Phelan Wins House Nod for Out-of-State
Donations Limits that Senate May Ignore
Capitol Inside
May 14, 2025
More than four dozen Texas House Republicans voted on Tuesday night for legislation that would slap strict caps on campaign cash from donors in other states with a bill that former Speaker Dade Phelan is sponsoring after taking $50,000 from a Las Vegas casino magnate for a re-election race last year.
The Phelan proposal in House Bill 3592 gained tentative approval without a word of debate on a vote of 100-32 that featured 51 Republicans and 49 Democrats on the winning side. The out-of-state contribution limitations measure cleared the Legislature's lower chamber in a 118-21 tally on Wednesday in time for a trip to a Senate where the reception could be cold.
Phelan has a separate but related campaign finance reform proposal buried deep today on the General State Calendar for an initial vote that may not materialize as a consequence of a bill-killing traffic jam that's already under way amid the countdown to a critical deadline on Thursday at midnight. House bills that haven't won preliminary nods on the floor will be dead at that point in the 2025 regular session.
Two in a quartet of political transparency bills that the ex-speaker from Beaumont has been pushing appear to have stalled across the rotunda after clearing the House two weeks ago with bipartisan support. HB 3592 - the measure that would impose restrictions on campaign donations from sources outside of Texas - could be dead on arrival in the Senate based on the lack of interest there in the other Phelan reform bills up to now.
The prevailing sentiment in Austin has been that Phelan bills would go straight to the shredder in the Senate where Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has been one of the former House leader's most strident critics. Patrick actively campaigned against Phelan a year ago when he was fighting for survival in his home district in the face of opposition from a marquee group of foes including Donald Trump when he was in the midst of his third campaign for president.
Patrick, who's served as the president's state campaign chairman, told a sea of anti-Phelan conservatives at the state GOP convention last spring that the Southeast Texas lawmaker who was leading the House at the time would be ousted from the House in a primary runoff election the following week. Phelan overcame unprecedented opposition to beat a challenger who Patrick and Trump behind him with almost 50.1 percent of the House District 21 vote in overtime.
Patrick has been alienated in part by the House leadership team's posturing on property tax relief during regular and special sessions in 2023. The powerful Senate president escalated his criticism of Phelan after the House impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton during the regular session's closing weekend that year. Patrick served as the trial judge when the Senate acquitted Paxton on corruption charges that Phelan and his GOP lieutenants persuaded fellow House Republicans to support based on ill-advised claims that the case would be a slam dunk in the Capitol's east wing.
After dodging lightning at the GOP primary polls, Phelan decided that he was carrying too much baggage to win a third term with the gavel and dropped the re-election bid in December in a move that cleared the path for Speaker Dustin Burrows to claim the post at the start of the regular session in January.
Perceptions of Phelan bills dying of Senate neglect regardless of merit could have affected the outcome of the second-reading vote on the out-of-state funding limits for campaigns at the state and local levels here.
HB 3592 would prohibit statewide candidates from accepting more than $5,000 for their next election from a contributor with a primary residence in another state. Texas candidates for House and Senate seats could take no more than $2,500 from out-of-state sources while the ceiling would be $1,000 for county officials.
The measure would have had the most dramatic impact on Governor Greg Abbott if it had applied to him since his last election in 2022. Abbott took a record-smashing $12 million from Pennsylvania resident Jeff Yass between December 2023 and August 2024. Yass is the leading investor in the TikTok app that Abbott had banned from being used on state phones, computers and other devices the previous year.
Las Vegas Sands owner Miriam Adelson gave the Texas governor $1 million in 2022 for a re-election race that year. But Adelson relied largely on third-party political action committees that are officially based in Texas to pass along $15 million that she donated to them in 2024 for spending on Republican state House candidates who were Phelan allies and supported and the legalization of full-scale casinos in Texas. .
Adelson contributed $50,000 to Phelan directly for the primary runoff last year. The ex-Texas speaker would have had to turn down all but $2,500 of the Adelson largess if HB 3592 had been in effect at the time. Adelson and Yass pumped more than $35 million combined into Texas politics in the past two years.
Candidates who exceed the out-of-state donations limit that HB 3592 would create could be subject to civil penalties under the terms of the bill on the calendar for what could be the final vote on it before the session expires on June 2.
Patrick has showered Burrows with praise in recent weeks. But Patrick faces a decision in the meantime on whether he would run the risk of appearing petty and vengeful if he single-handedly kills Phelan bills purely out of spite.
more to come ...
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