After election, Texas House speaker race remains up for grabs

AUSTIN – The Texas Tribune reports themembership of the Texas House is finally set after Tuesday’s general election — but the future of the chamber’s leadership remains a mystery.

On Thursday, the jostling to hold the speaker’s gavel resumed with insurgent candidate Rep. David Cook, R-Mansfield, saying incumbent Speaker Dade Phelan does not have enough support from House Republicans to win.

“We cannot continue to govern effectively without the Republican majority selecting our Speaker,” Cook wrote in the letter. “It is clear with my list of supporters that the current speaker cannot win an endorsement of the Republican Caucus.”

The House GOP Caucus will meet in a month to endorse its nominee for speaker. The speaker presides over the processes in the House and appoints members to leadership positions. Bills often live or die on whether the speaker supports them, or the lawmaker who has authored them.

In September, Cook became the consensus candidate of House Republicans who want to oust Phelan because they believe he is too liberal. Cook published a list of 48 supporters who had pledged to vote for him in January.

It takes only 76 votes – a simple majority of the 150-member chamber – to become speaker. But the House Republican Caucus rules require that all members vote for the caucus’ endorsed candidate. To garner that endorsement, a candidate must receive three-fifths of the group’s support. Neither Cook nor Phelan have shown they have that level of public support yet.

Since initially publishing his pledge list, Cook has dropped one supporter, Steve Kinard, who lost his bid for a Collin County seat to Democratic incumbent Mihaela Plesa. That puts his pledge list at 47. But the caucus has grown to 88 members after Republican victories on election day, putting the new threshold for a group endorsement at 53.

Phelan, a Beaumont Republican, has said that he continues to have the necessary votes to win the speaker’s gavel at the beginning of the legislative session.

“Rep. Cook does not have the necessary support to become the caucus nominee, let alone the Speaker of the House,” Phelan said in a statement. “I have the votes to become Speaker of the House and look forward to leading another banner session that reflects the will of our state and its lawmakers.”

Given Cook’s pledges, however, Phelan’s presumed path to the speakership runs through a coalition of loyal Republicans and Democrats, a move that would likely bypass the GOP caucus rules. Phelan has not published a list of his supporters.

That was the situation that brought about the speakership of Joe Straus, a Republican who took the gavel in 2009 and held the position for a record five terms. Straus was considered a moderate by the GOP’s increasingly conservative base and hardline lawmakers frequently bashed him for working with Democrats, saying he was killing conservative legislation.

Cook alluded to Straus’ tenure over the House in his letter on Thursday and described his rise to power like a usurpation which “fractured the unity of the Republican Caucus and set the stage for the division that persists to this day.”

Cook said caucus members had three choices: unify behind him, speculate about a new speaker candidate and reconvene the group to hash out an endorsement or re-elect Phelan – which he said was “the worst option.”

Cook has pledged to do away with the appointment of Democrats as committee chairs – a long-standing bipartisan tradition that Phelan supports. Many of Cook’s supporters also want to replace Phelan because they believe he held up school voucher legislation last session and because he oversaw the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton, a right-wing darling who is a polarizing figure in the party.

Paxton was acquitted by the Senate and school voucher legislation is a priority for Gov. Greg Abbott, who believes he now has enough votes to pass a bill.