Welcome to Texas Talk.

I'm Gilbert Garcia, opinion writer and columnist for the San Antonio Express-News.

On this show, we bring you one on one conversations with some of the most fascinating figures in Texas politics, culture, sports and business.

Our guest for this episode is the preeminent authority on Texas government and politics.

As the editor of the Quorum Report and host of the Texas Tech Podcast.

Scott Braddock has covered the inner workings of the Texas Legislature with unmatched detail and insight over the course of his career.

He's also served as a chief political reporter for news radio stations in Dallas and Houston.

On this episode, Braddock talks about Governor Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the growing divisions between the Texas House and Senate.

Let's get started.

Scott, thanks so much for being on the show.

Thanks for having me.

Always good to be in San Antonio.

And you recently covered the Republican state convention in San Antonio and the Democratic state convention in El Paso.

And on the Republican side, you had smaller attendance.

I think what we've seen in the past, you.

But Governor Greg Abbott did not go.

I don't think he's been there since 2018.

That's correct.

the party organization is not in great shape financially.

Clearly, Republicans dominate state politics.

But we reached a point where, and maybe we've been at this point for a long time where the Republican Party of Texas as an organization is just irrelevant now.

You know, it's gone up and down and it's irrelevance over the years.

and I would say that the some of the coverage of the convention maybe overstates the importance of the the Republican Party of Texas as an organization as far as Republican dominance in the state.

it's been well understood by, elected Republicans and folks in the business community who, who agree with the Republican platform, or agree with what Republican officeholders do when they're there.

but they can't depend on the Texas GOP to get it done.

And so they've got various other organizations that they use to put their money through, for example, Texans for Lawsuit Reform, the Associated Republicans of Texas and others, which spend millions and millions of dollars.

I've made this point on the Texas Tech podcast many times, which is to say that effectively, in this state, some of those groups, plus the campaigns of Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick especially, they're the ones who have the real financial heft.

I mean, all of those together can spend as much as about $100 million in an election cycle without breaking a sweat.

And so if the Republican Party of Texas doesn't have cash, it's not going to keep Republicans from being elected.

And I would say it's interesting that we've had low attendance this year for both the Republican Party in Texas, as you mentioned, here in San Antonio.

I didn't help that y'all ordered up some weather here that week.

That was yeah, felt like Houston in August.

It was pretty hot and humid.

they had low attendance, compared to pastures, you know, 15, 20 years ago.

You would have seen as many as 15,000 delegates or so at the Republican Party at Texas Convention.

This time around, I'd be charitable to say that they maybe had 3500 or so.

I think the number they announced is probably for just the real hardcore.

It's just the hardcore activists.

and for the Democrats.

So we'll talk more about that.

I'm sure.

But they had lower attendance, I think, because they held their convention all the way out in El Paso.

Yeah.

Which is a hardship for people to even get there.

I think for personal funds, you'd have to spend something like, you know, $1,500 per person for airfare and a hotel to go out there.

So they had, you know, depressed attendance at both conventions for different reasons.

but look, I mean, the fact is, at the Republican Party of Texas convention two years ago, the elder statesman of the Texas GOP, John Cornyn, you know, a San Antonio boy, he was nearly booed off the stage.

You remember that?

And it was because he did.

He did the smallest thing possible.

You know, on on gun violence, on gun safety, to move something forward on that in Washington.

And he was seen by Republican activists as the apostate.

Right.

He's he's he's not doing what they think he ought to do.

They they were assailing him.

John Cornyn, I imagine that's one of the most conservative senators and someone who's been in Senate leadership in Washington.

They're acting as if he wants to grab everybody's gun, which, of course, isn't true at all.

But it's this party purity thing going on.

and I remember a friend of mine who was at that convention in Houston he and his mother always attended together among, you know, lifelong Republicans when that booing was going on.

the mother texted the son in all caps and said, I will never come to another one of these, which is what some of those activists want.

They want to run off the more mainstream people.

So it's only the most right wing activists were there.

This gets to a point that I've heard you talk about on your podcast, which is that 20, 25 years ago, when the Republican Party in Texas was still trying to build or cement its majority, they were in party building mode.

They were trying to win people over, bring them into the fold.

Now, you talked about how they're in essentially party shrinking mode.

They they want to, eliminate or maybe at least punish people who they don't think don't pass their purity test.

We've had censure resolutions against Republican elected officials.

And, is there a price to be paid at a certain point, when you're ostracizing people who have been in the party to think of themselves as party members?

We have someone in Santoni, Joe Strauss, the former House speaker, who has been pretty candid about the fact that he doesn't really feel there's a place for him in the Republican Party now.

And he his family has a long history in that party.

Is there a price to be paid politically for the GOP at some point?

We may find out soon.

I mean, we're in a presidential election year.

There is a US Senate seat on the ballot this year in Texas calling all red is facing off with Ted Cruz.

it's a high stakes election.

And as you look around the country, look at the Senate map for Democrats as they try to retain their majority in Washington, they are prioritizing Texas as one of their top races.

That tells me that it's looking bad for Democrats nationally, at least for the Senate map.

if they if they think that Texas is a potential pickup, well, then they've got, you know, it's a tough row to hoe, as we used to say on the farm.

So the fact is that you have in this state a lot of folks who are sort of in that Strauss situation, they've been lifelong Republicans.

They've been voting for, you know, Republicans for for years, if not decades.

and they might be open to voting for a Democrat some, issues, have been flipped on their head in the state.

And I'll go right to the to the main one for Democrats is going to be abortion and abortion rights.

I'm at ten years ago, I was on the floor of the Texas Senate back when they allowed journalists there before the little governor, Dan Patrick, took over.

and that's when Wendy Davis filibustered that big abortion legislation that was happening that was being passed that year.

and if you think about what they were trying to do at that time, Republicans at that time, Gilbert, it's nothing like what they are doing now.

Right?

Which is banning abortion completely at that time.

They were regulating the width of hallways and clinics, and that was going to shut down some clinics in the state, but not eliminate abortion rights altogether.

Right now, in this state, for a woman to receive a legal abortion, the only exception is if the woman is dying in front of the doctor.

And you've seen the coverage lately that that tells us that, at the Texas Medical Board, they won't even, tell doctors and patients what that looks like.

So we have doctors kind of throwing up their hands and saying, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.

We've seen these stories, you know, in recent weeks and months over the last year, as this has really started to, to take hold and people are seeing the real world effects of it, women having to leave the state.

just last week, we had, a woman testifying in Congress about that, about the fact that she had, twins.

She was pregnant with twins.

One of the, babies was killing the other.

And her.

And previously, she would have been able to get an abortion in Texas.

Now, the doctor says you can't do that.

the numbers, if you look at the polling, are flipped upside down from ten years ago in this state, it was that the abortion restrictions that Republicans supported here were basically supported by most, Texans.

but ten years later, after the fall of Roe versus Wade and the Dobbs decision, now you have, the state legislature here and in some other places going as far as possible with restricting abortion and even some of those folks who have been open to voting for Republicans don't agree with it.

That is particularly true, in suburban counties, some of the suburban parts of Bexar County, out to Cornwall County, as well as up in North Texas in places like Denton County, Collin County in the Houston area, in, Fort Bend County is one of those, counties that's shifting toward the Democrats.

And if you start to see those numbers really shift, well, then maybe we have a real U.S. Senate race.

One of the things that we heard at the Republican state convention, from Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and it's something we've heard from Attorney General Ken Paxton, particularly, over the past year since he was impeached by the Texas House.

Is this idea that even though Republicans have the majority, Democrats really control the Texas House, because they have the potential to, form a coalition with a group of Republicans and pick the speaker and get whatever they want from the speaker.

I don't think there are many Democratic state representatives who feel like their party is in control of the House, but I wanted to get your thoughts on on that narrative from, from Patrick in Texas.

One of the things that separates Texas government from our federal government in a positive way is that we do operate with a coalition government where the Republicans and Democrats in the House, at least.

And it's been true in the Senate as well.

But the lieutenant governor does not promote that in the House.

Democrats and Republicans work together.

That doesn't mean that it's not a conservative government.

You've seen the kind of legislation that has come out of Austin that no one would no one would objectively say that it's liberal.

We do have some people misleading folks in saying that the Texas House is somehow a bastion of liberalism, which just isn't true in any way.

I don't think I can point to any legislation that would support that.

Well, and here's the other thing.

When, when, when some of these folks have been asked what Republican priority did not pass the legislature because there are Democratic chairs in the House, they can't give any examples.

one of the folks who's running for speaker, Tom Oliver, is a conservative Republican from Houston.

He was asked that question.

What conservative policy didn't pass in Texas because we have Democratic chairs?

His answer was, he didn't have one.

and so look at whoever the speaker is.

And I would handicap it for feeling that person is going to be elected with the support of Democrats in the House.

This has been the case since the Republicans took the majority in 2003.

It's not going to change in 2025. we have school districts across the state who are facing budget shortfalls, having to lay off employees.

And one of the reasons for that is that last year, when Texas state government was flush with cash, they're there.

They failed to pass, funding increase for public education and it was, basically because Governor Greg Abbott was holding his school voucher program hostage and saying, if we don't if I don't get this, you're not going to get that.

Yeah.

He told them together, tied them together.

and one of the things that that that's interesting to me is that, you know, he's been governor for nearly ten years.

This was his fifth legislative session.

My memory is and you would know much more than I would on this, but my memory is that prior to the lead up to the 2023 session, this was not a big priority to him.

And he certainly did not show any indication that he was willing to go to the mat.

And if I don't get vouchers, we're going to, you know, we're going to blow up everything else.

what do you think accounts for the fact that so deep into his administration, suddenly vouchers became, an obsession?

Well, you're right, he did not care about this prior to the last legislative session.

in the lead up to the session, he started talking about it quite a bit.

Remember in the campaign for reelection in the year before that?

He didn't talk about it almost at all on the campaign trail.

The main promises he made were what he said he was going to secure the Texas border, and he was going to cut people's property taxes.

That that's what folks elected him on.

and suddenly when he got into office, once again, you know, won reelection.

And then in 2023, he was on this mission to pass private school vouchers.

The answer is easy.

It's money no politician in Texas has ever received as large a single donation, from any person as Greg Abbott.

he got a $6 million check.

no, I mean, the the the biggest contribution before that was a $3 million contribution to the little governor, Dan Patrick.

around the time of the Ken Paxton trial, there were some folks who were saying that, you know, maybe that had something to do with the outcome on that.

but for the school voucher, proposal that Abbott was suddenly, as you say, suddenly obsessed with, this seems to be a money deal, plain and simple.

bought and paid for.

And that's why he's so willing to, tell lies about members of his own party who displeased him on the issue.

after it failed in the legislature last year.

He went on the warpath during this last primary, just scorched earth.

and telling outright lies about members of his own party.

Sort of the death of shame.

in Texas politics, for sure.

Yeah.

And, he's been able to take out several Republican state representatives who were anti voucher.

Yeah.

During the primaries this year, is, well, we still have to see what's going to happen in the general election.

But do you think that vouchers or are likely to pass next year, given that I feel like I've had to do this all this year, with, with with with folks in our profession, which is just to say this, everyone should slow down.

you see these headlines that say, you know, vouchers are sure to pass next session.

The governor, of course, is going to tout, you know, the idea that he can pass vouchers, a lot of question marks.

one, what does the bill even look like?

there are there are some members of the legislature who will never vote for what, the governor wants, but he said he wants, which is a universal voucher where every kid, you know, the 5.6 million children or so who are in K through 12 education in Texas would be eligible for the voucher.

The some Republicans will never go for that, especially when there's no accountability, no strings attached whatsoever.

And that's what the governor has said that he wants.

If there's anything short of that, there are some hard liners in the Texas house.

I'll give you an example.

Briscoe Cain, who's a very conservative member who is a pro school voucher guy, but he won't.

But I think he's a no vote on a bill that isn't the universal version.

if you look at, the cost of it, I mean, you're talking about more than, at full cost, $22 billion or so every two years for a school voucher system in the state, which would be taking money out of the public education system.

and there are a lot of Republicans who would just say that's way too expensive.

In fact, that was the reason given by Republicans who voted no last year and why they said no to additional money for public education in the state.

But I got to tell you, you're putting your finger on something very important.

in this state, we now have Republicans who are on the record saying that school districts need more money, that they're desperate for more money.

Think of it this way.

Tom Oliver, who is running for speaker on the platform of of eliminating Democratic chairmen in the House, signed a letter with Democrats in the Houston area asking for the state to send more money to his local school district.

He knows how bad it is in reality and how bad it is for him and other Republicans in suburban areas.

Politically.

If we start to see and we're going to see some of this before the fall, sort of like one of my friends, describes it as, sort of like, submarine out in the water.

And then politically, it's going to blow some things up before November.

when you start to see these layoffs in school districts around the state and it has all been, tied to, something that just isn't popular in the state, not with most Republicans or Democrats.

The idea of a private school voucher.

Now, I will say the idea of school choice when you frame that very vague.

Yeah, that's popular with Republicans.

But I can tell you that I've seen polling that indicates that Republican primary voters in Texas, even though they overwhelmingly support school choice.

They also and just imagine those people want their cake and eat it, too.

They also overwhelmingly support full funding for public education.

And the problem with that is you know, when you only have so much money, you can't do both.

We really haven't seen a Democrat in Texas, become a kind of statewide force.

And since maybe that they're award in 2018 when he ran for Senate against Ted Cruz.

do you see any, any figures in the Democratic Party in Texas on the horizon who could maybe step into that role?

It's hard to say.

you know, at the Democratic convention, you know, I saw, some of the, speeches.

I didn't see all of them.

There was meetings to be had, and talk to folks and was a few bars in El Paso, but but but the point is that, you know, they've got they've got a bench, but they don't have, they don't have a bench that you would, you would think, okay, let me, let me pick from these candidates and I'll, I'll tell you who's going to be the breakout star.

it's interesting though, that the Republicans, short of their statewide, officials at this point, don't really have a bench like that either.

Right.

and so it's going to be hard to say what the matchups are going to be specifically going forward, in these next, elections.

but since you mentioned O'Rourke, I mean, the guy who's running for something he ran for before, for the U.S. Senate calling already is a very different kind of candidate from what we saw with better.

Right.

You're not going to see, Colin.

All red riding a skateboard in a Waterberg or parking lot and, you know, giving the middle finger to Republicans.

It's going to be a very different kind of campaign.

It's going to be very different, you know, references to punk rock?

I don't think so.

Not as many F-bombs for sure.

More football references, but more football.

He'll say, you know, in the NFL we would check the tape.

He likes to say that he does.

But but the fact is that, in this campaign, you're going to see a disciplined campaign and a well-funded one.

They're going to be on television all the time on, you know, paid advertising, in all the major markets, which, of course, in Texas, it's one of the most expensive states to do that huge television markets, including San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth.

And then you really need to spend money.

If you're a Democrat, you need to be spending money in the Valley as well.

which is which is another fairly expensive market.

all roads going to have the budget to do that.

Of course.

if Republicans really do perceive that Senator Cruz is under threat, he'll have all the money he needs as well.

So it's going to be one of those epic battles.

Scott, you came up through radio.

You already did news radio in in both Houston and Dallas.

And something that I didn't realize until recently was that you knew Washington Governor Dan Patrick before he ran for office, when he was a Houston radio host.

And we were yeah, we were radio station competitors in Houston.

what were your early impressions of him and has he changed in, fundamental ways over the time that you've known him?

He has.

And the most fundamental way that he's changed is he doesn't listen to anybody anymore.

I would say that, a lot of folks get it wrong when it comes to Dan Patrick.

They think that he's been successful because he's such a good talker.

And I would say that his early success in politics was the opposite, that he was a good listener.

And I'll tell you what happened, when he ran for the Texas Senate in 2006, it was a multi-way race.

It was a wide open seat for the Texas Senate.

He was on the radio in Houston.

and he's running against other Republicans.

The thing that he did that was so key and, I learned this from folks who worked on his campaign, was that he would go and meet with every Republican activist in the district, every precinct chair, everybody who had, you know, Republican blog or whatever.

And he would just sit and listen to them, listen to what they were saying, what they were concerned about.

He would have he would absorb what they had to say, and he would just listen to them as long as they wanted to talk.

So they talked themselves out.

And then at the end of the meeting, he would hand write.

He would write a cell phone number on the business card, hand it to them and say, call me anytime.

And that had, basically, that had two benefits for him.

One was he then knew what to say, right?

He was he was sort of gathering information about what these Republican grassroots activists wanted to hear.

But the other thing was because he was talking and meeting with the most active Republicans, they would turn around and tell all their friends, this guy, listen to me.

He, you know, he actually cares about what we care about.

but in later years, as he, as he has, you know, really consolidated power in Austin, folks will tell you that he just doesn't listen.

He doesn't call folks anymore who he used to call for advice.

He thinks he can call all the shots himself.

And maybe that's true.

He basically is the Texas Senate right now.

The Republicans and most of the Democrats in the Senate never really buck him about anything.

So he's he's grown to the point where he basically fills up the Senate chamber.

Yeah.

But in a lot of ways, not much bigger than that.

And when he when he clashes with, Governor Abbott, for example, the way he did on property taxes, both of them eventually got some of what they wanted.

but I think his influence outside of the Senate really isn't that impressive.

I mean, look at what just happened in Beaumont, where he took on the sitting speaker of the House and tried to beat him in his in, Dade felons, reelection campaign.

Phelan was up against former President Trump.

Yeah.

Type that Patrick.

And this lieutenant was Lieutenant Governor Patrick, the attorney general, Ken Paxton, the Republican Party of Texas, all of these Republican entities working against the Republican Speaker.

And he beat them anyway by a small margin.

It was a huge win.

You said that your your guess is that that, Jake Fielding will be reelected speaker.

given the bad relationship that already existed between him and Dan Patrick and the fact Dan Patrick really tried to take him out this time, I mean, is it going to be all at war in next year's legislative session?

Between the two of them, that question is going to factor heavily into who the House picks for speaker.

Yeah, I think do they want to do the members of the House?

Do they want to assert their independence?

you know, against the lieutenant governor and to some degree, the governor?

If so, the best way for the House to assert its independence would be for, in my estimation, for failing to win reelection with the full knowledge that he can't trust the governor or the lieutenant governor on key issues.

And I think that at least right now, that's his mindset that, for example, on the school voucher issue, that the governor, you know, got basically everything he wanted, from Phelan last year.

as far as there being a vote on vouchers on the House floor, and a few other things, including, not, the House did not send Abbott, the school funding package that the Senate had passed that was separate from vouchers.

They could have done that.

Steve Allison, who's from, from San Antonio and lost his, his primary.

Alison had asked the speaker on the floor if they could do that.

Go ahead and pass a teacher pay raise.

Go ahead and pass some more money for schools without vouchers.

Dan Patrick said that would be okay.

but Phelan didn't do that.

He didn't put the governor in that box of having to either sign or veto that.

so the speaker was doing one favor after another for the governor.

He didn't get almost anything in return for that.

The governor went on on the warpath against against the incumbent Republicans.

and some of the folks who want school vouchers to pass actually spent money against the speaker, during his run off.

And that's after the speaker had gone out of his way to not really personally take a position, on school vouchers.

I think that the potential for, Phelan and Patrick to face off, you know, next session across issues, is real.

It could be very ugly.

But I would say this if all the top Republican leadership has in this state is bad ideas, gridlock wouldn't be the worst thing in the history of the world.

We, we just got a little bit of time, but I want to ask you about something that you and Jeremy Wallace talked about on your Texas Tech podcast, which is, you talked about Henry Cuellar in Texas.

Democratic congressman.

He's, under indictment for allegedly taking nearly $600,000 in bribes and money laundering.

And, but he's giving it every.

I mean, he's to people who are very close associates or, have agreed to plea agreements to testify against him.

It looks very bad for him.

But you talk about how he's he's holding on.

He's staying in office.

He's he's running for reelection.

And you talked about it's a term that you used earlier in this show, which is the death of shame in politics.

So we don't see we don't see politicians, expressing shame or feeling shame the way they used to.

What when did that change?

I mean, it's just been a gradual thing.

It really has been, I think, during the era of Donald Trump.

I mean, here you have, a former president convicted, in a case that involves paying off a porn star, to keep quiet, you know, during a, you know, to, to not influence an election.

that stuff all comes from the top.

and in this state, Ken Paxton, the attorney general, he would say to Tucker Carlson on the, you know, the right wing talk show host, he would say, yeah, I've got some personal problems to work through.

But, you know, they shouldn't really be asking me about those things.

It's essentially what he told Tucker.

and, and I think that, that, you know, for a lot of voters around the state, and some of the most active voters, as I've traveled around their attitude is this, that they think all politicians are corrupt, that all politicians are on the take, that they're all crooked.

And with that as their baseline, they then ask themselves, well, which one of those crooked people is doing the things that I like?

And I'm going to go with him, you know, sort of the old saying of, you know, he might be an S.O.B., but he's my S.O.B.

and most especially Republican voters feel that way.

The Quaker, race may be a different test on that because of course it is Democrats.

But as you know, that district was shored up, for him to do much better in a general than in a primary.

That's why, of course, a couple of years ago, he had that very spirited and close primary, but I think in a general election, he's probably pretty safe.

Scott, thank you so much for being on the show, Gilbert.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of Texas Talk.

Thanks for watching.

We'd love to hear from you.

And if you have any thoughts or questions, please email us at Texas Talk a Taylor and talk.

We'll be back next month with a new guest.

Until then, take care.