most conservative Texans to secure “owner’s box” control of the House. These people – billionaires like Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn, consultants like Dave Carney and Allen Blakemore, and the grassroots MAGA soldiers who give credibiity to their threats – already control statewide officials like Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Govenor (and Senate presiding officer) Dan Patrick. They hoped to complete their trifecta by installing a friendly Speaker in the Texas House – and came very close to doing so.

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The 89^th Texas Legislature gaveled in Tuesday. There is always a festive atmosphere about Opening Day. Legislators and their families crowd into the House and Senate chambers to watch the swearing-in. In these days of social media, members upload selfies of themselves on the floor or even tape TikTok videos to send to the news outlets back home. One member even proposed to his longtime partner. Staffers are in a jubilant mood, akin to the first day back to school after summer break: seeing friends, meeting new colleagues, the days ahead full of promise.

In the Senate, not even the arrival of three new members – Molly Cook of Houston, Adan Hinojosa of Corpus Christi, and Brent Hagenbuch of Denton – could dispel the utter predictablility and boredom of Dan Patrick’s Playhouse. Patrick’s grip on the GOP senators is absolute, and his relationships with the chamber’s 11 Democrats varies from benign neglect to outright hostility.

As Christopher Hooks wrote in a 2023 Texas Monthly article,

“He’s the most powerful figure ever to have held the post,” says lobbyist Bill Miller, who has been watching lieutenant governors wheel and deal since 1985. Miller says it’s a lot simpler to lobby the Senate now than ever before. If Patrick wants a bill passed, it passes. If he doesn’t, it doesn’t. Approach a senator about a bill, Miller says, and the “first question out of the box is, ‘How does the lieutenant governor feel about it?’ ” One time, Miller said, by way of example, he convinced a senator to hold up a bill in his committee, effectively killing it. But Patrick wanted the bill alive. So he simply plucked the bill out of the senator’s hands and gave it to another committee, where it passed without incident.

Not content with treating the Senate as his own fiefdom, Patrick played an unprecedented active role in intramural House politics during the last election season. He began with a blistering condemnation of House Speaker Dade Phelan and the chamber he led immediately after the Senate acquitted Ken Paxton of impeachment charges adopted by a supermajority of House members. From then on, Phelan was always in his sights, and he loudly supported both Paxton’s (for voting to impeach him) and Abbott’s (for not supporting vouchers) fatwas against conservative House members — and Phelan supporters — who had defied them.

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(Former House Speaker Dade Phelan, back when people hung on his every word.)

As part of their retribution, Abbott and Paxton targeted Phelan in his district — centered in Beaumont where a major throughfare is called Phelan Boulevard. Phelan survived an expensive contested primary, but decided not to run for another term as Speaker. That set up a battle between two-termer Rep. David Cook of Mansfield, selected by the House GOP Caucus (under ground rules, immediately ignored by many members, that they would vote unanimously for the caucus choice), and Rep. Dustin Burrows of Lubbock, who’d been a key Phelan lieutenant and was thought to embody the “institutionalist” sentiment in the House. For good measure, Democratic Rep. Ana-Maria Ramos of Richardson also jumped in.

Typically, Speaker races are internal affairs and outsiders intervene at their own risk. But this time the exceptions blew a hole (possibly permanently) in the rule. The big funders of the Texas GOP were hell-bent on deposing Phelan; once the caucus had selected Cook, they were all-in on him, threatening censure and even worse to GOP members who did not toe the company line. The Four Horsemen of the Texapocalypse – Abbott, Patrick, Paxton, and Ag Commissioner Sid Miller – enthusiastically rallied for Cook. Of course, given the strained relatiosnhips between House members and Abbott/Patrick/Paxton, this may have been counterproductive.

In the first round of voting, Burrows received 71 votes, Cook 56, and Ramos 23. Under the rules, Ramos was now out and the runoff was between Burrows and Cook. Burrows won, 85-55. Burrows’ votes cames from 49 Democrats and 36 Republicans, prompting immediate squawking and primary threats from the MAGA establishment.

(The best day of his session: Rep. Dustin Burrows wins the Speaker’s race. It’s all downhill from here.)

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The breathless tone of my reporting and th sheer profundity of my analysis may lead you to believe that the triumph of Burrows over Cook augurs some cosmic improvement in the lot of Texans, some Dawning of the Age of Aquarius for you amd me and Bobby McGee. But that will not be. Except on one or two issues, the House will continue to vie with the Senate to enact the most reactionary legislation in the entire nation. In our sepia-toned retrospective of Phelan and his predecessor, Dennis Bonnen, we lionize their commitment to keep the House independent but neglect that the Legislature still passed some of the most draconian legislation in the country – a near-total ban on abortion, restriction on rights for trans people, especially minors, and the creation and funding of an army for the noble but entirely performative goal of protecting our border. Meanwhile, the Lege pissed away a $32 billion surplus last session without managing to give teachers a pay raise or schools an inrcease in their per-pupil allotment.

In the big picture, the state’s yawning problems remain unaddressed: a water crisis exacerbated by years of drought; environment degradation worsened by the extractive industries who remain supreme in the back corridors of power; and the looming health care crisis in rural parts of the state.

Hey, but at least Burrows won, right?