In Texas, Bipartisanship Is on Life Support. Republicans Could Pull the Plug.
It’s old hat to say everything is bigger in Texas. True connoisseurs know that things in the Lone Star State are also often wilder and weirder than what you see on the evening news. Every two weeks, Steven Monacelli will explore the dystopic, desperate, and despicable realities of contemporary Texas and channel the sense of absurdity, anger, and anguish that is felt by so many Texans. State politics mirror our already overheated summers, while floods and hard freezes overwhelm our infrastructure, and disinformation erodes our social discourse. But not all is lost. Together, we can navigate this Hell & High Water to get to more stable ground.
As lawmakers gear up for the 2025 legislative session, Texans are in for a bumpy ride. Buckle your seatbelts.
A tight competition for the position of speaker of the state House has caused long-simmering tensions between the far-right and moderate-but-still-conservative wings of the Republican Party to boil over with acrimony. Deep fissures exposed during the failed attempt to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton are once again fueling intense party infighting, this time between supporters of Rep. David Cook, whose candidacy for speaker of the House is endorsed by the majority of the Republican caucus, and Rep. Dustin Burrows, an ally of former speaker Rep. Dade Phelan who is challenging Cook with the support of both Republican and Democratic state representatives.
On Dec. 7, the Republican Party of Texas passed a resolution that implies it would censure — and thereby effectively bar members of the House from participating in primary elections for two years thanks to Rule 44, which was adopted at the 2024 Texas GOP convention — if they don’t support the rightmost wing of the party’s preferred candidate for speaker. Cook, a Republican from Mansfield, has committed to ending the long-standing bipartisan practice of awarding Democratic state representatives with committee chairmanships.
The resolution was adopted within hours of news that Burrows had released a list of bipartisan supporters that was just long enough to win the race for speaker — only for several Republican lawmakers to subsequently ask for their names to be removed. Regardless of whether the new GOP rule influenced the reversals, the message was the same: Get in line or get squashed.
And if the attempt to ban Republican lawmakers from primary elections is challenged in court and proves unsuccessful, there’s still a backup plan to fund aggressive primary challenges against Republican state representatives if they don’t support Cook’s bid for speaker, as reported in the Texas Tribune.
The promise to replace Republican state representatives who would dare honor traditions of bipartisanship mirrors similar threats from the camp of President-elect Donald Trump (via Elon Musk-funded campaigns) to replace Republican senators who don’t vote to confirm Trump’s controversial cabinet picks. (See also: Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s modus operandi.) The threats also resemble the tactics of Texas Republican “Christian Kingpin” megadonor Tim Dunn, whose massive oil-funded warchest helped propel a slate of hard right Republican primary challengers to victory over their more moderate incumbent opponents who had voted against school vouchers in the last legislative session.
The tradition of Texas bipartisanship was once so strong that some considered state level politics “nonpartisan.” Ten years ago, the 2013 session was nicknamed “The Kumbaya Session.” Even under decades of trifecta Republican control of the governorship, legislature, and courts in Texas, a modicum of bipartisanship has remained in the statehouse, even if it has become exceedingly rare. During the speakership of Republican Rep. Dade Phelan, a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and largely rural district Republicans prevented the passage of private school voucher bills, a top priority for top GOP donors like Dunn and the Christian nationalist wing of the party that wants to siphon public dollars toward religious education. This past year, Texas Republicans and Democrats have voted together on AI regulation and to temporarily halt the execution of Robert Roberson, a man convicted of murder on the basis of a medical syndrome that is increasingly derided as “junk science.”
But that bipartisanship has withered away under increasingly authoritarian leadership. Trump’s rise to power, characterized by his idiosyncratic style and eschewal of long-established political traditions, scrambled the governing norms that dominated Republican party politics and is concomitant with the transformation of the Republican Party of Texas from the business-friendly “party of local control” into the party of state preemption and spiritual warfare. Now that Trump is set to be back in power in January, we can reasonably expect our state level politicians to follow his lead.
As I wrote earlier this month, the dominant right-most wing of the Texas Republican Party is gradually embracing a muscular style of politics that disregards traditions of federalism and bipartisanship in favor of naked will to power. They’ve already demonstrated that they’re unafraid to use the power of big government to strip away local Democratic control. They’ve also called for the creation of a sort of state level electoral college that would decide elections for statewide office based on a “majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county” — a system that, if enacted, would likely cement one-party Republican rule at the state level for decades. To achieve this, Republicans would have to successfully pass a joint resolution supporting a State Constitutional Amendment and then voters would have to approve it. The intention behind the proposal is clear — though the probability of its success is not.
Now, the Texas GOP is poised to wield the party apparatus against fellow Republicans who are willing to reach across the aisle — or oppose the priorities of major donors that don’t align with the interests of their constituents. The demand to support Rep. Cook for speaker, or risk being barred from primary elections, not only serves as further confirmation of the ascendancy of the right-most wing of the state Republican party, but it may also prove to be the final nail in the coffin of bipartisanship in the state. Above all, it sends a clear signal: The Texas GOP has plans, and they are willing to crush anyone who stands in their way.
