Texas Monthly’s scorecard of the Eighty-eighth Texas Legislature’s noisy scoundrels and quiet heroes.
This session offered transformational opportunities for Texas. The GOP’s control of redistricting in 2021 ensured safe seats for almost all its members for the rest of the decade, and lawmakers came to town with an unprecedented $33 billion budget surplus, the largest in state history. Previous generations of legislators would have danced with the devil at midnight to be so politically secure and have such ample patronage to dole out. Almost any dream, large or small, could be made real. Connect Dallas and Houston by high-speed rail? No problem. Pull Texas from near the bottom in spending per public school student? We could afford it.
To do any of that, state leaders would have had to put aside their petty intrigues and think big. Instead those intrigues shaped the session. Governor Greg Abbott invested the lion’s share of his political capital in a school-voucher program, knowing full well that rural members of the GOP deeply opposed it. Abbott offered those members their choice of a carrot or a stick and then when they wouldn’t acquiesce, tried beating them with both.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, perhaps bored with his dictatorial reign in the Senate, spent much of his time attempting to annex the House. He tried to strong-arm sophomore Speaker Dade Phelan on property tax cuts and culture-war issues. When the two couldn’t agree, they began killing each other’s priority bills. They had started with low expectations and concluded by not even meeting those, causing the governor to promise a summer of special sessions to try to salvage something.
In the absence of leadership, lawmakers were able to do some good with the bounty they’d been given. They ensured more resources for our underfunded mental health-care system, approved raises for state employees, and injected state parks with cash. But the session still was a missed opportunity. Lawmakers argued about which flawed property tax plan to spend half the surplus on and passed a massive package of corporate subsidies.
Then legislators set out to hobble three engines of the Texas economy that delivered them the fat surplus in the first place: big cities, the booming renewable-energy industry, and public research universities. They had time left over to restrict cultural expression that offends their sensibilities. Lawmakers fought to pull books—including, according to one North Texas Republican, raunchy smut such as Lonesome Dove—from school library shelves and then to restrict drag performances. In previous years, one longtime lobbyist said, a session would be defined by a few big divisive social debates such as these. Now there are dozens every year. “There’s little time to discuss anything else. That’s the point.”
No single debate this session exemplifies better the priorities of the Lege than the much-publicized push to legalize casino gambling, which dominated public interest in the session’s early going. Aspiring casino owners had spent several years and millions of dollars buttering up politicians and helping Republicans maintain control of the House in 2020. That debt had to be repaid. Two months before this session even started, gambling advocates had retained the services of more than three hundred lobbyists. It was an orgiastic display of excess of the kind you normally would go to Las Vegas to see.
Had the gambling bills passed, the money tap would have dried up for those in the Capitol fold. Better for many lawmakers if the push made a little headway and then failed, because then the spending could resume next session. So most legislators in the House, in a rare moment of bipartisan unity, played their parts perfectly. After a comical floor debate in which only the few who opposed gambling for moral reasons seemed to express political principles at all, the primary casino proposal fell just short of the one hundred votes it needed to pass the chamber. Republicans showed how hard they were working to make it happen, and House Democratic leader Trey Martinez Fischer repeatedly made clear how he was “not a no” but “a not now,” implying that he was open to changing his mind. As in Vegas, the House always wins. On to 2025!
For fifty years, we’ve been offering an assessment of each legislative session’s heroes and villains. The archives remind us that though the Capitol has long been a playground for scoundrels, there are always faithful public servants too. We tried to select a group that represents the Legislature as a whole, which is disproportionately white and male, and in which Republicans hold about 60 percent of seats and about 80 percent of committee chairmanships. As ever, we disdain self-dealing and small-mindedness and value integrity, foresight, and the willingness of members to “vote their districts,” whatever part of the great state they may represent. Here are our lists, in no particular order.