Speaker Needs Clash with Patrick
to Show He Has the Ability to Lead

Capitol Inside
September 21, 2021

GOP Speaker Dade Phelan sought to sugarcoat the rhetoric last month when he barred the word racism from the Texas House debate on an election bill that has been widely portrayed as an attack on minority voting rights. Phelan was trying to protect the wounded sensibilities of some House Republicans who resented being labeled as racists.

But Phelan and the Republicans didn't attempt to deny the allegations or to dispute them on the merits - and they are preparing to make themselves vulnerable to another round of criticism on racial motivations and intent during a special session on redistricting that began on Monday.

The speaker hasn't indicated whether he plans to censor the debate on new legislative and congressional plans that - if drawn as ambitiously as the new Senate map - will dilute the voting strength that Blacks and Hispanics have in a state where they've accounted for almost all the growth since 2010.

The new special session could be make or break for Phelan in a bid for a second term in the leadership post. He might decide to forego the token gestures like the vernacular regulation in favor of the more traditional approach for building stock among the membership in the Legislature's lower chamber. Phelan may need to win a fight with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and the Senate Republicans in the next month to keep the gavel in 2023.

Standing up to Patrick had been a prerequisite for strong support as a speaker before Phelan's election in January. But Phelan took over in the face of extraordinary circumstances and pressure that the three more experienced Republican speakers before him could not have imagined. He appeared to be letting the GOP majority work its will when the Senate steamrolled the House this spring and summer for the first time in modern history at a Capitol that Patrick controls. The House Republicans are running the risk of becoming a Patrick rubber stamp like their counterparts across the rotunda have been this year.

Patrick has written, directed and produced the script at the statehouse in Austin in 2021 like he did four years ago without as much success due to natural resistance in the House. The most important quality that House members were looking for in open speaker's contests was a willingness to go toe-to-toe with Patrick and the Senate without backing down.

While almost all of the Republicans voted in lockstep on an agenda that was radically conservative by House standards of the past before COVID-19, it's possible that 2021 could be an aberration if the GOP doesn't squander the majority by overreaching to the far right.

Phelan won the leadership post in surprisingly easy fashion as Republican Dennis Bonnen's choice for a replacement after he decided not to run again in his hometown district last year. Phelan appeared to be trying to preserve the House's tradition of bipartisan leadership in the early stages of his debut in the dais - appointing Democrats to a significant number of chairmanships including some of the chamber's most coveted.

But Phelan was overwhelmed from the outset in the first session in a pandemic in Texas in more than 100 years - and he and his GOP allies eventually decided that it was safer to go along with the far right that controls the party now than to try to build consensus the old fashion way for proposals that are needed and good for all the state.

The speaker appeared to snap out of the partisan fog in the closing days of the second special session when the Public Education Committee that he'd appointed a Democrat to chair kept a bill to ban transgender athletes in high school sports bottled up without a trip to the House floor.

Phelan made another telling move that escape the radar when he promoted GOP State Rep. Dan Huberty of Humble to the role of chief House sponsor on a critical race theory ban that's sparked a massive backlash from public school advocates. Huberty is a former school board member who passed a landmark school funding package in 2019 as the Public Education Committee chair. But Huberty appeared to have fallen out of grace with Phelan as a consequence of speaker politics - and he'd been replaced by Democratic State Rep. Harold Dutton of Houston earlier this year.

Huberty is one of the few remaining House Republicans who've clashed with Patrick in the past - and he was the perfect choice to make the critical race theory bill as inoffensive as possible in the current environment.