The Texas House speaker’s race is likely to be a contest between Dustin Burrows and David Cook. But history has taught us that there could be surprises. Just...
A view of the Texas State Capitol Annex rotunda in Austin. As someone who has sat in the smoky back rooms where the deals are made and where vote cards are given, traded, and sometimes abandoned altogether, in a speaker’s race, nothing is set in stone, and nothing is as it appears, writes Jason Villalba.
The conventional wisdom surrounding the current speaker’s race is that the contest has boiled down to two contenders. Dustin Burrows, a staunch conservative and seasoned legislator from Lubbock, has marshaled the support of classic Republicans and the chamber of commerce set. The other candidate, David Cook of Mansfield, seems to have captured the imagination of the base and those members most beholden to the trinity of modern conservative politics: Guns, God, and Trump.
Just such a scenario unfolded on Jan. 2, 2009. On that evening, Chairman Byron Cook convened 10 fellow-minded Republicans in his Austin home on Polo Road to not only strategize how to challenge and displace the sitting speaker but to choose a new speaker from among themselves. If they failed, it would mean the end of their political careers.The gentlemen attending the meeting that evening were neither mutineers nor insurrectionists.
They chose a second-term member from San Antonio, with a blue blood pedigree and whose family had a history of service to the Republican Party. Joe Straus would be their horse.
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