The morning of the Texas House vote on school vouchers Wednesday included, among other last-minute maneuvering, a phone call from President Donald Trump.
“It’s one of the most important votes you’ve ever taken,” Trump told the House GOP caucus in a meeting that Governor Greg Abbott had called.
Standing around Abbott, House Republicans listened as Trump rambled on about Texans, freedom, families, and how he would return education policy back to the states. He then promised to back them if they voted for school vouchers: “I’ll be endorsing you. … Everybody that I endorsed, every single person that I endorsed in the state won.”
And with that, Abbott assured passage of his pet project: a universal school voucher program. In an 86-63 vote, with only two Republicans opposing—Representative Dade Phelan and Representative Gary VanDeaver—the House passed Senate Bill 2 amid widespread opposition from Texans across the political spectrum. From there, the bill will go to the Senate, which could quibble with some changes but is all but certain to ultimately move the measure to Abbott’s desk.
Since deciding to make school vouchers his top priority for the 2023 legislative session, Abbott has pulled out all the stops to ram the proposal through the House, where a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans has for 30 years defeated such efforts. During the last Legislature, Abbott tied school vouchers to a $7.6 billion school funding bill. He dragged House members through an onslaught of special sessions, but still he failed when 21 Republicans joined Democrats to kill the bill. Abbott then launched a targeted primary offensive in 2024—waged through deceptive ads on unrelated subjects—that ultimately ousted 9 Republican House incumbents who’d held their ground, replacing them with more hard-right candidates, a revenge campaign partly bankrolled by $12 million from billionaire Pennsylvania hedge-fund investor Jeff Yass.
Claiming a new pro-voucher majority in the Texas House, Abbott has insisted for the past several months that his top political priority was as good as passed. But, earlier this week, support grew within his own party for a Hail Mary move to kick the issue onto a statewide ballot later this year. Abbott called some House Republicans into his office Tuesday “to threaten vetoes of their unrelated bills if any of them offer amendments or vote for changes to the bill on the floor,” Quorum Report revealed.
Mary Lowe, part of a conservative anti-voucher group called Families Engaged, told the Texas Observer: “The governor showed us that he will be punitive to anyone who doesn’t fall in line with what he orders.” She said she had voted for Trump, but “He does not understand or respect state sovereignty.”
Charles Johnson, a North Texas pastor and director of Pastors for Texas Children, which has fought against school vouchers since 1995, said: “Governor Abbott and President Donald Trump may have bullied lawmakers behind closed doors, but they cannot silence the people. They blocked a proposal to put vouchers on the ballot because they know it would fail.”
Zeph Capo, the president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, added in a statement that “Greg Abbott relied on a last ditch phone call from Donald Trump to bully Republican lawmakers to fall in line.”
All day long Wednesday, the Capitol building was swarmed with Texans like Lowe who drove across the state to urge lawmakers to let Texas voters decide the school vouchers issue in the fall. They wore red and hoisted posters and banners that read, “Let the People Vote,” “Students Over Billionaires,” and “Don’t mess with Texas Public Schools.” Standing a few feet outside the House gallery, Angelica Rios held a sign that said, “We the people say no to school vouchers.” Rios told the Observer she had taken time off of work because “We have a voice too.” Jamie Lavarta, who worked as a school paraprofessional, drove from North Texas to tell legislators, “It should be a vote for the people.”
Leading up to the decisive vote, opposition had been growing. Three weeks prior, the House Public Education Committee heard nearly 24 hours of public testimony on the voucher proposal from around 700 people, 70 percent opposed to the bill. In a March poll, two-thirds of Texans surveyed said they opposed “A private school voucher program that would take tax dollars away from public schools to subsidize a student’s private school education.”
Lowe said members of her group had delivered to legislators water bottles wrapped in labels that read: “Liquid Courage to Vote for Amendment on SB2 to Bring it to the People.”
But, by the evening, Lowe said, “There is no courage.”
The previous day, there had been as many as 85 House members who supported the ballot measure move, Quorum Report wrote. But, by Wednesday evening, it became clear the House would pass the school voucher bill when only one Republican, former House Speaker Dade Phelan, voted with the Democratic minority for Representative James Talarico’s amendment to bring the issue to a statewide vote.
Talarico told House members he had decided to carry the amendment because Abbott “threatened to make their [GOP members’] primaries a bloodbath.”
Noting that there are multiple precedents for putting proposals that are not constitutional amendments (which always require voter approval) to a popular referendum, Talarico said, “When an issue is going to have such an impact, such a historic impact on such a critical service, like public education, when an issue may raise, and I think will raise people’s property taxes across the state, then that issue, especially when there is bipartisan opposition, especially when there is historical controversy about the issue … this body is justified in sending this issue to the voters for their approval.”
Talarico reminded members, “The last time I checked, this was still the people’s house, not the governor’s house. All of that is at risk with this vote on this amendment.”
Past midnight, the voucher bill author, Salado Republican Brad Buckley, continued to kill off Democrats’ efforts to limit spending on the program and restrict eligibility to low- and middle-income students by successfully tabling their amendments to the bill.
“The people of Texas, working-class families, deserve to see us fight and debate on the issues, and unfortunately, when we table these motions, we’re also silencing debate and really shutting down democracy,” said Democratic Representative Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos.
Democratic Representative Vikki Goodwin added, “It’s almost as though some members have been told how to vote, and they aren’t looking at the policy. They’re just following directions.”
The bill finally passed, with ease, at 2 a.m.
The House has appropriated $1 billion for the first biennium of the voucher program, but the bill’s fiscal note estimates the net cost will grow past $6 billion in the second biennium. Three percent of funds would go to the Comptroller, and five percent would go to private vendors who manage the program.
While the state currently has a budget surplus of $24 billion, Democrats warned that ballooning costs to the general revenue fund may affect public school funding if the economy faces a recession. Impending changes for federal funding to school districts will also have an impact. Democratic Representative Donna Howard’s proposed amendment to make up future public school funding shortfalls with money appropriated for private school vouchers was rejected.
Each child in the program would receive 85 percent of the estimated statewide average of state and local funding for students—$10,330 per student in the program’s first year, growing to $10,889 by 2030, per the fiscal note. Homeschool students would receive $2,000, and students with disabilities in private school would receive up to $30,000, though private schools are not mandated to enroll or provide services for students with disabilities. The bill caps the portion of program funds that can go to families at 500 percent or more of the federal poverty level at 20 percent, and it deprioritizes those families compared to those with lower incomes or whose kids have disabilities. Democratic Representative John Bucy’s amendment to simply exclude high-income families was dismissed.
According to Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University professor, data collected from states with a universal voucher program shows only a quarter of participants were previously in public schools. “The rest had either never been in public school because they were kindergartners, or, more commonly, were coming into the voucher system from a private school,” Cowen said.
House Democratic Caucus leader Gene Wu denounced the bill, saying, “When we say that this bill is about helping the needy, helping the poor, helping people who are living paycheck to paycheck, this is not what this bill does. This bill is a trough, a feeding trough for the rich.”
In a statement, Wu said, “Today, Texas House Republicans chose to bow to a call from Donald Trump rather than the call of Texans for a public vote. …This is a disgraceful day for freedom and the voice of the people of Texas.”
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