Straus to seek a record sixth term despite enduring toughest session as speaker.
Speaker weathers a stormy session, eyes record 6th term
AUSTIN — Regardless what passes and fails in the closing hours of this year’s legislative session, one thing is certain: Texas House Speaker Joe Straus faced his most tumultuous and explosive session helming the 150-member chamber.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick repeatedly tried to back Straus into a political corner. A faction of conservative Republicans within his own House tried to challenge his leadership and weaken his support. And some Democrats vital to Straus’ control in the House said the difficult session has forced them to reassess their long-standing allegiance to the speaker.
With the 140-day regular legislative session coming to a close Monday — and with the prospect of a special session hanging over the Capitol — Straus seems unfazed and revealed Saturday to the San Antonio Express-News that he’s going to seek a record sixth term.
“This session has been challenging but more by certain behavior and certain individuals who want to disrupt, and the inter-chamber dynamics were different than I’ve seen even in the last session,” Straus said in a Saturday interview ahead of the House’s vote on the $216.8 billion state budget. “I feel pretty good about the outcome assuming we get 100 votes today on the budget, so I feel all in all it was pretty challenging.”
The chamber overwhelming approved the document
hours later in a 135-14 vote. The Senate also passed it 30-1 on Saturday, sending to the governor a tight budget to fund state operations for the next two years.
There have been worse times, Straus said, like the 2011 session when the state faced a $20 billion shortfall caused by a severe recession.
“It was an enormous job to try to come to terms with where we were with the economy and with our budget,” he remembered.
Known for his evenkeel style, Straus had already served three terms as speaker before Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick began presiding over the Senate and Gov. Greg Abbott moved into the governor’s mansion. All three Republicans are up for re-election in 2018, but while Patrick and Abbott face statewide battles, Straus is expected to easily win re-election to the House District 121 seat in San Antonio’s wealthy, Republican-leaning north side. Straus has served five terms, tying him with two previous speakers, both Democrats, for the longest tenure leading the chamber. He said he intends to break that record when he seeks a sixth term in 2019. Perennial target
While affording him the most experience of the “Big Three” — Abbott, Patrick and Straus — the speaker’s record-tying tenure has also made him the perennial target of far-right activists whose rise to power in state Republican politics has paralleled Straus’ since 2009.
This session, Straus, at one point or another, became everybody’s scapegoat when they needed one. For example, he faced withering criticism from activists that he bottled up conservative priorities, while other Capitol observers posit that Patrick, not the House speaker, seems to be running the show in Austin.
However, for all of the strained relationships in the Capitol this session, the House has stuck together on many key issues, including school vouchers, which are championed by Patrick.
The House voted 10443 to block the state from funding any program that gives parents taxpayer money to subsidize their child’s private school tuition. Patrick then hijacked a House bill that sought to give more money to public schools and rearrange parts of the state’s school funding formula by adding in the controversial school voucher component, albeit one for students with disabilities. The House again rejected the idea last week, sacrificing its favored school finance bill in the process.
Patrick blamed the House for killing the bill, arguing the Senate was willing to put more money in education in exchange for a pared-down voucher plan. When it was all over, several members considered it a point of pride that the House stood its ground.
The biggest test of wills involved the House and Senate’s divergent views on how far the state should go in regulating the public bathroom use of transgender people. Patrick’s idea of a so-called bathroom bill required transgender people to use bathrooms, locker rooms or changing rooms in governmentowned buildings that align with the sex listed on their birth certificate, a measure LGBT activists said would target transgender Texans for harassment. Straus long maintained Patrick’s proposal or a similarly widereaching one would drive out business from the state and be discriminatory.
In the final week of the session, the House responded with a scaled-back version requiring schools to make single-stall bathrooms or empty multi-stall bathrooms available to students who request to use them, a measure Patrick rejected as too narrow. As of Saturday night, after dueling news conferences in which they each said they would stand their ground, Straus and Patrick had not broken the impasse that has brought the Legislature to the brink of a special session. ‘Made our statement’
Whether that happens, Straus said Saturday he was confident the House “would not go one inch further” on the issue, even if Abbott calls a special session specifically on the bathroom bill.
“No. I think the House feels very strongly that we’ve made our statement and that issue was continuing to be debated while school finance, which is really important to us, had not been addressed,” he said.
There were also times this session when the usual cohesiveness of the chamber seemed to crack, if temporarily. Republicans, who outnumber Democrats 9555 in the body, began to turn on each other as the Freedom Caucus, a group of 12 tea party-aligned members, managed to kill more than 100 bills in the name of political retribution against Straus and his chairmen, in what has come to be known as the Mother’s Day Massacre.
“What we’re doing is exactly what they did to our bills,” Rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican from Plano and member of the caucus, said at the time. “Members of this body want to hit us personally. Nine times out of 10, we’ll rise above it and be happy warriors and go on. But this has crossed a line that we cannot be silent about.”
The caucus declined to comment for this story. Rep. Matt Schafer, the Republican from Tyler who chairs the group, said they would reserve comment on the speaker’s performance until the ink was dry on this legislative session, or a special session if one is called. Other members of the Republican Caucus blamed members of the Freedom Caucus for the turbulence this session and praised Straus for a hands-off approach that allows the body to work issues out itself.
“The speaker’s job is to make sure that we keep the institution intact the way it is,” said Rep. Dan Huberty, a Republican from Humble who chairs the Public Education Committee after lecturing the body for failing to act like adults after the Freedom Caucus lampooned non-controversial bills. “The order and decorum, that’s some of my frustration. Leadership has tried, including the speaker, we’ve worked hard to maintain that. Unfortunately, some people just don’t listen.” Different priorities
Rep. Tom Oliverson, a first-term Cypress Republican and anesthesiologist, said he understands Straus is a “lightning rod” for criticism but called that assessment unfair. “There are obviously different priorities between the House and the Senate. … I just think that the bodies are different. They (senators) tend to be ideologically a lot more united than we are over here,” he said. “I did not in a million years come up here thinking I would have bills that would die that I thought were good bills, conservative bills, that would die at the hands of my own colleagues.”
A well-funded antiStraus machine, particularly the group Empower Texans, has lobbed another criticism at Straus over the years: that the San Antonio Republican is in power only because he has made deals with House Democrats, in some cases giving them high-profile chairmanships, in order to keep their votes when the race for speaker comes around. Showed restraint
Before the 2009 session, when Straus became speaker, the House was nearly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats were so confident they stood a chance at winning back the speakership after six years under Rep. Tom Craddick, a Midland Republican, that as many as five of them considered running for the top job. As their numbers dwindled after the brutal 2010 election and beyond, though, House Democrats fell in line behind Straus and have remained a relatively loyal part of his governing coalition ever since.
Rep. Poncho Nevarez, a Democrat from Eagle Pass who is vice chairman of Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee, gave a second nominating speech on Straus’ behalf at the start of the legislative session in January, extolling the speaker’s pragmatism.
“We are fortunate to have been led by someone as discerning as Joe Straus,” he said at the time. “I highlight in particular his compassion, which gives him the courage to stand up for the people of this state.”
On Saturday, 138 days after his initial speech, Nevarez’s assessment had not changed when presented with evidence of some Democrats’ increased criticism of Straus as the session went on.
“I think that’s beyond him. I think that’s the body’s decision,” Nevarez said of the House’s votes on a host of controversial legislation that, at least momentarily, tested the chamber’s usually affabile nature. “It showed a lot of restraint on the speaker’s part.”
Through tearful and wrenching pleas, Democrats this year showed a rawer vulnerability to the whims of the Republicancontrolled Legislature than in previous sessions, even as they tried to beat back proposals they said were discriminatory and unconstitutional. In the final days of the legislative session, several House Democrats said the presidency of Donald Trump heightened their emotions this year, but in Austin, they expected the Straus-led House would have been a more decisive foil to the Senate, which has taken a conservative lurch under Patrick and perhaps felt embolded by Trump. SB 4 lingers
Early in the session, Democrats saw some signs of hope. When the chamber debated House Bill 4, a measure to increase state assistance to people who care for abused or neglected children, GOP Rep. Mark Keough of The Woodlands tried to attach an amendment that would have barred any funds going to caregivers who are in the country illegally, no matter the citizenship status of the child.
Rep. Byron Cook, a Republican from Corsicana and a staunch Straus ally, lamented that he was “pretty heartbroken to be part of this today” on a bill to “take care of children.” Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Rafael Anchia of Dallas called Keough’s proposal “really racist, anti-Hispanic stuff.”
Keough eventually withdrew his amendment after it was clear he would get support from enough Republicans, but for Anchia, it was among the first of many times he would publicly lambast the House and Straus, in particular, for their complicity in what he says is Austin’s unmitigated hostility toward Latinos in the state.
“At the beginning of the session, that wasn’t happening. We beat Keough back when he wanted to turn the CPS (bill) into immigration,” Anchia said recently as he reflected on the session in its waning days. “I had a lot of Republicans coming up saying ‘good job, thank you.’ But there was none of that towards the end.”
There was surely no turning back after Senate Bill 4, the so-called anti“sanctuary cities” bill that allows police to question a person’s immigration status if they have been lawfully detained, replacing a requirement that a police officer arrest the person first.
There are other controversial provisions in the law, which Abbott signed in May, but that debate around SB 4 still lingers as a pivotal moment in the minds of many Democrats, who said the bill, which they already view as unconstitutional, went from terrible to a crisis with the change pushed by Schaefer of Tyler.
“Once (Schaefer and the Freedom Caucus) were able to take control, it was very hard for House leadership to regain it and stop the avalanche of bad legislation,” Anchia said.
Could Straus count on Democrats’ support when he runs for a recordbreaking sixth term as the House’s leader in 2019?
“Everyone is speculating about the speaker’s future — that’s not secret. If he decided to run again, he would certainly be a prohibitive favorite to win,” Anchia said. “If he chose not to, I believe that the Schaefer amendment vote would be an important litmus test for members of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.”
From SB 4 to an omnibus abortion measure, the Republican majority this session enacted another round of sweeping new laws that will have to withstand expensive and winding legal challenges promised by Democrats and their allies. The state’s lawyers are all but expected to spend the interim defending the legislature’s actions in court, which Straus said had no immeidate bearing on the House’s work this session.
“That’s not really a concern of mine,” he said. “The courts will do what they do and the legislature will address what we need to going forward. Hopefully we don’t pass a lot of laws that are unconstitutional, but sometimes it happens.” ‘This is grumbling’
Rep. Garnet Coleman, a longtime Democrat from Houston, said Straus did as good a job this session as could be expected with an increasingly intransigent Senate that sought to challenge the speaker on a host of issues. Coleman dismissed claims that Straus’ 2017 session mirrored Craddick’s dramatic fall from the House speakership after the 2007 session. Coleman said political tensions during Craddick’s era had felt like “the world was coming to an end.”
“Oh no, this is nothing compared to that. This is grumbling, but nothing compares to those six years of opposition,” Coleman said. “I don’t think we will ever see that again; at least I hope we don’t.”
Given the Freedom Caucus’ tendency to revel in floor flights that challenge their more moderate Republican colleagues, Coleman said Straus handled the body as best he could considering the constraints.
“I think Straus has done more than any other speaker could or would have done in the climate that we’re in,” Coleman said. “Intellectually, what would I do if I was in the same position? Generally, it’s the same thing the speaker does.”