GOP State Rep. Terry Wilson of Georgetown contended on Tuesday that the Republican caucus leader and his allies attempted to rig the nominations process in the Texas House speaker's contest with a scheme that manifest at a secret meeting three months ago.
Wilson unleashed the accusations in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal in a guest editorial that he used as a platform to reiterate his support for the hometown State Rep. Dustin Burrows in the House leadership election on opening day of the regular session in January. Wilson, a military veteran who serves as the Defense & Veterans Affairs Committee chairman, is one of about 30 House Republicans who are backing Burrows for speaker after a half-dozen or so switched allegiances to Cook after he scored the formal caucus plug.
Burrows finished as the runner-up to State Rep. David Cook in the caucus endorsement competition at the Capitol in Austin on December 7. But Burrows announced that day that he had sufficient support to win the official election on the chamber floor next month. Despite the post-caucus vote defections, the West Texas lawmaker claims to have more than 80 pledges from Republicans who'll be House members in 2025 including some who haven't been publicly identified up to now.
The Wilson op-ed was part of a coordinated attempt to push back against a monsoon of criticism from Cook loyalists and conservative activists who are threatening to have local party organizations censure House Republicans who refuse to fall in line behind Cook as the formal caucus choice for the job that Speaker Dade Phelan is giving up after withdrawing from the fight on the eve of the party endorsement vote.
Burrows and his supporters have been villified relentlessly since the caucus vote as liberal enablers who are selling out the GOP amid plans to keep Democrats on the leadership team despite calls from the right for a purging of minority party members from committee chairmanships in the west wing in Austin.
But Wilson argued that the party selection process was tainted in part by maneuvering by State Rep. Tom Oliverson of Cypress before the caucus vote in his role as the GOP caucus chair. While Wilson did not mention Oliverson by name in the newspaper op-ed today, he claimed the caucus chief got the process under way when he "announced he would defy the caucus-recommended candidate" and "take it to the floor" after declaring himself as a candidate for speaker himself.
Oliverson entered the speaker's battle in March when Phelan was planning to seek a third term with the gavel. But Oliverson and several other Republicans who were running for the leadership position candidates deferred to Cook after he joined the fight in early September.
Wilson asserted that Oliverson and a group of other Republicans sought to fix the process later that month in a power play at a meeting to which almost half of the House's GOP members were not invited to attend. The gathering to which Wilson refers took place in September at the County Line restraurant on the Colorado River in Austin.
"A faction, led in part by the caucus chair, attempted to unilaterally select a Speaker candidate and pressure attendees to pledge support," Wilson wrote. "This backroom effort not only violated the spirit of the caucus rules but also set the stage for division and dysfunction in December."
Cook and his supporters claimed that the Wilson op-ed was packed with falsehoods, innuendos and lies. Cook and the Republicans who are backing him for speaker will be hoping that a new political action committee's threats to spend as much as $20 million against members who refuse to support the caucus nominee in primary re-election races in 2026.
more to come ...
