The Texas GOP’s failed campaign to install Republican Rep. David Cook as the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives has left some party members resenting its aggressive tactics.
On Tuesday, the state ethics commission dismissed a Republican complaint against the GOP party chair regarding the speaker race, and a pro-Cook lawmaker sued one of the action groups backing Cook for speaker for allegedly claiming that he was committed to Lubbock Republican Rep. Dustin Burrows, Cook’s chief opponent.
When both Cook and Burrows announced last month that they had enough votes to claim the speakership, local and state Republican party officials and conservative political groups unified around Cook as the best candidate. Both representatives had similarly conservative voting records last session, but Burrows aimed to win the position with support from Democrats.
To help clinch the race for Cook, Texas Republican Party Chair Abraham George and numerous county level GOP parties threatened to censure any representatives who did not support Cook — an action that, under new party rules, would bar those representatives from the Republican primary ballot in the next election.
George also threatened to send negative mailers to constituents of any representatives who did not back Cook, including Palestine Republican Rep. Cody Harris.
On Jan. 8, Cook argued in a complaint to the Texas Ethics Commission that George illegally threatened and intimidated lawmakers. His threats to spend money on mailers offered economic benefit to any candidate who would run against Harris, he argued, which, in conjunction with the threat of censure, would constitute a bribe.
The Texas Ethics Commission on Tuesday dismissed that complaint, Harris told the Texas Tribune, because it did not believe it had the jurisdiction to give an opinion.
Dismissed complaints are kept confidential by state law, but complainants can ask the commission for a review of the decision. Harris told the Tribune that he has not decided whether to take that action.
But pro-Cook Republicans didn’t escape the pressure campaign, either. Rep. Pat Curry of McClennan County filed a lawsuit and initiated a criminal investigation of a Virginia-based group for misrepresenting his position in the House speaker’s race, Waco’s KWTX reported on Tuesday.
Curry is arguing in his suit that he had already committed to voting for Cook, but the day before the caucus was set to vote last month, the political action committee Courageous Conservatives sent a text blast to his constituents listing his personal cell phone number and calling him a “turncoat” who “left the Republicans to side with the Democrats in electing a new closet Democrat speaker, Dustin Burrows.” The texts urged readers to contact Curry to urge him to support Cook over Burrows.
Those messages, in addition to a Facebook post from the group, allegedly flooded Curry’s phone with “hundreds of calls and texts for this purpose, filling up his personal voicemail,” according to the filing as quoted by KWTX. Many of those messages allegedly contained “menacing words and veiled threats,” per the filing, concerning his family and staff and prompting home and office sweeps by the state Department of Public Safety.
Courageous Conservatives’s posts constitute political advertisements that were not properly disclosed under Texas election rules, Curry is arguing, and “resulted in harassment and harm” to Curry.
Curry also told KWTX that the group employed a similar tactic against Democratic lawmakers.
Cook, a Republican from Mansfield, condemned the PAC’s actions as “reprehensible” and “below the belt politics” in a post on X last month.
[Link to embedded tweet from Cook: https://x.com/DavidCookTexas/status/1870596822026363296]With Burrows’s victory in the speaker race on Jan. 14, it’s unclear what’s next in the conflict between the Republican Party’s more establishment conservative lawmakers and its far-right members.
Burrows beat out Cook for the speakership with the votes of 36 Republicans. To make good on its threats, the Texas GOP would need to censure nearly 41% of its 88 members in the House.