Speaker Boxing: Is Phelan Failin’, or Will the Far Right Fall Short Again?

Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan escaped a May primary runoff defeat by the skin of his teeth, but the Beaumont Republican’s support within his own party is as diminished as ever. 

Many of his key GOP allies in the House preemptively retired or otherwise fell victim to Governor Greg Abbott’s vitriolic primary war against the rebels who undermined his demand for “school choice.” (Phelan’s apparent unwillingness to whip support for vouchers, alongside various hot wars with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, is what earned him his political precarity.) Other Republican incumbents who once supported Phelan have since defected, spurred by the fallout from the House’s ill-fated impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last session. 

While his foes narrowly failed to take him out at the ballot box, they’ve since turned their focus to denying him a third term as speaker—a post he assumed after his predecessor, with the help of his own poor judgment, was kneecapped by the same clan of right-wing agitators.

On a hot September morning in the scenic hills of West Austin, a large gaggle of GOP legislators and candidates gathered at The County Line barbecue restaurant. The strength of their numbers has been disputed—ranging from around 25 to nearly 50—but the point of the meeting was clear: to consolidate the anti-Phelan forces behind a single challenger as next year’s legislative session draws ever closer. 

The effort was led by a group of self-appointed “reformers” who had months ago declared their mission to rid the Texas House of what they feverishly deem a secret ruling uniparty of softie, establishment Republicans united with Democrats. (Phelan’s tenure, in reality, comprises two of the most successful sessions for hardline conservatives in Texas history—proving the old adage that if you give Freedom Caucus types an inch, they’ll take the chance to try to overthrow you.) 

The plan to cleanse the den of sins includes a litany of pledges—dubbed the “Contract with Texas,” an apparent ode to Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America crusade to seize the U.S. House in 1994—aimed at toppling the status quo and enforcing ideological purity by abolishing Democratic committee chairs, ousting the current parliamentarian (a uniparty shill in their eyes), and overhauling rules and procedures that they believe provide cover for moderate Republicans to undercut conservative priorities. Paxton’s impeachment may have lit the match, but this fight is fueled by the far right’s years-long desire to incinerate what remains of bipartisan comity in the lower chamber and rebuild the House in the image of Patrick’s Senate, where authoritarian rule is put to proper use. 

At the outset of the September meeting, attendees received a text message from a mysterious entity that dubbed itself “Texans for a New Speaker,” promising support for the renegades. “The largest fund ever amassed in Texas politics is in place to support you and your colleagues’ critical work. … we have your backs.” 

It reportedly took seven rounds of ballots for the Republicans to winnow the field of candidates down to their chosen torchbearer, selected only after longtime Amarillo Representative John Smithee decided to bow out: Representative David Cook—a nondescript rank-and-filer from the Fort Worth suburb of Mansfield who had, until that point, made little impression since arriving in the House in 2021. He was among the many Republicans who voted to impeach Paxton last year, only to sour on the whole affair after the fact. Newt Gingrich, he is not. (To be fair, it wouldn’t be unprecedented for the House to elect a little-known two-term lawmaker as leader.)

Cook later released a list of 46 named Republicans (predominantly greenhorn incumbents and yet-to-be-elected candidates) who pledged their support—which would represent just over half of what is currently an 86-member GOP caucus. 

The self-appointed reformers and their allied right-wing groups claimed this to be a sign of Phelan’s imminent expiration date, while the speaker himself dismissed the meeting as “little more than an orchestrated scheme to generate headlines and fuel social media clicks, driving our caucus headlong into unnecessary chaos.” 

The path to the dais requires 76 votes. And for the past 20 years, since Republicans took control of the House, every speaker has needed Democrats to reach that threshold. The various factions that comprise the GOP majority have never been united behind a single candidate for speaker, and both Phelan and his foes have ensured that will remain the case for the foreseeable future. 

Cook’s nearly 50 Republican backers could very well represent the ceiling for the anti-Phelan contingent in the House. And while Phelan’s base is diminished, he still has over two dozen GOP incumbents in his pocket and can use the power of his office to lure fence-sitters back into his corner. 

Phelan’s far-right enemies have created a self-fulfilling prophecy: The speaker, whom they accuse of sharing his bed with Democrats, must now rely on those Democrats to keep his post. That means Dems can exercise significantly more leverage over Phelan than in the past—especially if the party manages to flip some seats in November. 

While their current “power sharing” arrangement may live or die with Phelan, 

Democrats may not be in a rush to bail out the speaker, especially after a highly divisive session in 2023 nearly erupted into fisticuffs. At the Mexican-American Legislative Conference’s annual retreat in San Antonio, the departing chair Veronica Neave Criado gave a speech lashing out at GOP leadership while Phelan was seated up front. In a not-so-subtle warning to the speaker, under pressure to break the longstanding tradition of appointing some Democratic committee chairs, Neave said, “A chairmanship isn’t worth much if the physical chair has a stiffer spine than the person sitting in it,” according to the Quorum Report. 

For the past decade, Dems’ strategic backing of Republican speakers has given them a limited degree of power that they’ve used to engage in a political strategy of harm reduction. They’ve found small successes in sanding down the sharpest edges of the GOP’s agenda or killing a couple of the most egregious bills, but their support of Phelan has ultimately done little to stop the hard-right lurch in the lower chamber over the past two sessions. 

With his fate up in the air, Phelan’s camp has brought in reinforcements as the speaker tends to all fronts of this battle royale. He’s hired two of the heaviest hitters in the GOP establishment: making super-lobbyist and political consigliere Mike Toomey his new chief of staff and bringing on former Governor Rick Perry as a special advisor. 

In an October TV interview, Perry, once a (gasp, Democratic) House member himself, declared, “The speaker’s race is over with. … You can say what you want to say. The proof is in the pudding. And Dade Phelan has the votes to be the next speaker.” 

But for all the public posturing and private maneuvering, the race is far from over, and the entire landscape could be upturned in the coming weeks—the anti-Phelan movement could reach terminal velocity, Cook and the reformers could hit a wall, or a dark horse could emerge at the last minute. 

Speaker races are fickle, fluid things—stealthily won and lost behind closed doors through horse-trading and arm-twisting, and the result is almost always determined well before the actual votes are cast on the floor in January. 

Whether Phelan remains speaker or is deposed, one thing is certain: House Republicans’ fractious infighting foreshadows a dysfunctional 89th legislative session, like a daytime soap revealing the dramatic perils of protracted one-party dominance one episode at a time.