Texas House Speaker Battle Gets Heated And Weird

With only a month left until the 2025 Texas legislative session, the fight for Speaker of the House has gotten heated and also a little weird.

There are two men vying for the vacancy left by former House Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont). Despite delivering one of the most conservative Texas Huse sessions in state history, Phelan was marked for removal by Governor Gregg Abbott for not pushing through the governor’s school voucher plan. Attorney General Ken Paxton  also targeted Phelan for not stopping Paxton’s impeachment for misuse of office, something Paxton is still under federal investigation over. Phelan barely managed to hold onto his seat in the recent election, and withdrew from the Speaker race when it became clear he didn’t have the votes.

David Cook (R-Mansfield) is trying to replace Phelan from the right, promising to do away with the tradition of letting the opposition part control some chair positions in House committees. Phelan’s support of this tradition is one thing that has earned him the ire of the far-right backed by Christian nationalist oil and gas moguls Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn.

The Texas GOP caucus met last weekend to vote on a candidate. Caucus rules state that any candidate that received 60 percent of the caucus vote would have the unanimous support of the group’s 88 members, more than enough to secure the speakership.

Cook fell four short of that goal thanks to a revolt by supporters of his opponent, Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock). Several of them left the caucus meeting before voting, denying Cook the necessary support. This left Cook with a majority of Republican support, but not unanimous and also not enough to win the speakership.

Instead, Burrows is pursuing a bipartisan strategy, claiming he has enough support from Democrats and  Republicans to win the speakership in a coalition vote. On Saturday, Cook said he had 38 Democrats and 38 Republicans behind him, though at least three names on his list later said they were mistakenly included. That would give him enough votes to win.

This puts the GOP in yet another intraparty war, a thing that has dominated the Republicans for the last three election cycles. The Republican Party of Texas is now considering altering their rules so that members who do not support the House Speaker candidate chosen by the majority of the caucus cannot run as Republicans in a primary for two years.

This is a bizarre strategy that would almost certainly fail in a court challenge. Denying members of a party to run as members of that party simply because they did not like the preferred candidate for speaker of some of the other members is a fundamental denial of the right to run for office in a democracy.

This is likely the new normal, though. The Texas GOP has increasingly used censuring its own members for defection from the will of the far-right as a political tool to shape the legislature into a more extreme body. Purity tests are now standard, with Republicans continuously denouncing opponents as “Republicans in name only” as part of a bizarre witch hunt/political beauty contest. Whoever prevails in the speaker race will be bogged down once again by Republican squabbling.