A Caucus, if You Can Keep It

In the leadup to Texas th 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 numerous who had just won their seats by ousting incumbents who were seeking a total upheaval of the status quo In the middle were Democrats Ever since Republican Speaker Tom Craddick was dethroned in January 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 specific semblance of negotiating power on procedures 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 several concessions and horsetrading on bill to kill particular 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 in the midst of the all-out speaker battle Democrats uncovered themselves with a chance to play things differently They could stand by and watch the fractured Republican ranks duke it out withholding their backing until a speaker candidate met their demands or otherwise they d only cast their votes for a Democratic speaker For a moment it looked like that s what they might certainly do Then came the stampede A couple dozen Democrats various of whom had been a part of Band 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 bill 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 development 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 communicated he had the votes to win the speakership Democrats plus Republicans A smaller bloc of mostly progressive members fought against this strategy and declined to get in line A large number of members came to the obvious conclusion that we must have a speaker who would not just 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 explained the Texas Tribune at the time But it was never clear exactly what if anything the Burrowcrats had secured in exchange for their help beyond this vague understanding that he would not entirely block Democrats from power And it certainly wasn t clear that they d secured any major promise on the session s the bulk 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 sine die Dan Patrick declared that the Texas Senate had just completed its the majority conservative and triumphant session in history as the upper chamber nearly ran the table on his priority decree and he had his way with the House on multiple key issues including a total ban on THC hemp products and a litany of red-meat social conservative ordinance Governor Greg Abbott had already signed his white whale the school vouchers bill in early May and was about to declare win on his long-coveted goal of limiting access to bail And Republicans successfully passed bill 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 general 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 regulation To be fair the House did manage to moderate specific bills including on bail adjustment and tenant rights and kill others including an ugly tort improvement bill and a craven abortion-pill bounty hunter bill And Democrats played specific part in this All stated 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 particular of this year s failed conservative regulation 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 chosen -plus Dems supplied the necessary aid for constitutional amendment resolutions which need votes to ban any future possibility of state taxes on securities transactions and capital gains highly unlikely prospects in Texas but ones that Republicans yearned 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 particular Democratic members performed fierce opposition to school vouchers along with anti-immigrant and anti-DEI provision 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 majority significant broadly salient guidelines issue in the state the approach divide was largely between the two Republican-run chambers not the two parties Democrats did not offer any sort of alternative agenda 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 various 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 competition to quietly make chosen bad bills less bad while individual members get specific traction on their own piecemeal bill has seemingly become the consuming identity of the party Still in that time abortion has become near-totally outlawed The populace training 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 years ago The time may have come for Democrats in the Legislature to withhold their cooperation sacrifice several of the bipartisan chumminess that prevails in the House and focus on building a party that knows why Texans should vote for it The post A Caucus if You Can Keep It appeared first on The Texas Observer