Stickland won’t seek re-election to Texas House

AUSTIN — A combative tea party-aligned Republican from North Texas known for bucking the establishment has announced that he is not seeking reelection, leaving a key swing seat in the Texas House up for grabs in the 2020 election.

“Eight years was enough for George Washington, and it certainly is for me,” Rep. Jonathan Stickland, R-Bedford, said this week in a Facebook post. “It was never my intention to grow old in office. I don’t want to turn into what we’ve been fighting and become part of the establishment.”

His 92nd House District, sandwiched between Dallas and Fort Worth, was already an important battleground heading into the 2020 election season.

In what has long been considered a Republican stronghold, Stickland narrowly held on to the seat in 2018, winning by 2.4 percentage points. Democrats, who gained 12 seats in the Texas House in the 2018 midterm elections, have targeted District 92 as one of more than 20 they say are flippable in 2020.

Stickland, one of the most conservative members of the party, helped orchestrate the so-called Mother’s Day Massacre in 2017, using procedural moves to kill more than 120 bills. It was retribution for what Stickland and other tea partyaligned members said was unfair treatment by the House Republican leadership.

This year, Stickland took a more congenial approach and shepherded a bill to ban red light cameras statewide. That bill became law this month — the first legislation authored by Stickland to pass. He also sponsored a bill that would allow handgun owners to carry their weapons in public places without a license, but he withdrew it after a gun rights activist began visiting leading Republican members’ homes to lobby for the legislation, irking House Speaker Dennis Bonnen.