Welcome to party politics.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor also here at the University of Houston.

It's been a pretty exciting week, actually.

A lot going on.

I hope you check your garage for documents, making sure that you didn't have anything that was problematic.

Okay.

As long as you checked because they are popping up everywhere.

We won't spend much time talking about it because obviously, like there's going to be a whole thing about this, like we predicted.

But there's a lot of of discussion about these documents.

And actually, if you are on Tik Tok at the University of Texas or that University of Houston, you can't check it out.

So, yeah, we'll talk about that too.

In addition to the budget and new committee chairs in the Texas Senate.

So a lot going on this week, Jeronimo.

Let's start with actually pretty surprising news, and that is that Ron Klain, who was a longtime confidant of Joe Biden and his chief of staff, is stepping down.

It's a kind of remarkable moment of turnover in a White House that has had a fair amount of turnover, but is kind of prides itself on having stability in the so-called A-Team.

Mr. Klain is as connected to Biden as just about anybody politically.

He's often talked about as the virtual prime minister and has been credited with a bunch of wins in the two years the Bidens had been in power.

So what do you make of his two years in office and what do you make of kind of what it means for the Biden administration at a very critical juncture?

Well, I think, first of all, he had very good wins.

Right.

And even after President Biden's lack of popularity.

That's a nice way to put it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Lack of popularity.

Exactly.

He was able to had, you know, a couple of very good bipartisan wins in Congress.

So that is testament that he's a very good negotiator or that he also has a lot of compromise, made a lot of compromise with Republicans.

So I think that he's going to leave a good gap.

Right.

But obviously, he's he must be exhausted.

Oh, yeah.

Can you imagine?

Yeah.

No, I can't.

Every day.

All day.

It's like an unrelenting.

24 seven.

It is so.

And you know that.

Going in and I think everybody who's kind of in that level knows that going in, but the amount of work they put in is incredible.

And honestly, there's a reason that the A-Team eventually leaves, and that is because, like, it's so draining, but also because, you know, in Washington, credibility is like a block of ice.

It loses very quickly, even in kind of moderately cold weather.

So that's I think part of the reason, too, is that you see a lot of Republicans pushing the Biden administration on these big issues.

And although he's got some big wins, there have been some big losses, too, like you're Afghanistan and the exit from there.

So that's been kind of an issue.

But I think it comes at a bad time for the Biden White House because here you are basically right at the cusp of having Republicans investigate your every move, including, you know, documents which apparently continue to pop up all over Biden's like White House residence and his house in Delaware.

So you're at the kind of cusp of this breach in charge of Republicans.

Exactly.

But I think that's exactly why he might say, like I say and.

Not.

Being able I mean, he doesn't apparently one of the reasons might be not dealing with this type of mess.

Right?

Yeah.

And he's just saying, like, that's it.

I see it coming.

Yeah, I don't want to deal.

And now, Jeff Zients is going to be the one that apparently has been named as his replacement.

Yeah.

And boy, yeah, I mean, he will have to learn the ropes in 30 seconds because.

Yeah, you know, Republicans in Congress, especially in the House, are full throttle and they're not going to wait a single say.

Yeah, where's the West Wing streaming.

Can we like watch?

That is exactly like Leo McGarry shortcut.

Right?

The real ones know what I'm talking about, right?

He's going to have to binge watch.

Yeah, yeah.

The West Wing in one to get it done.

But if he's for the incoming chief of staff is more of a kind of administrator, which I'm not sure what the Biden administration needs.

Right.

I mean, you rember The Godfather, right?

You had the kind of wartime in peacetime consigliere, right?

I think they need a wartime consigliere, somebody who's willing to punch hard like Rahm Emanuel, remember, from the first couple of years of the Obama administration, like when you need a fighter, you've got to have somebody in that role to do that.

So we'll see.

But the Biden administration has actually been pretty solid in terms of turn over the second year.

Turn them over was about the second highest behind Ronald Reagan's percent turn over.

And so it's a kind of a rare event to see this happen.

And this is, I think, going to be kind of destabilizing because one thing that happens when you're A team leaves is that scandal sets in, in fact, from like a lot of the work that I do.

You can see that when people have this turnover, you start to see these new and unpredicted problems.

And the first group, the key group, you know, kind of what your problems and liabilities are.

But with another set of groups, you might not.

And so that's a potential moving forward.

Not that he's, you know, not going to see scandals anyway because he definitely is.

And we've seen him already.

So and I mean, and especially if President Biden owns another Corvette, you know.

It's it's even worse if somebody checked the other Corvette.

Exactly.

So it's, you know.

Good question.

Yeah, I think it's smart.

You should have been a lawyer.

I think.

You think you think like a like a lawyer.

So, I mean, and, you know, probably he's thinking like, oh, I'm glad I didn't get that truck.

I imagine that my paper that dated the paper hauling capacity, so.

They don't talk about that in the commercials.

But yeah, I can haul a lot of documents.

But speaking of politics and at a high level leadership, in an event that actually didn't get you like the transition in an event they didn't get like a lot of attention or hasn't gotten as much attention.

And that is that the Republican National Committee is choosing a new chair.

This normally wouldn't be that big of an issue, right.

Kind of chair of the national committee tends to be a position that's, you know, you know, kind of heard but not seen.

Usually.

It's very kind of low key.

But Ronna McDaniel was and is the current chair.

She was sort of handpicked by Donald Trump, but she may have fallen out of favor with Trump and some of the kind of.

Yeah, it's a rise of rise with some of Trump's acolytes.

So she is a running for essentially reelection by a number of the members is limited to 168.

But she says she's got about a hundred.

But there are challengers.

One challenger is Harmeet Dhillon, who is attorney.

She was part of a law firm that backed Donald Trump's attempt to throw out the 2020 election and a familiar name and face.

And that's Mypillow CEO Mike Lindell is running.

The likelihood is the pillow guy is not going to get enough votes to be competitive.

I think it's just people are not sleeping on pillows anymore.

I'm not sure like but he's been pretty toxic in lots of ways and even the Republican Party's not willing to embrace that.

But of course, he's pushing everything, as is Trump, in a lot of these, you know, kind of Freedom Caucus members to the right.

And so Dylan, who is, I think, making a case number one that basically she's a better person to run the RNC, more sort of economically minded.

She's able to, you know, produce wins where, you know, where McDaniel is essentially faded right.

Like all of the puffed up aspirations for Republicans in 2022 were kind of lost.

They won the House back.

Yeah, but not by big numbers.

They didn't win the Senate like they were supposed to.

So the concern is that basically the GOP is floundering.

Tell us what this means.

Like, is this a kind of real sea change in terms of the party?

And are we at a point where it's a, you know, kind of don't, you know, kind of can't come back for a moment?

Well, I think, first of all, Family Feud.

Let's play that.

Yeah, but it's not right.

You know, it's not that type of family.

It's actually, you know, quite bitter, these leadership, you know, competition, if you want to put it that way.

But I think it's very indicative of what's going on within the Republican Party.

Yeah, we have you know, the Republican Party's completely divided, right?

Well, perhaps not completely divided, but there is a group of, you know, MAGA Republicans that are making a lot of noise.

And we have seen that with the election of Kevin McCarthy.

We're seeing that in Texas, that we're going to talking in a few moments.

And now we're seeing that in the Republican Party.

Yeah.

So that creates a big problem in terms of unity.

Yeah.

And unity is needed to win an election.

Yeah.

And if they cannot provide it when they go fragmented and, and have, you know, trying to compete in an election that basically hurts them most of the time.

And that's what happened in 2020, too.

But they do not realize it.

Yeah, that's right.

And honestly, the party's never been good at kind of self-reflection that way.

Recall like the autopsy that they did.

Oh, yeah, right.

Following a kind of disastrous loss.

And in 2008 and nothing really happened from it.

And so I think that's probably one of the problems that they've are facing.

McDaniel says that, you know, to your point, that she's the unity candidate, she's the one that can bring the party together.

She's got the donor, she says.

They built the ground game.

But realistically, it's hard.

And, you know, unlike I say sports team, right.

You can't just kind of fire the coach and help move things along, right.

Every Dallas Cowboys fan right now is like fire Mike McCarthy, right.

People watching the game.

They know what was going on.

Like, it's not, though, totally in control of the chair, right?

Like she only has so much control over how much money gets spent where.

Right.

Everything else is kind of done locally in a decentralized way.

The other problem is that you've got Donald Trump.

Now, Trump has said he's going to stay out of this race.

Like what?

Donald Trump is sitting out a political fight that is all about him anyway.

Yeah, that's surprising, but for sure I think it's going to be connected to him.

And so I think this will tell us a lot about where things were three.

Hundred percent connected to former President Trump.

100%, right.

I mean, people are calling McDaniel.

Ronna is the enemy within and that's just that's not good.

You know.

I want to be there because we're going to get some nasty mail.

Yeah, nobody likes that.

Yup.

But as you say, actually, this is not just a kind of national Republican Party problem.

It's a Texas Republican Party problem, too.

It has been for decades.

But the latest manifestation of this is that the Republican Party of Texas is raising money and then spending that money on ads against speaker Phelan And if you haven't been paying attention or if you're new to Texas or new to politics speaker feel and is also a Republican you guessed it and a pretty conservative Republican.

Yeah so this is a strange turn of events, although honestly it's in keeping with the kind of friction that's been happening for the far right to the I guess you'd say middle, but not even middle like establishment of the Republican Party for decades.

So what's going on here?

And.

Well, I mean, it's very odd, right?

Yeah.

He was elected with 145 votes in the Texas legislature, having the overwhelming support of the Republican Party, but also the Democrats and Democrats.

And, you know, his opponent had, what, 30 votes?

Something like that?

Yeah, three votes, one of which was with him, like the opponent.

I don't want to say it right.

All right.

Should you vote for yourself in that it's an equal.

I would vote for myself.

Absolutely.

What I would love for you to.

But that's.

It's right.

And he got 30.

Yeah.

Like that's I'm sure I can find another one.

You get.

One more.

Vote.

Yeah for sure.

But anyway so that creates, you know, the Republican Party in Texas to me, at least in this sense at the House.

Right.

It's quite united in how they want to move forward.

Yeah.

The other part is, as you said, that it's very clear.

Yeah.

Speaker Phelan delivers.

Yeah, right.

He delivers.

And it's not like, you know, part of the war is please call speaker feeling and tell him to stop empowering Democrats.

Yeah.

Tell him to listen to the 85% of voters who support banning Democrats chairmanships.

I'm fine, right?

But he gave you what you wanted the past session.

Yeah.

You got.

You got voting changes, you got abortion restrictions, right?

I mean, there's some stuff clearly they didn't get.

And that's what they're concerned about, right?

I mean, they're saying things like they think that just like Speaker Strauss before him, that felon is preventing some of the kind of core Republican bills from getting to the floor.

Maybe that's true.

But he runs the House like it's been run for decades and that's generally on consensus.

I mean, that's not to say the Democrats are going to get any big wins, but they're going to be part of that process.

And that's been a hallmark of how the state governs for decades, almost a century.

So it's not that uncommon.

But you do have Republicans pushing back like Dustin Burrows from Lubbock, you know, tweeted out, essentially saying, why are you giving money to the party so the party can run ads against our speaker?

Yeah, this doesn't make any sense.

But again, it just highlights how much division there is.

But honestly, I may this question I'm not sure really matters.

Like I'm not sure that except for a kind of small group of our, you know, really smart listeners and watchers, all of them that people really care about how this goes down right.

First of all, like nobody cares about the Democratic chairs, right?

I mean, it's such a small, niche issue for some modest Republicans.

But Democratic chairs.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And then I think that mostly beyond that, the voters are really concerned about how any of this looks like the Civil War.

They're like it's just it's just ephemeral.

Right?

They're more concerned about why the Cowboys, you know, can't kick a field goal.

Right?

So, I mean, not to say that, you know, people aren't paying a lot of attention.

To that 15 interceptions, something like that?

It's a good number.

Yeah, yeah.

We can't speak because we're Texans fans.

And so I'm not going to like bash the poor Cowboys fans, including my my poor struggling parents trying to figure out, like, you know, are they going to be Cowboys fan next year?

Oh, okay.

Well, fair enough.

Okay.

We won't I won't dwell onto that.

But let me ask you a question.

Do you think that, you know, these traditional quote unquote or the establishment Republicans are pretty conservative breed officer?

Yeah, very, very conservative.

He's not talking about rhinos or anything like that.

No.

These are solid conservatives that delivers.

Yes.

Do you think that they're getting.

Yeah, I guess exasperated are saying, you know what, enough with these people like we need to get them out because we're not going to be able to go forward this is creating problems within the electorate because they're just seeing this bickering over and over and over and that doesn't win votes.

People may want conservative politics, but people not do not want to have bickering about if a Democrat gets a chair or doesn't get a chair, well, they care about the outcome.

Yeah.

So do you think that these might be the first step to, you know, basically telling them either you cooperate with us or you don't cooperate, right?

And then you're out or you can leave and do your own party, do your own gig That's your problem.

We're seeing that to some degree, I think.

I mean, the fact that, you know, tinder hole got three volts is a pretty good indication of like where people are, you know, personally on those political questions also for the national level.

Right.

We saw this big fight with the over the speaker and that became like a major problem for Republicans to have to kind of justify how many votes and rounds of votes it was going to take to get just a speaker elected when you have the majority.

So I think that were there, but I also think that this is really just a base priming, right?

I mean, this is really a way for the kind of most conservative Republicans to say these are the things we care about and that our base cares about.

Those are the reliable voters.

Right.

And in fact, this week, actually, two bills have been filed that would make basically party like something you had to register for in Texas.

And so that will even more greatly shrink if it passes, who can vote in these Republican primaries?

And they are the most hardcore.

Right.

And that's how you win primaries.

And so I think mostly it's about that, right?

They're not thinking about the general, they're thinking about the primary.

But again, I mean, that would be extremely, extremely generous.

Right, because we're seeing, you know, the big I would say trend is for people not to align with a political party.

Yeah.

So you are having more and more people that self-identify as independent.

Yeah.

And therefore, you know what's going to happen, as you say.

And that's very, very bad for, you know, the core Republican constituents is that they're going to say, I'm not going to vote for these people and only those people are going to vote.

Yeah, they're going to win.

But again, yeah, in the general election, I don't think that they're going to be very, very competitive.

We saw in 2022 and I think that that's giving an advantage to the Democrats are just sitting back.

Yeah, yeah.

And now it's time for unity.

And they're just saying like, yeah, oh, don't fight.

Don't find that.

Yeah, fight, fight, fight.

Right.

Playing candy crush on their phones.

Right, exactly.

Like, oh.

Yeah.

Like, yeah, yeah.

Ring the bell when it's time to vote.

I mean, yeah, I think that's right.

We actually I've seen these proxy wars spill over into other kind of policy domains too.

So yeah, this week, actually, in both policy news and political news, the regulators of Texas's energy grid have approved an overhaul of the system.

Now, you know that the governor promised that things were all fixed with the energy grid and so far no major catastrophe, although, of course, there are hiccups here and there.

But after weeks of deliberation and all kinds of testimony, the commissioners of the PUC settled on a very complex market construction known as a performance credit mechanism.

This is actually against the recommendations of their consultant and of the Texas Senate.

Critics say basically this new design is going to shift costs on to consumers.

Proponents basically say it's going to generate new ability to have reinvestment, the energy grid, so that like these producers are going to have more, you know, money and incentive to do this almost immediately.

Charles Fortner, the Georgia Georgetown Republican and close Patrick Ally pushed back, saying basically that, you know, this is not what the Senate told you to do.

This is going to be looked at more clearly.

So in some ways, this is a kind of proxy war, it seems, between the governor and the lieutenant governor.

Right.

The governor appointed all of these people.

This is a brand new reconsideration of the PUC.

And then you've got the, you know, Senate run by Patrick, who's got this, you know, kind of team who says want to do it something different.

So this is going to be interesting to see how it kind of shakes out here in a policy.

Yes.

Well, I mean, and I think that these proxy war can be translated into, you know, guerrilla urban warfare rights.

Yes.

Because, you know, these performance, whatever you're talking about, that gives, quote unquote incentives to private entities on a pretty much unregulated market.

Yeah.

It's like.

Right, yeah.

I don't know.

It's like, you know what?

I'm doing a diet, right?

Yeah.

And I have chocolate cake, cookies, ice cream, right.

Yeah.

And if I don't have my enforcer.

Right, right.

There's someone to regulate my behavior.

So that's, you know.

Yeah, bit of cake is not going to hurt .

Suddenly, I look the other way.

The cake is gone!

- There's no cake left.

something like that you know that takes it.

Yeah but right this is what happens.

So if there's no stick in terms of the carrot.

Yeah, I don't think that these new scheme is going to work and the ones are going to be losing are consumers.

Yeah.

And I think that's Patrick's concern and that it's been going on, you know, since the kind of session.

And so it's a shame to see it kind of play out.

Speak of Dan Patrick actually this week, Senate committee assignments came out.

The House will have their committee assignments in a couple of weeks.

Now, we know Phelan's already said that he's going to have Democratic chair.

So that's a done deal.

How many in where?

We don't know yet.

But Patrick is jump the gun as is usual.

Actually, they come out earlier and the surprises here, I think weren't many.

But one is that Bob Hall, who's a very conservative member from North Texas, is going to chair administration, which means he's going to run the local and consent calendar where a lot of little bills but important bills are.

And so this has been where the Freedom Caucus has feasted in the last couple of cycles.

And so I think it could be problematic for a lot of these bills that have to get passed.

So more bad feelings ahead.

Brian Hughes of Patrick Ally is going to chair state affairs and jurisprudence and Joan Huffman is going to chair Senate Finance and also special committee on redistricting.

So there's a lot of kind of action packed into these.

And this is, I think, his real leadership team.

In a way, though, I'm not sure it matters much just because Patrick runs the Senate with an iron fist.

Remember how they used to say that, like Jim Baker was like the, you know, iron fist in the velvet glove.

There's no velvet glove.

Oh, no.

It's not even a pretense of - I it's like, yeah, he's one of those metal politicians like, you know, spy.

And then with a machine, like.

Do you remember Inspecter Gadget like the claw, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Like the spikes on it.

Exactly.

That's a deep dive.

But yeah, that's what I think when I think of Dan Patrick leadership style.

But here's, you know you know basically speaker Phelan not relenting to demands to limit democratic chairs.

Right.

You, though had Dan Patrick saying we're going to have one chair and it's going to be John Whitmire and Whitmire is going to leave to run for Senate.

So, you know, it won't be a permanent thing.

I'm interested in this because it has also ramifications for John Whitmire.

Remember in 1990, Bob Bullock did the same thing Patrick did.

He said, okay, we're not having any Republican committee chairs.

It was a disaster.

The Republicans banded together.

They slowed everything down.

They enforced every minor rule.

And it was a like a real a real problem.

But the next session, he learned and appointed some.

And so I think that if the Democrats are looking to do the same thing, they're going to need seasoned legislative hands, which means they need Whitmire to do that.

Now, Whitmire is running for mayor and a pretty Democratic city is going to be a problem for him to have to kind of walk that fine line between what Patrick wants and what the Democrats need in terms of slowing things down, or is it just kind of Whitmire plays mostly as he has kind of down the middle and you know, but but so friendly with leadership, what do you think's going to happen?

Oh, wow.

That's some DNA analysis.

Yeah, no, right on the spot.

So here you go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Well, let me do let me first give you the regression coefficient.

Gotcha.

Okay.

You know, just running.

I want to, I want to hear the coefficient, right.

Yeah.

I have the confidence interval.

Well I think well you know Whitmire is one of the most experienced and seasoned politicians in the state of Texas.

That's, you know, point number one period.

No.

One contest that yeah I think he knows how to navigate these very fine line yeah I think that I think that it could play to his advantage and why?

Because he has been, you know, sane and all his speeches that, you know, he's willing to negotiate, that he's willing to sit down with the other side, that he has work on bipartisan legislation and he goes one or the other.

On the other hand, he's also smart enough to have, you know, people from Democratic Party, other senators not in line board a line to, you know, have a goal at the end.

So not to rush, but be able to, you know, okay, we're going to go there.

Let's walk.

Okay.

Let's not run because this is a marathon.

Yeah.

So I think that it plays to his advantage to have this.

And also, you know, he's someone that has the political stature to sit down with.

Patrick.

Yeah.

And say it.

as it is.

And he's not afraid to also say it.

as it is.

outside I think that's true, but I think it potentially makes him vulnerable on his left flank.

And that's, I think, where he's going to have to shore it up And that's, I think, where he's going to have to shore it up you know, running for Houston's mayor.

So we'll see we'll keep an eye on how it plays out.

dementedly disagree with your analysis.

Wow.

Okay, that's good.

The fancy word of.

the week.

There you go.

Yeah.

Well, speaking of vehemently disagreeing.

Yeah, the.

Big news of the week, at least for budget nerds, is that the House and Senate both unveiled their budgets.

Both are maxing about 288 billion.

The biggest spending is going to be for property tax relief and for border security.

I want to talk about those, too, because those are the biggest surprises to me.

The first is that they're only spending about 15 billion on homeowners property tax bills, which is, I think, less than assumed.

I think the impact might be small.

The other is about the border.

They're giving Greg Abbott four and a half billion dollars, which is a lot more than they used to.

So I'm interested in this.

The property tax issue is interesting.

They're going to buy down about $3 billion worth of local school property taxes and they're going to reduce the home or increase the rate of the homestead exemption to $70,000.

You're talking probably on the order of maybe 300 or 400 bucks.

That's the biggest tax break, as promised.

I'm not sure.

There's also a structural hole in this.

At least one third of that $15 billion is going to assure compliance with the 2019 law that reduced the ability for local governments to increase the property tax rates.

And so that's one problem.

They're going have to keep paying for this and that boom.

Money's not going to be there.

Yeah.

The other is that without appraisal reform, it's hard to see that this is sustainable.

So in a short term, maybe it's okay, but in the long term, it's going to be problematic.

So what do you think?

What's your take on that and on kind of border spending?

Well, I think I mean, we're spending on things that we should not be spending a lot of money.

I don't think that, you know, spending $4.6 billion on border security is is smart.

Yeah.

Is that something that is going to be sustainable?

Absolutely not.

What happens to the schools?

Right.

Right.

And what happens to the schools and how we schools.

So if you're going to decrease property taxes, you also have to have a series of school reform in terms of house.

Public schools are funded.

So it's going to be a complete mess.

We're going to see it.

Yeah.

Unfold.

It'll play out.

Yeah.

Like this in the final version right there by day and night, which is, you.

Know, first step, as Senator Scott said.

And we still have like 30 more thousand steps to go.

So we'll keep an eye next week on it.

But this is it for this week.

Well, thanks for watching and listening.

I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

And I'm Jeronimo