7.4: Leadership and Organization of the Texas Legislature

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If you studied Congress in your American Government class, you probably remember that the U.S. House and Senate operate on a strictly partisan basis. The party with a majority of the membership controls everything in that chamber—the presiding officer, all committee chairs and subcommittee chairs and a voting majority on every committee and subcommittee. While Texas legislators are elected on partisan ballots, and partisanship certainly plays a role in the work of the legislature, the Texas House and Senate are organized on a non-partisan basis, though the increasingly intense partisanship of the last few decades has eroded some of this traditional bipartisanship, especially in the Senate.

The two most powerful members of the Texas legislature are the speaker of the House, who is elected by House members and who presides over the House of Representatives, and the lieutenant governor, who is elected by the people of Texas and who is head of the Senate. They wield their power through chair appointments for committees and floor recognition of members that allow them to introduce legislation for debate. Standing committees in the Texas legislature have near total control over the flow of legislation to the floor on the subject areas under their jurisdiction. Unlike the U.S. Congress, where committee chairs are always in the same party as the majority elected to the U.S. House or the U.S. Senate—for example, of the Senate majority leader is a Republican all the chairs will be Republican as well—the chairs of Texas House and Senate committees have traditionally reflect the general partisan balance of either the House or the Senate—a House speaker presiding over a membership that is forty-five percent Democratic will name Democrats to chair roughly forty-five percent of the committees— and not just minor ones. This tradition has been disrupted in the Senate, however, where under the leadership of conservative Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick only one chair of a Senate committee is a Democrat.

Speaker of the House

When the House convenes on the first day of each regular session, members elect one of their own to serve as speaker of the House. The speaker is the presiding officer of the House of Representatives, running the chamber’s floor debate. The speaker rules on parliamentary matters and is the final authority on procedural challenges that can used by members to derail legislation during floor debate.

The speaker also has tremendous control over the leadership and membership of committees, limited only by seniority rules, which give members priority in appointment to substantive standing committees based on their length of service in the House. Under the house rules, members request committee assignments at the beginning of each session. Roughly half the membership of most committees is determined by seniority, the rest at the speaker’s sole discretion. The speaker also has control over the chair and vice chair selection for each

An unofficial but important job of the speaker is to protect the membership from divisive votes that could imperil their reelection, and to represent the House in the unavoidable competition with the Senate, especially toward the end of the legislative session. Members of each chamber tend to become annoyed with the other, especially toward the end of the session, for delaying action on bills popular in one chamber but not on the other. The speaker will occasionally “send a message” to the senate by delaying the referral of a bill passed by the senate to a house committee, thus delaying action in an overt way. During a special session in 2017, Speaker Joe Straus refused to even refer the Senate’s “bathroom bill” to a committee for consideration, saving House members from a vote on a bill that would likely prove unpopular with constituents of both Republican and Democratic House members.

In 2021, a new speaker was elected with bipartisan support, Republican Dade Phelan of

Beaumont. Phelan won with the support of a women’s equity bloc after pledging "an equitable distribution of women in leadership.”²¹ Phelan appointed five committee chairs and fourteen vice-chairs to women, and fourteen chairs and twenty-one vice-chairs to Black, Hispanic or Asian members of the House.²² In addition, Phelan named fourteen Democrats to chair committees, approximately forty-one percent, which is one more chair than they had in the 2019 legislature.²³ Phelan announced, “The State of Texas has arrived at a pivotal moment in its history—one that requires us as lawmakers to work with one another, build consensus, and leverage the diverse strengths and backgrounds of those within our chamber to confront the unique challenges ahead.”²⁴

Democratic Representative Terry Canales of Edinburg, discussed at the beginning of the chapter, will continue to chair Transportation, a powerful committee in a geographically large state that spends billions on transportation projects.²⁵

Lieutenant Governor

Like the vice-president of the United States, the lieutenant governor is an executive branch official, not a member of the Senate. Unlike the vice-president, however, the lieutenant governor has tremendous power over the day-to-day operations of the Senate. The lieutenant governor is chosen by Texas voters in a statewide election and serves a four-year term. Like the speaker of the House, the lieutenant governor appoints chairs and vice chairs of each committee and determines committee membership. As just mentioned, unlike Speaker Phelan, Lieutenant Governor Patrick named only one Democrat as chair, Senator John Whitmire of Houston.

Losses in the 2020 election for Republicans meant that Republicans in the Senate were reduced to eighteen. They still are in the majority, and they used a simple majority vote along party lines to lower to eighteen the supermajority number of votes needed to bring a bill to the floor.²⁶ Previously a three-fifths supermajority, nineteen votes, were needed. This means Republicans can bring legislation to the floor without any Democratic support. But it also means that if any Republican does not agree, Republicans will still need a Democrat on board.

21. Jones, “Phelan announces diverse slate,” https://www.statesman.com/story/news...ts/4393274001/.

22. Cassandra Pollock, “Speaker Dade Phelan shakes up Texas House with new chairs on key committees,” Texas Tribune, Feb, 4, 2021, https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02...mittee-chairs/.

23. Dade Phelan, “Speaker Dade Phelan Announces Committee Assignments for 87th Legislature,” Press Release, Texas House of Representatives, Feb. 4. 2021, https://house.texas.gov/news/press-r...print/?id=7284.

24. Pollock “Phelan shakes up House,” https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02...mittee-chairs/.

25. Alex Samuels, “Texas Senate changes rules so Republicans can still bring bills to floor without Democratic support,” Texas Tribune, Jan. 13, 2021, https://www.texastribune.org/2021/01...e-republicans/.

26. Ally Mutnik, “Epic redistricting battles loom in states poised to gain, lose House seats,” Politico, Dec. 30, 2019, https://www.politico.com/news/2019/1...se-2020-091451.