Texas Observer by Christopher Hooks 3/28/2017
House Speaker Joe Straus is the last man standing between Texas and Dan Patrick’s plans.
For at least the last few legislative sessions, there have been two real political factions in Texas: the House and the Senate. Particularly since the demolition of the two-thirds rule in 2015, the upper chamber caters directly to the wishes of Republican primary voters. It’s fallen to the House to represent just about everyone else. When May rolls around every session and bills start dying, the two factions generally come to hate each other, though they may not always make that hatred plain.
This year, that animus is coming earlier and louder than usual. The hostility is so great that it may make a mess of the session’s crucial last months, when a lot of horse-trading will have to happen to pass a budget. Last week, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick gave an interview to KFYO, a Lubbock radio station that closely identifies with the Texas GOP’s right flank, in which he offered unusually explicit criticism of House Speaker Joe Straus.
In the interview, Patrick says he holds a stronger mandate than Straus because he was elected statewide. “My audience is the people of Texas,” he said. “The same thing with Greg Abbott. The speaker has a different audience. He gets elected by a very small group of people in his district and then he gets elected in the House by the Democrats and some Republicans.”
Of course, that’s true. Though Straus was re-elected as speaker unanimously this year and by large margins since he was first elevated in 2009, Democrats are a major reason Straus has been able to hold on to the position. For that reason, many conservatives think he’s a fake Republican, and the Republican Party platform actually calls for making speaker of the House a statewide elected position. (Empower Texans, the state’s major anti-Straus group, sponsored the radio segment on which Patrick spoke.) But it’s unusual to hear Patrick himself edge toward that line of argument.
More:
https://www.texasobserver.org/no-mr-nice-guy-joe-straus-punches-back-dan-patrick/
