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The leadership fight in Austin follows months of all-out political warfare between Republican factions and could further empower the state’s most strident conservatives.
Jan. 14, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET
After months of attack mailers, threats and accusations of misconduct, the Texas House was set to pick its next speaker on Tuesday in a vote that could elevate the state’s hard right to new levels of power in the nation’s most populous Republican state.
On its face, the election by members of the Republican-dominated chamber might not appear consequential: the front-runners include a conservative Republican and another conservative Republican.
But the fight for speaker has been unusually bitter, even if its antagonists are ideologically aligned and have become familiar sparring partners in the battle for control of Texas politics.
On the one side are the old-guard Texas Republicans, in the mold of former governors such as George W. Bush and Rick Perry, who want to keep the Texas House and its members as a third power center in Austin. On the other is a more radical faction backed by religiously conservative West Texas billionaires who want to bring the Texas House in line with the more aggressively partisan Texas Senate, where they already hold sway.
Legislators said the selection contest was the most contentious in years.
“This is something that has never happened in the history of Texas politics — to have this much chaos as the result of a speaker’s race,” said Representative Harold V. Dutton Jr., a Houston Democrat first elected to the Texas House in 1984.
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