After years of tension, Texas House emerges as cooperative partner for Dan Patrick and his conservative agenda

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With tensions boiling over in the final days of the 2021 Texas legislative session, Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Lubbock Republican and a top House lieutenant, went out of his way to throw shade at the Senate and its leader, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, for letting too many House bills languish.

From the back microphone on the House floor, Burrows rhetorically asked then-Speaker Dade Phelan if he was aware that “less than 50% of the House bills that we sent over were passed by the Senate” — much worse than the success rate for Senate bills sent to the lower chamber. It came shortly after Patrick had flayed the House for killing several of his top conservative priorities.

Four years later, Burrows’ first session wielding the speaker’s gavel is winding down with little of the same inter-chamber acrimony. Conservative priorities that had failed in session after session in the House, from private school vouchers to stricter bail laws, have cleared the Legislature with time to spare. So have once-thorny issues, like property tax cuts, school funding and immigration, that in years past had generated bad blood between the chambers and needed overtime sessions to address.

Many of those now-imminent laws were in the sweeping agenda Patrick unveiled near the start of the session in January, marked by several issues that Gov. Greg Abbott also championed as “emergency items.” All but a handful of Patrick’s priorities — from conservative red meat to top bipartisan priorities to the lieutenant governor’s own pet issues — have made it across the finish line or are poised to do so in the closing days of the session, which ends June 2.

The lack of discord reflects the collegial relations Patrick and Burrows have worked to maintain from the start; Burrows’ apparent desire to avoid drawing Patrick’s wrath and the political damage it inflicted upon his predecessors; and the reality that the House, thanks to the turnover wrought by a bruising 2024 primary cycle, is now more conservative and more receptive than ever to Patrick’s hard-charging agenda.

“The tools that Patrick uses — and I think he uses them as effective as anybody — is he's aggressive, he's up front, and he's early,” said Bill Miller, a veteran Austin lobbyist and political consultant. “He lets you know what's coming and why and how important it is to him.”

Patrick’s influence — and that of the hardline conservative Senate he oversees — is evident down the homestretch of the Legislature, as a steady drumbeat of his highest priorities make their way onto the House floor as a waystation to Abbott’s desk.

For critics of the dynamic, the most telling case was the House’s move this week to adopt Patrick’s ban on hemp-derived THC products, in lieu of the carefully crafted regulatory bill offered up by one of Burrows’ lieutenants. Patrick’s crusade to eradicate the hemp industry, underscored by his threat to force a special session if the THC ban fell through, met almost no resistance from House Republicans, nearly all of whom stayed silent on the issue throughout the session.

Speaking from the House’s back microphone Friday, Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, jokingly asked whether Texas has a “bicameral legislature” and, if so, whether either of the chambers is “superior to the other.”

“I believe that democracy calls for this house to exercise its authority in as much as or to the same extent that the other side does, and I don't believe that's happening,” Dutton said, before echoing his favorite refrain about the Senate: “If they won’t respect us, they need to expect us.”

In a statement, Patrick disputed the notion that either chamber “gets its way over the other” and noted that, without cooperation from the House and Senate, “nothing gets to the governor’s desk to be signed into law.”

“The Speaker and I don’t keep track of what’s a Senate bill or a House bill. That simply depends on the flow of legislation and how we divide up the work as the session progresses to find the best way to pass a bill,” Patrick said. “The Speaker and I, and the members from both chambers, have never had a more positive and collaborative relationship in my 18 years in office and that’s why this session will be the most productive in history on so many major issues.”

Burrows said he and Patrick “began session aligned on many major issues” and kept their “shared legislative priorities” moving by staying in contact.

“As a longtime conservative member of the Texas House, I appreciate the input and perspective from our Senate colleagues in crafting legislation and the support of Lieutenant Governor Patrick in making sure this was a banner conservative session for our state,” Burrows said in a statement.

Democrats in recent weeks had intensified their criticism of Senate Republicans for failing to move on a multibillion-dollar school funding package, sent over by the lower chamber in tandem with a $1 billion school voucher bill that was quickly sent to Abbott and signed into law. The Senate’s lead negotiator, GOP Sen. Brandon Creighton of Conroe, said the delay was a matter of lawmakers doing their due diligence on “the most complex piece of legislation we will consider and negotiate this session.”

Both chambers struck a deal on the $8.5 billion package this week. Just before it advanced out of the Senate Friday evening, Patrick — perched on the Senate dais — took aim at “the media and those outside who said, why is it taking so long?"

“You don’t pass those bills with the snap of a finger, because there are 150 opinions over there and 31 opinions over here,” Patrick said. “So, we shut out the rest, the outside noise, the media who doesn’t even understand how a bill passes. … It’s really been a five-month process, and it’s a masterpiece for the rest of the country to follow.”

This session, Patrick has also taken a special interest in reining in the Texas lottery, which has come under scrutiny over the proliferation of online ticket sellers — known as couriers — and the revelation that a $95 million jackpot in 2023 went to a group that printed 99% of the 26 million possible ticket combinations. Couriers and bulk ticket purchases would each be banned under a last-minute Senate bill that has zoomed through the House and is set to reach the floor on Sunday.

Patrick has also championed a push to more than double the amount of money the state spends to lure film and television production to Texas, with extra incentives for faith-based productions. That measure, Senate Bill 22, also made it onto Sunday’s House floor agenda.

The House has until the end of Tuesday to give initial approval to most Senate bills. The Senate, meanwhile, faces a Wednesday deadline to grant final passage to legislation from either chamber. Senators and House members will then spend the final days of the session reconciling their different versions of bills in closed-door conference committees.

Some of Patrick’s priorities have already cleared those hurdles and been sent to Abbott’s desk, including a measure to allow time for prayer in public schools and create a $3 billion dementia research fund, the latter of which will also need approval from voters in November.

Several priorities of Patrick and fellow hardline social conservatives also are on track to reach Abbott’s desk after stalling in the House in recent sessions. Those include a requirement for public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments and a law barring residents and governments from countries deemed national security threats from buying property in Texas.

The pressure for the House to pass conservative legislation has also come from within the chamber, with GOP members from the party’s rightmost flank urging Burrows’ lieutenants to push key bills through their committees. On Friday, a group of the House’s most conservative members called on Rep. Ken King, a moderate Republican from Canadian who chairs the influential State Affairs Committee, to advance a bill aimed at restricting the flow of abortion pills into Texas.

“If Chairman King kills a bill that would protect tens of thousands of innocent children from the murder that is abortion, Republicans will be forced to hold him accountable,” Rep. Nate Schatzline, R-Fort Worth, said at a news conference highlighting conservative legislation stuck in limbo.

King’s committee advanced the measure, Senate Bill 2880, hours later.

It was one of a handful of high-priority Senate bills that have been voted out by King’s panel in recent days after being parked there for weeks, including the school prayer measure and a proposal to bar local governments from helping Texans travel out of state to receive abortions. Around the same time, some of King’s bills sent over to the Senate — most of which had been frozen — suddenly began moving. Patrick has denied that King’s bills were purposely being held up.

The House’s hardline ranks have swelled after last year’s wave of GOP primary defeats that saw more than a dozen incumbents ousted, largely over their opposition to vouchers, support for the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton or a combination of both. Others chose to retire and were replaced by more conservative successors, forming a class of insurgent GOP freshmen who make up the bulk of the House’s more than 30 new members — the largest freshman class since 2013.

“There are two things that are working in Patrick's favor,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “Number one, the House is more ideologically conservative than it's ever been. And two, a lot of the members are brand new.”

Still learning the ropes, many of those new members “are going to follow Patrick's lead,” Rottinghaus said, “because he is, in some ways, the party's de facto leader.”

That was especially clear in the debate over THC. King, who carried the Senate’s THC bill in the lower chamber, proposed a version that would have sharply tightened regulations on the hemp industry and restricted which products are allowed to contain THC, while preserving hemp-derived THC edibles and drinks. That was done away with by proponents of a ban, who centered their pitch for a complete crackdown around the idea that Texas would expand its limited medical marijuana program, known as the Texas Compassionate Use Program, or TCUP.

Midway through the House’s THC floor debate, Patrick voiced support on social media for expanding the medical program to allow for more licensed medical marijuana dispensers and let providers operate satellite storage facilities designed to make it easier for patients to fill their prescriptions. Rep. James Frank, R-Wichita Falls, read off Patrick’s post to the full chamber to bolster the case for a ban.

House lawmakers included those provisions in legislation approved by the chamber last week. Their draft also would add several qualifying conditions, including chronic pain, and extend eligibility to honorably discharged veterans — both key selling points from House Republicans championing the THC ban.

Both provisions — eligibility for chronic pain and veterans — were stripped from a new Senate draft of the bill unveiled days after the House’s THC vote.

The change sparked one of the first real signs of public discord between the chambers, kicked off when Rep. Tom Oliverson, the Cypress Republican who led the charge to restore the THC ban in the House, wrote on social media Saturday that he was "deeply disappointed in the removal of chronic pain" from the Senate medical marijuana bill.

Pitching the ban this week, Oliverson told his House colleagues he had fought to include chronic pain in their version of the bill, and he promised he would "fight for that on the other side."

In an addendum, he later added, "To clarify my statement below, no agreement on chronic pain in TCUP was ever reached with the Senate and none have been broken."

Patrick followed later Saturday evening by thanking Oliverson for clarifying, before adding a key detail: Patrick said he had told Oliverson personally that the Senate would not add chronic pain as a qualifying condition, well before Oliverson later told House members he would fight for its inclusion.

"I was as transparent as I could be. He knew the Senate wasn’t adding chronic pain 2 weeks ago," Patrick said, adding, "For all of us, our word is the most important currency we have in the legislature."

In conference committee, Patrick said, "Tom will get a chance to make another pitch. We’ll listen in good faith."

Disclosure: University of Houston has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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