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The Blast - June 2, 2025 [1]
['The Texas Tribune']
Date: 2025-06
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“We started with an almost unprecedented division on what the House would look like,” he said. “Now that we’ve all fought each other and together, we all know that we’re one House, and if we remember that, we close a historic 89th session today with an eye toward an incredible 90th session ahead.”
From the back mic, Burrows’ speaker pro tempore, Democratic Rep. Joe Moody of El Paso, said he had an idea what the speaker’s leadership could look like after they visited Uvalde together in the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting.
Burrows said he was most proud of “what we did for public education.”
Tensions eased in the House, but they also eased with the Senate. Burrows managed to win back Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick , who touted his relationship with the Lubbock Republican as one of the best he’s had with a speaker.
“It took each of you, from all spectrums, working together, getting to know each other, to a place that I am very proud of where we landed,” Burrows said.
But as the session aged, the caucus’ wounds began to heal. Although Burrows didn’t win back every one of the 52 Republicans who voted for Rep. David Cook of Mansfield for speaker, most of the “reform” caucus ultimately came home to the leadership coalition.
Burrows, serving in his sixth term but his first in the speaker’s chair, was elected on the second ballot on the first day of session thanks to a minority of Republicans and support from the Democratic caucus that brought him above 76 votes. After the intraparty slugfest while Speaker Dade Phelan manned the gavel, it seemed the 89th legislative session could be even more tempestuous than the last.
“We started this session as a House in a bit of uncertainty, and I believe that we ended in a much more unified and solid place,” Burrows said.
The Texas House began this session in a pit of deep division within the majority caucus and without a speaker. But at the end of session’s 140 days, Speaker Dustin Burrows told the chamber he was proud of how its members came together.
SINE DIE LEAVES BILLS SINE DEAD
With the late session heroics to reach a deal on judicial pay to cap off the 2025 session, the House and Senate abandoned only four bills in conference after the final weekend of negotiations. However, that included a couple priorities.
The big ticket items were House Bill 4, the STAAR test bill, and Senate Bill 30, the so-called nuclear verdicts bill.
A lot of anticipation surrounded whether the Legislature would eliminate the STAAR test, and what would replace it. However, the Senate wanted to solidify the Texas Education Agency’s role in future testing and the House wanted to calibrate the tests with national standards. Moreover, the House wanted to give school districts more room to challenge TEA’s school ratings, which had become a sticking point for districts after years of lawsuits.
Meanwhile, after the House gutted SB 30, Texans for Lawsuit Reform’s priority bill to limit personal injury lawsuit payouts, a dispute over how much discretion to give to courts over the rules of evidence tanked the bill in conference. Rep. Mitch Little, R-Lewisville, helped pen the amendment that created the final dispute, and he was included in that conference.
TLR will return, however. The group, along with the Texas Trucking Association and Texas Food and Fuel Association, today encouraged the Legislature to take up SB 30 in the next regular session.
Another casualty was House Bill 2974, an omnibus hotel occupancy tax bill. While the House bill merely expanded the list of cities that can request to implement a hotel occupancy tax, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and all 31 senators issued a statement demanding that the final product limit how many hotel projects a city can designate for the tax.
“One prominent Austin lobbyist is threatening to kill HB 2974’s reforms unless Sen. [Brian] Birdwell’s taxpayer protection language is removed,” they wrote. “This is absurd and terrible public policy, and we will not negotiate.”
And negotiate, they did not.
The final big bill to fall was House Bill 5138, which would’ve given Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton his white whale — the authority to prosecute election fraud without requiring a referral from local prosecutors. Unlike the Senate version, which would’ve made the AG the point man on election cases, the House version maintained that local prosecutors must get the first bite at the apple before the AG could weigh in. Additionally, the House prescribed a six-month cooling off period before the AG gets their turn.
Paxton went three for three last election cycle on ousting the Court of Criminal Appeals judges who ruled in 2022 that the attorney general must get a referral from local attorneys. In a statement to Texas Scorecard, he suggested that the fight would go on, even though he’s running for the U.S. Senate.
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