Former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus has stepped up fundraising efforts for Republicans candidates in the weeks since Speaker Dennis Bonnen announced he would not seek reelection.
In doing so, Straus, a moderate Republican, is reprising a role that he played in 2018 to counter the influence of the Libertarian-leaning group Empower Texans, which typically invests heavily in GOP primaries in a bid to push the Texas GOP farther to the right.
Efforts by then-Speaker Straus and his allies in the 2018 primaries helped defeat more than a dozen Empower Texans-backed challengers to House incumbents.
After leaving office in 2018, Straus launched a political action committee (PAC), Texas Forward Forever, seeded with $2.5 million of his own campaign funds. Straus and the committee are now helping a number of mostly moderate GOP incumbents.
Straus said in an email to supporters yesterday, “I have been traveling the state to support and help raise resources for candidates and organizations whose priorities and principles align with Texas Forever Forward, including the Associated Republicans of Texas, Rep. John Raney of Bryan/College Station, Rep. Stan Lambert of Abilene, Rep. Sarah Davis of Houston, and Texas Supreme Court Justice Brett Busby.”
Straus’ email also included a photo of him with Reps. Angie Chen Button and Morgan Meyer, considered vulnerable Republicans in Dallas swing districts, who only narrowly won their 2018 races.
According to the most recent campaign finance reports available from the Texas Ethics Commission, which are current to July, both the Straus-aligned Associated Republicans of Texas and the Dennis Bonnen campaign contributed $5,000 and $19,890 to Meyer’s campaign, respectively, for digital advertising and polling.
Contributions of identical amounts and for the same purposes were made by the two committees to Rep. Button’s campaign. Rep. Sarah Davis, a Houston-area Republican, likewise received $5,000 from the Associated Republicans of Texas for digital advertising, though she did not get any help from Bonnen.
Rep. Steve Allison, who now holds Straus’ old seat in Bexar County, is also getting help on the campaign trail from the former Speaker. “I am actively supporting these candidates because they are committed to the type of constructive, future-focused leadership that is needed for the Republican Party to win and for the state of Texas to succeed,” Straus wrote.
“Local control has gone from a basic tenet of Republicanism to an easily discarded principle on the alter of rigid, conservative orthodoxy.”
Joe Straus
Straus’ current priorities, according to the ‘about’ page of his PAC’s website, include investing in public education and higher education, treatment of behavior health challenges, the promotion of ‘non-discriminatory policies and laws’ — a reference to Straus’ long-time support for LGBT rights — and investments in transportation and water infrastructure.
Other than public education, these priorities don’t necessarily align with those of post-Straus era leaders in the House GOP. During the 2019 session, conservative House members led by Speaker Dennis Bonnen tried to ramp up pressure on Progressive local governments with bills that would ban taxpayer-funded lobbying, preemptively override local sick leave ordinances, and ban local funding for abortions, among other measures.
Straus took issue with the push to assert greater state control over local governments, writing in a recent op-ed in the Dallas Morning News, “Differences of opinion have lately metastasized into outright hostility toward officeholders in cities, counties and school districts… Local control has gone from a basic tenet of Republicanism to an easily discarded principle on the alter of rigid, conservative orthodoxy.”
Leadership Vacuum
The majority of House GOP incumbents are supported neither by Straus’ centrist PAC nor by the far-right Empower Texans PAC, and most members do not align fully with either of these groups.
Until recently, this majority conservative group was led by Speaker Dennis Bonnen and GOP Caucus Chair Dustin Burrows, but now Burrows has stepped down and Bonnen has taken a back seat in fundraising after losing the confidence of many fellow House members over remarks that were caught on tape in a discrete recording made by a conservative operative.
The leadership vacuum comes at a time when incumbent House conservatives are facing primary challenges and a major Democratic push to retake the Texas House.
Stepping into this vacuum, earlier this week a group of House conservatives created a new PAC called Leading Texas Forward. According to Texas Ethics Commission paperwork, the PAC’s decision-makers include Reps. Charlie Geren, Drew Darby, Lyle Larson, Four Price, and Chris Paddie.
In some ways this PAC looks like a Bonnen successor group, because its leaders include close allies of the Speaker. Rep. Four Price, for example, was Bonnen’s calendars committee chairman, a role that involves close cooperation with the Speaker in making decisions on which bills go to the House floor for a vote.
Hence this PAC could end up playing a similar fundraising role to the one that Bonnen’s own committee would have played in 2020 had he not been sidelined. However, the PAC’s leadership does represent a diversity of views on the issue of taxpayer-funded lobbying, an issue that has divided the House GOP, and it includes both rural and urban representatives.
This suggests that the creation of the PAC is meant in some way to help restore consensus within the House GOP Caucus at a time when it is still wrestling with the fallout of a leadership crisis.
Additionally, the PAC seems to want to distance itself from Speaker Bonnen and his leadership: the Texas Tribune reported that Bonnen’s brother Rep. Greg Bonnen and Rep. Craig Goldman were both affiliated with the PAC, but later they both denied this.
Karl Rove, the former strategist for George W. Bush, will serve as the group’s treasurer.
