In the leadup to Texas’ 89th legislative session, the Republican leadership apparatus was under siege and the party in open warfare as the sitting House Speaker Dade Phelan decided not to seek another term with the gavel.
This power vacuum created unbridled chaos among the GOP ranks, largely divided between those who aligned with Phelan and more mainstream House Republicans, and those right-wingers, including many who had just won their seats by ousting incumbents, who were seeking a total upheaval of the status quo.
In the middle were 62 Democrats.
Ever since Republican Speaker Tom Craddick was dethroned in January 2009, the Democratic caucus has delivered the decisive votes to choose the speaker. First for the more moderate Joe Straus, then Dennis Bonnen, and then Phelan.
This has been the Democrats’ modus operandi: maximizing their minimal leverage to prevent a more hardline conservative takeover of House leadership—to secure a seat at the speaker’s table, maybe a handful of committee chairmanships, and at least some semblance of negotiating power on policy matters. Over the last decade, this also preserved the House as a bulwark against the increasingly extreme Senate of Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.
At a high level, this has allowed Democrats to negotiate some concessions and horsetrading on legislation, to kill some very bad bills and make others better. But as the GOP has grown ever brasher in its pursuit of a radical conservative agenda, the fruits of that inside strategy have become ever-less bountiful.
In late 2024, in the midst of the all-out speaker battle, Democrats found themselves with a chance to play things differently. They could stand by and watch the fractured Republican ranks duke it out, withholding their support until a speaker candidate met their demands—or otherwise they’d simply cast their votes for a Democratic speaker. For a moment, it looked like that’s what they might actually do.
Then came the stampede. A couple dozen Democrats, many of whom had been a part of Team Phelan, lined up behind Dustin Burrows, a top lieutenant for the prior two speakers—and then came a dozen or so more. Burrows was perhaps an odd choice for Dems to rally around. The Lubbock Republican had carried the “death star” legislation to gut local control the previous session, and he was a staunch supporter of school vouchers.
Gene Wu, House Democratic caucus chair, on the floor in May (Jordan Vonderhaar for the Texas Observer)
The case made by the so-called Burrowcrats was that he was the lesser evil—or, at least, the devil they knew—while his challenger and the GOP caucus choice, David Cook, was a more unknown commodity that the party’s far-right faction had latched onto. In early December, Burrows announced he had the votes to win the speakership: 38 Democrats plus 38 Republicans. (A smaller bloc of mostly progressive members fought against this strategy and declined to get in line.)
“Many members came to the obvious conclusion that we must have a speaker who would not simply trample all over the minority and take a pledge that says, we will not pass any of your bills—we won’t even work on your bills—until we pass every single one of our bills,” the newly elected Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu told the Texas Tribune at the time.
But it was never clear exactly what, if anything, the Burrowcrats had secured in exchange for their support beyond this vague understanding that he would not entirely block Democrats from power. And it certainly wasn’t clear that they’d secured any significant promise on the session’s most meaningful issue: vouchers. In fact, Burrows declared right out of the gate that the House had the votes and would pass the bill.
Fast forward to June 2, sine die. Dan Patrick declared that the Texas Senate had just completed its most conservative and successful session in history as the upper chamber nearly ran the table on his priority legislation and he had his way with the House on many key issues, including a total ban on THC hemp products and a litany of red-meat social conservative legislation.
Governor Greg Abbott had already signed his white whale, the school vouchers bill, in early May and was about to declare victory on his long-coveted goal of limiting access to bail. And Republicans successfully passed legislation to provide several billion dollars more to once again modestly ease the burden of local property taxes on homeowners.
Abbott had ensured that so-called school choice was likely a foregone conclusion this session, but perhaps Democrats could have at least pushed the speaker to hold out on vouchers as a bargaining chip until the Senate had played nice on a public school funding package (which had died last session because Abbott tethered it to vouchers and which the House paired again with vouchers as a “Texas two-step.”) Instead, the speaker’s decision to pass both the funding and privatization bills early handed all leverage over to Patrick, who later seized control of the details of the school finance legislation.
To be fair, the House did manage to moderate some bills, including on bail reform and tenant rights, and kill others, including an ugly tort reform bill and a craven abortion-pill bounty hunter bill. And Democrats played some part in this.
All told, things could have gone worse, but the power structure solidified this session isn’t promising: There’s little evidence to believe, if Abbott and Patrick decided to play hardball on some of this year’s failed conservative legislation, that the House would or Democrats could successfully resist. And even within the House there are signs the GOP speaker can peel off Democrats as needed when he has a pet project of his own.
For instance, some 30-plus Dems supplied the necessary support for constitutional amendment resolutions, which need 100 votes, to ban any future possibility of state taxes on securities transactions and capital gains, highly unlikely prospects in Texas but ones that Republicans wanted to pass as a show of fealty to the titans of Dallas’ growing “Y’all Street.”
The factions within the Democratic caucus are not primarily along ideological lines but more about legislative strategy: whether to quietly work within the power structure and influence the margins, or to loudly confront the power structure and make the party’s own agenda front and center.
While some Democratic members performed fierce opposition to school vouchers, along with anti-immigrant and anti-DEI legislation, the feeling that this was hollow theater was particularly strong in this year of Abbott, Patrick, and Trump dominance.
And more and more, Democrats have responded to the growing strain of anti-corporate populism within the Texas GOP by themselves co-opting old pro-business Texas Miracle messaging, by going along willingly with the governor’s Elon Musk-inspired push to turn Texas into a corporate haven.
On the matter of property tax relief—perhaps the most important, broadly salient policy issue in the state—the policy divide was largely between the two Republican-run chambers, not the two parties. Democrats did not offer any sort of alternative policy message of their own, such as demanding that the state exclude downtown skyscrapers or Gulf Coast refineries from the property tax cuts, or ensure that the roughly one-third of Texas households that are renters are also provided some semblance of direct relief.
Perhaps it’s time for House Democrats to toss out the old playbook that centers around speaker selection—one that increasingly comes at the expense of diluting Democratic politics.
Having spent so long as the minority party in the Texas Capitol, Democrats’ emphasis on playing an inside game—to quietly make some bad bills less bad, while individual members get some traction on their own piecemeal legislation—has seemingly become the consuming identity of the party.
Still, in that time, abortion has become near-totally outlawed. The public education system has been pushed to the brink and local school districts made the target of fear-mongering and social conservative dictates. The floodgates of publicly funded privatization have been opened with the passage of vouchers. Medicaid, far from being expanded, is hollowed out. Corporate welfare programs run rampant.
And yet, Democrats are no closer to controlling the Texas House, to say nothing of statewide office, than they were 10 years ago.
The time may have come for Democrats in the Legislature to withhold their cooperation, sacrifice some of the bipartisan chumminess that prevails in the House, and focus on building a party that knows why Texans should vote for it.
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