GOP infighting in Austin and Washington dominated Texas politics in 2023

Republican infighting dominated Texas politics from Austin to Washington, D.C., in 2023.

When a party is as dominant as the Texas GOP has been, there are always internal feuds because the other party is less of a threat. But in the last year, those fights became vastly more public in Texas with a historic impeachment fight in Austin, outright name-calling between state House and Senate leaders, and Gov. Greg Abbott calling a record-tying four special sessions in one calendar year as he tried unsuccessfully to browbeat fellow Republicans into passing a school voucher plan.

“The civil war which has raged along many fronts within the Texas GOP since 2010 reached a crescendo in 2023,” said Mark P. Jones, a Rice University political science professor.

And it has shown itself in Washington where U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, and other Texas Republicans very publicly blocked fellow Republican Kevin McCarthy from becoming the speaker of the house. While McCarthy eventually got in after 15 rounds of voting, it set the tone for a tumultuous year in which Republicans eventually voted to remove him from his post, making him the shortest-lived speaker in more than 140 years.

In the presidential race, former President Donald Trump hammered his one-time political ally Ron DeSantis at a campaign rally in Waco and DeSantis returned the favor in Eagle Pass as the focus of his “no excuses” tour, highlighting Trump’s failure to build border walls in Texas.

With the animosity likely to spill over into 2024, here’s a look back at some of 2023’s biggest flashpoints: 

For only the second time in history, the Texas House voted to impeach a statewide elected official.

In May, the GOP-led House voted 121 to 23 to impeach embattled Attorney General Ken Paxton and suspend him from office for alleged abuse of office. Paxton was already under indictment for felony securities fraud but had been seeking more than $3.3 million from the Texas Legislature to pay off a settlement with former staffers who accused him of committing bribery, abuse of office and other crimes to help an Austin real estate developer.

The Texas Senate ultimately voted to acquit him on all the charges, with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick publicly excoriating House Speaker Dade Phelan and House Republicans for the way they handled the impeachment of a fellow Republican.

“It should have never happened this year, and hopefully it doesn’t again,” he said of the impeachment. House Republicans blasted the comments, saying they showed Patrick had not been the impartial judge he was supposed to be in presiding over it all.

As for Paxton, it didn’t take long for the Collin County Republican to vow retribution, telling talk radio personalities that those Republicans who tried to impeach him needed to “get ready” for him to come after them politically in future elections. He’s aiming to help unseat dozens of House Republicans in the March primary elections.

Paxton will have company in seeking retribution in March. 

Abbott is on his own revenge tour after the Texas House killed his top legislative priority — private school vouchers. The governor has endorsed a slate of GOP challengers against Republicans who voted against the program, which would subsidize private education costs through education savings accounts.

Twenty-one Republicans joined with Democrats in voting down the bill in the last special session in November. Many of those Republicans are from rural communities that have opposed the plan on the grounds it will eventually drain money from public schools.

Abbott vetoed unrelated bills in June by members who had opposed him and threatened holdouts with primary opposition during their reelections. But so far, the pressure campaign hasn’t worked.

While both Republican leaders championed handing out record tax cuts, how to do it became a monumental struggle with Patrick calling Phelan names like “California Dade” and nicknaming him “Dade Failing.” Phelan responded by largely ignoring Patrick and refusing to meet with him for most of the last two years.

Jones said issues like cutting taxes and securing the border are typically unifiers for the GOP, but “even picking the lowest hanging fruit caused conflict and consternation among Texas Republicans in 2023.”

While they eventually came to a deal, the damage was already done between Phelan and Patrick. Patrick has since said he can’t work with Phelan and wants Texans to vote against any House member who refuses to back a new speaker.

If there was one thing that mostly unified the GOP, it was border security.

Border encounters with migrants increased during President Joe Biden’s first two years as president, and this year they reached a record 2.4 million.

Abbott responded by deploying miles of razor wire and busing migrants to other cities to pressure Democrats like New York City Mayor Eric Adams. He also deployed a floating buoy barrier in the Rio Grande, which drew a pending lawsuit from the Justice Department.

Republicans still had areas of disagreement. While McCarthy was ousted for many reasons, his struggle to placate fellow Republicans like Roy, who wanted a tougher stance on the border in the federal budget, only added to the opposition against him. 

That fight spilled over into the winter, leading GOP leaders to block additional military aid to Ukraine despite once broadly supporting it. Biden conceded this month that he is “willing to make significant compromises on the border,” which triggered its own backlash from Democrats.

The border is likely to remain front and center heading into the new year as Biden seeks reelection.

For the first time in more than 40 years, Texas doesn’t have a contender in the presidential race after San Antonian Will Hurd ended his nascent campaign. 

He’s not alone. Both former U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley and DeSantis — Trump’s top rivals — have spent a lot of time in the state wooing big donors and making their pitches. Shortly after DeSantis announced his campaign, he was in Texas at the border along stretches where Trump’s promise to build a wall never came to fruition. DeSantis used it as an example of broken promises that demand a new leader. 

While the GOP sees Texas donors as a key to dislodging Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris made clear in a recent trip to Houston that the state’s harsh abortion laws and others like it have become a clarion call for Democrats to fight for the rights of women. 

The White House was quick to seize on the plight of a Dallas woman who initially won a judge’s approval to get an abortion last week but still had to leave the state to get the procedure. The Texas Supreme Court ultimately overturned the lower court’s approval, saying the decision was up to the woman’s doctor and that the state medical board should issue better guidance.

“While extremist elected officials in Texas claim to care about the health of women and babies, they are endangering the health, wellbeing and lives of women by denying them the care they need,” Harris said in what felt like a preview of a key battle line Democrats will draw in 2024 in Texas and nationally.