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Dade Phelan Takes Aim at Deepfake Tech
in Campaign Ads in Bill that House Weighs
Capitol Inside
March 12, 2025
The Texas House committee began an examination on Wednesday into a landmark state law that outlawed deepfake technology in political advertising but failed to stop a group that's bankrolled by Governor Greg Abbott's top donor from altering images of Dade Phelan before a primary runoff election when he was still the speaker last year.
The State Affairs Committee set a hearing for today on House Bill 366 - a measure that Phelan is sponsoring in an attempt to prohibit the use of artificial intelligence in campaign ads that are designed to depict "conduct that did not occur in reality" with altered media images and videos.
Phelan has been preparing the legislation since he was targeted almost a year ago in a campaign mailer that portended to show him hugging former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in one doctored graphic and speaking at a press conference for Texas House Democrats in another. The advertising was funded by the Club for Growth - a political action committee in the Washington D.C. area that's received substantial sums of money from the Texas governor's number one contributor in Pennsylvania resident Jeff Yass.
"When we elected Dade Phelan, we didn't know he'd team up with the Democrats!," the Club for Growth mail piece claimed. "The woke left has waged war on our conservative values, and Phelan is hanging us out to dry."
The mailer proved to be a waste of time and money when Phelan survived an unprecedented assault by conservatives en route to a narrow victory in a primary runoff election is the district he represents in Southeast Texas last spring. It also displayed a general ignorance on legislative politics in Texas where all of three Republican speakers before Phelan had won the gavel with substantial support from Democrats including some who were subsequently appointed to numerous committee chairmanships in the Legislature's lower chamber during the past two decades.
Having become radioactive among his own GOP colleagues as a result of the House impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton in 2023, Phelan decided in December to give up the leadership position in a move that cleared the way for current Speaker Dustin Burrows' election to the dais in January. Burrows named Phelan as the chairman of the Licensing & Administrative Procedures Committee for the regular session in 2025.
But Burrows depended more on Democrats than any of the four previous Republican speakers including Phelan had in campaign for the chamber's top leadership post. Burrows claimed the gavel on opening day of the 2025 regular session with 36 Republican votes and 49 Democrats in his corner.
Texas was the first state to ban the use of media that's been manipulated for campaign materials with legislation that lawmakers in Austin approved in 2019. But the measure only applied to political ads 30 days before an election. The Club for Growth sought to get around the prohibition with the Phelan attack piece that landed in constituents' mail boxes more than a month before the overtime vote in 2024.
Eighteen states have followed the Texas lead on the regulation of AI for campaign advertising in the past six years. Deepfake technology hadn't been a significant problem in political races until 2024. One of the more highly-publicized cases featured robocalls that purported to feature then-President Joe Biden urging voters in New Hampshire to stay home instead of participating in the primary election there last year.
Abbott didn't take a position publicly on Phelan's re-election campaign at home in 2024. But the Texas governor has taken millions of dollars from Yass in recent years as a school vouchers advocate who's the leading investor in TikTok. Abbott portrayed TikTok as a Chinese espionage front that he banned on state computers, phones and other devices shortly before the campaign cash from Yass began to flow.
more to come ...
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