Dade Phelan, Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, announced on Friday that he would withdraw from the race for a third term as head of the lower chamber. However, his surrender isn’t a clear win for his hard-right detractors either.
On one hand, it’s difficult to imagine any conservative being unhappy with Phelan’s leadership. Over the past four years, he has overseen a massive push for Republican supremacy that includes banning abortion, restricting voting rights and access, and various anti-LGBT initiatives. By any reasonable measure, Phelan is a dedicated conservative who has accomplished legislative milestones previously considered pipe dreams.
And yet, he was also the major impediment to and even greater rightward shift. Phelan allowed the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton to proceed, refused to end the long-standing practice of allowing Democrats to chair some committees, and did nothing to help Governor Greg Abbott’s school voucher ban pass through rural House Republican opposition.
These actions earned him the ire of Abbott, Paxton, and other powerful far-right Texas Republicans. Phelan held onto his Beaumont seat by less than 1,000 votes in a runoff thanks to an Abbott-backed challenger. Though adamant he would retain his leadership, the target on Phelan’s back has made garnering support difficult.
That said, Phelan is well-liked and deeply respected by Texas conservatives, and they don’t appear ready to run the complete opposite direction either. The speakership is down to two probably candidates: David Cook of Mansfield and Dustin Burrows of Lubbock.
Cook is coming to the speakership from the right, but he isn’t that much different from Phelan, who he previously supported. Cook also voted to impeach Paxton, though he now says he would not have voted for all charges. His work in the legislature has been very conservative, but really no more conservative than Phelan, though he did vote for school vouchers. He has vowed to end the Democratic chairpersonships, a strange sticking point for the far-right despite Democrats having less than a quarter of such positions and hardly ever stalling Republican priorities through them.
Cook’s support depends almost entirely on winning all Republicans in the House, who will caucus this weekend on the matter. Burrows, however, believes he can win the day through bipartisan support. Burrows can be described as Phelan 2.0, a comparatively moderate candidate who wished to uphold the few remaining bipartisan traditions left in the House after two decades of total Republican control.
Whether he can actually court enough Democrats and Republicans to stop Cook is unknown. Republican caucus rules state that any candidate who can win 60 percent of the Republican vote will get unanimous support in the formal House Speaker vote. With Republicans controlling the chamber 88 – 62, that would be enough to deliver the position.
Neither candidate has enough declared support to get that far this weekend, though that does not mean a clear winner won’t emerge. If one does not, the fight for support will likely continue until January.
Whoever wins, it’s clear that the House is not quite ready to cede its control entirely to the executive branch’s handpicked candidates yet. There is some indication that the lower chamber will still be a break on the most extreme right-ward pushes in the next session.
