Will Democrats pick Texas House speaker after getting blown out?
Image via WikipediaNow that the 2010 campaign is over, in Texas there’s a campaign after the campaign kicking into high gear. It’s fair to say that the race for Texas speaker of the House is heating up and may be the first measure of where the Republican majority intends to plant its flag for the next couple of years. The incumbent, Rep. Joe Straus of San Antonio, cruised unopposed to re-election to his seat on Nov 2, only to find that the Republican majority in the House had swelled to historic size. Republicans crushed Democrats from one end of the state to the other, save deep south Texas in the Rio Grande Valley and a few urban pockets of resistance, where Democrats still cling to some power. Republicans won everywhere else, including deep blue Travis County, and the GOP hold went from a 77-74 seat razor’s edge to a 99-51 total global ownage. Texas Democratic HQ remains little more than a smoking crater.The idea that Democrats with about a third of the representatives can control the speakers race is ridiculous. That is reason enough to vote against Straus. That he would then appoint some of them committee chairmen is an outrage.
Paradoxically, the huge new Republican majority actually imperils Straus’ prospects of being re-elected speaker of the House. There are two reasons for that. One, he didn’t help grow that majority in any significant way during the 2010 elections, and two, very few Republicans actually elected him to become speaker in the first place. That’s because Straus became speaker prior to the 81st session of the Texas legislature in 2009, thanks almost entirely to an alliance he forged with the House Democratic caucus and 11 moderate Republicans. When the margin was as thin as it then was, it was possible to rebel against and kick out the then-speaker, state Rep. Tom Craddick of Midland, and get elected to replace him via Democratic votes. That’s what Straus did. And as part of that deal, Straus installed Democrats to chair 14 of the Texas House’s 32 committees — just under half. This spirit of bipartisanship has left a lingering bad taste among the GOP grassroots. It backfired badly when the Democrats used their power to stall bills dear to the hearts of conservatives and even brought the entire legislature to a grinding halt in order to kill a voter ID bill toward the end of the 2009 session. I was working for the Texas GOP at the time. It wasn’t pretty.
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... If Straus is elected, the chairmanship issue isn’t likely to go away: Straus is touting the support of 49 Democrats along with 79 of the 98 Republicans (one passed away after the election and has yet to be replaced), and has already said he will appoint some Democrats to committee chairmanships. If those numbers hold up, and at least the Democratic ones will since their bylaws require them to caucus and then vote for a single candidate in bloc, Straus has enough support to win if the vote were held today.
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... The thought of a GOP caucus that’s redder than red letting the Democrats, who were beaten like a cheap pawn shop drum in the last election, elect its leader is anathema to many of the newly elected and the voters who propelled them to victory.
Republicans need to be contacting those they elected and letting them know that Straus is not acceptable. There was a time when Texas Democrats were almost as conservative as Republicans, but that time is past, especially after this last election.
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