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The Blast: The SREC meeting we’ve been waiting for, maybe [1]
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Date: 2025-02
The State Republican Executive Committee has a meeting tonight that will chart the party’s next moves in the ongoing Texas GOP civil war.
As of now, the SREC appears to be backing down from potential plans to censure Texas House members who elected Dustin Burrows as speaker. However, there are mixed opinions on whether the SREC is genuinely pumping the brakes or merely bolstering their argument for censures.
The SREC has three major agenda items tonight. The first will be a thank you to the Texas House Republicans who supported Rep. David Cook of Mansfield for speaker, a slap on the wrist for Burrows supporters who flouted the Texas House Republican Caucus and built a coalition of Democrats and a minority of Republicans to elect the Lubbock Republican.
The second agenda item would allow the committee to censure members who voted in favor of Frisco Rep. Jared Patterson’s bipartisan motion to end debate during the rules vote on the House floor two weeks ago. Members approved the motion before the House even began to take up amendments, a move that enshrined Republicans as chairs and Democrats as vice chairs with new powers without allowing debate on that or other House policies.
The third item will outline to county parties the process for blocking censured candidates from the primary ballot under the new and untested Rule 44.
At issue here is that the Texas GOP rules lay out what The Blast is calling the “three strikes, you’re out” rule. It takes three violations of the party platform preamble or its legislative priorities in one term to be subject to censure. Only then can the party move to block members from the primary ballot for 24 months.
In theory, county or district executive committees could string together three violations using the broad preamble. However, why rush into censures and ballot removals now when the party could keep the threat lingering over the heads of House members?
There are also concerns about casting a wide net of censures now. Censuring three dozen Republicans for one vote could diminish the significance of the measure to primary voters and, importantly, state and local executive committee members who want unity.
Instead, the party could be strengthening its case and narrowing in on a targeted list of offenders, strengthening its case with a variety of violations. That could explain the second resolution, the one retroactively making it a censurable offense to have voted in favor of Patterson’s motion.
Texas GOP Chair Abraham George had been threatening to go after Burrows supporters. But on the first day of the regular session, following the speaker election, George said censures would be up to the SREC and equivocated on what they could mean.
“We don’t know what a censure means,” George told reporters. “I mean, we can say if we’re censuring you, but some of the censures don’t mean anything. Does it mean they will continue to have ballot access? Does it mean it’s just a slap on the wrist? We don’t know that.”
The SREC meeting began at 6 p.m. Be on the lookout for potential outcomes. The Tribune’s Robert Downen is following it.
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