The Texas House leadership fight shifted to the courthouse on Tuesday when a rookie Republican representative sued a political action committee for falsely portraying his position in the speaker's race with tactics that culminated in personal threats and a subsequent investigation by the state police.
GOP State Rep. Pat Curry of Waco filed a lawsuit in a local district court one week after casting his first major vote as a lawmaker when he backed State Rep. David Cook of Mansfield as the Republican caucus nominee in a duel with the eventual winner - Speaker Dustin Burrows. The suit names the Courageous Conservatives PAC and its director Chris Eckstrom as defendants along with several others who are listed as John or Jane Doe.
The group in question is a super PAC was conceived in 2016 with U.S. Senator Ted Cruz as a prime beneficiary in a quest for president. Cruz finished a distant second to Donald Trump in the primary competition that year. Eckstrom ran for Congress in 2020 when he finished third in a field with 15 Republicans with 15 percent of the vote. Eckstrom missed out on a runoff that U.S. Rep. Ronny Jackson of Amarillo went on to win in an open Congressional District 13 race that year.
The Courageous Conservatives PAC, which is based outside of Washington D.C., is registered with the Federal Election Commission but does not report its financial activities at the state level here. But Curry contends that the damage was done mostly in cell phone texts and social media posts including messages that contained his personal number and encouraged angry constituents to contact him to protest his alleged support for Burrows the day before Cook emerged as the victor in a party caucus vote in early December.
While Curry had appeared to be wavering before the caucus election, he argued in the lawsuit that he'd expressed his support for Cook in a public fashion before the PAC at the center of the case circulated a text that claimed otherwise. Curry contends that the public listing of his cell phone was illegal and that he has the Texas Department of Public Safety investigating.
But that didn't stop a barrage of phone calls with threatening and intimidating rhetoric - according to a report on the court fight by the CBS affiliate in Waco - KWTX.
“That Curry had already intended and publicly committed to doing so did not impact the response the recipients had to the text message,” the lawsuit says. “Within hours of the message’s proliferation, Curry received hundreds of calls and texts for this purpose, filling up his personal voicemail.”
Curry was one 22 freshmen Republicans who voted for Cook on the floor last week. Burrows only had four rookie Republicans in his corner when he claimed the gave with 85 votes compared to 55 for Cook.
Curry and other Cook supporters can expect to be left out when Burrows names his first round of committee chairs in the near future with or without additional openings from a potential ban on Democrats in chairmanships for the first time in the chamber's history.
But Curry isn't willing to let sleeping dogs lie in this case.
“I don’t appreciate the people that want to go spend money and try to ruin other people’s lives, certainly not with lies,” Curry said in an interview with the Waco TV station. “So they put out a text that went throughout the district, and then they put it on Facebook and they also put it on Twitter. So consequently, they put my personal cell phone number, my longtime business cell number, so now I have thousands of contacts that I’ve got to change my number and get my new contact with people all over the world.
“So by having my phone blow up because of that was illegal," Curry added. "What they did was illegal, and it is also criminal. So I intend to push this to the fullest extent of the law and stop them. They did this to some Democrats, too. I was the first person they did this to, and they made a mistake. It’s a group of people who think they can get away with anything they want and they have a lot of money behind them. So bring it. Let’s see what you’ve got. They picked a fight with the wrong guy.”
