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Learn more at MHM dot org. I don't have to hello and welcome to
the Texas Tribune trip Cast for June sixteenth, twenty twenty three. My name's
Matthew Watkins, Managing editor for the Tribune. This week, we're going to
talk about Texas Republicans and why they can't seem to get a lot these days.
In the past month, we've had the Attorney General call for the resignation
of the House Speaker, the Republican led House impeaching that attorney General, the
Lieutenant governor calling a property tax plan supported by the governor and the state's leading
conservative think tank a joke and a fantasy, and accusing the House Speaker of
pushing a plan to relate it to property taxes that would boost his own financial
interests. This week, Governor Greg Abbott has vetoed eight bills. Seven of
those were authored by Republicans. Most have been vetoed because Abbott explicitly stated he's
mad at the Republicans for not passing a property tax bill. The House voted
unanimously to expel a Republican member of the legislature this last month in Congress,
the US rep Hip Roy has helped lead a mutiny against the Republican House Speaker.
Oh and I guess maybe we should also bring out that one of our
panelists for this show reported last year that Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick tried to recruit
Rick Perry to run against Abbott ahead of the twenty twenty two elections. That
same story talked about associates of Donald Trump telling people close to Ken Paxton,
the Attorney General, and Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller that Patrick had worked to undermine
Trump's support for them. So it's a big pot mess in the Republican Party
these days. They're winning elections but fighting with each other. Here to talk
about that dynamic today is Mark Davis, a conservative radio host for Dallas's six
sixty am The Answer and a frequent interviewer of the state's top Republican officials.
Hey, Mark, thanks for joining us. Matt you pleasure to be here.
Thank you. And we've also got Patrick's VTech our politics reporter back again.
Hey Patrick, Hey, thanks for having me, Thanks for joining us.
All right, so let's talk about impeachment first. On Tuesday, the
sin is expected to vote on its rules for the upcoming impeachment trial. Paxton's
attorneys and supporters have waged a public push to get rules favorable to Paxton,
and we've seen some geo parties, county level parties calling for essentially throwing the
charges out against Paxton. Mark Tony Busby, Paxiston's lead attorney, appeared on
your show yesterday Thursday. Can you tell us a little bit about the case
he made to you on this issue. Sure. It's interesting because anytime you
have an adversarial situation that's about to play out, whether in a courtroom or
sometimes in an impeachment, there might be some wiggle rooms, some gray area,
some nuance. There is precisely none here. The house managers, through
their celebrity attorneys, mister Harden, mister de Garren, they have said,
when when we lay this out for you, you can look at those articles
of impeachment, it's ten times worse. And up against that, mister Buzby
says, not just we're going to go at this case by case or count
by count. He says that every single one of them is intellectually vacant,
that Paxton is innocent of absolutely every thing, and that he will and that
he will prove it. So now there's going to be an odd and interesting
vacuum because, as you mentioned, next week, Senate will offer up some
framework of rules through which this will all happen. But it's a good two
months before any of this plays out, so it'll be interesting to see what
kind of lobbying in the court of public opinion will will spring forth. As
for mister Busby, he is not shy. He not only points to the
articles of impeachment as vapid and threadbare, he looks at the motivation of this
entire thing as a political assassination and seeks to besmirch it at that level before
he even opens his mouth in the Senate. Cham Yeah, no one has
ever accused Tony Buzby of being shy, that is for sure. Patrick.
You got your hands on a letter from the House impeachment managers kind of seemed
like in response to some of this kind of public posture by Buzzby, they
are doing their own sort of p string. Can you kind of sum up
the case that they are making to the Senate leadership. Sure, and it
should be said, you know, for maybe folks that have been falling this
um. You know, there's a lot of anticipation building for these rules because
the Constitution and state law really are silent on what the rules like, what
the parameters of the rules have to be. So that gives a lot of
power to the Senate to devise the rules of procedure for this trial. And
so the memo that you just mentioned from the House Impeachment Managers appeared to be
a response to what Buzzby has been saying on Mark Show and in other media
outlets recently. One of the big things he's been emphasizing is that he would
like a rule from the Senate that basically allows the Senators to uh, you
know, dismiss these articles or maybe some of them, maybe all of them,
but basically before they get to a real trial. You know, he's
saying it's similar to what would probably formally known as a summary procedure, which
is basically taking all the evidence captured up into this point and just having the
Senate vote on that before proceeding with any further investigation or evidence vetting or motions.
So that's the main thing that he seems to be pushing, and he's
warning very vocally that if there isn't a mechanism for that, these senators could
be in for a pretty painstaking process. You know, he's talked about how
they've identified i think sixty six witnesses. You know, he said there's obviously
going to be thousands of pages of documents. This could take up to a
year. And so his message to the Senate, I think has been pretty
clear in some of these media appearances, which is, if you don't you
know, if we have to move to a real trial, we're confident,
but you guys better be ready for what an actual real trial looks like on
twenty articles of impeachment. And so the memo that you mentioned from the House
Impeachment Managers was sent yesterday Thursday to the Senate Rules Committee, and it basically
tried to rebut Buzzby instead that you know, suggested that he's pushing for a
quote sham trial, and you know, pointing to the two previous impeachment trials
that we've had, you know, back in nineteen seventeen and I think in
the nineteen seventies, the house managers offered up i think seventeen different rules that
they basically said they want in this trial. And those rules include everything from
um, you know, having cameras there, having frequently published transcripts. They
also, you know, point out that in past impeachment trials there have been
rules related to recusal. Obviously a lot of folks want to know if Ken
Paxson's wife, who's a state Senator, Angela Paxson, would recuse herself in
a trial. So I mean there's a lot of posturing going on as these
rules are being devised. Yeah, you know, the threat of having to
be in Austin for a year for a trial, I think is one that
might since the yeah, yeah exactly, all right, Mark helped me kind
of way the politics of this, I mean, we are definitely seeing,
um from you know, the Paxson segment of the gop um a push to
you know, make kind of quickly get past this effort and you know,
an idea of um, you know, really pushing the argument that this is
driven by Democrats that this is, you know, driven by the liberal House
and things like that. How much is that push do you think, Wayne
on the people who will make these rules and the people who will ultimately in
the Senate, you know, have the future of Paxson's time and office in
their hands. As the senators look at this rules framework that they will craft
next week. Patrick's mentioned of the of the summary judgment framework is exactly what
Buzzby wants. As in a court and let us say twelve times, as
you guys have mentioned in prior tribes that I've been glad to work my way
through. This is not a court of law. This is a completely political
environment. I mean, yes, you still might have witnesses, you still
have evidence, you still have a decision to be made, etc. Someone
presides like a judge, that's Stan Patrick. But it is a purely political
environment and within that realm, these senators. Maybe the first thing that they'll
have to weigh if they get this is the chance to simply say, you
know what, we're throwing this out on its face. But what Buzzby told
me was that he would like for a rule to be crafted or the thirty
one senators before we even get to the months or possibly almost a year of
excruciating trial activity in Austin, as a judge would do. Lawyers would perhaps
smile for a summary judgment, which for the uninitiated essentially says we're asking for
ruling that says this doesn't even meet the bar for going to trial. It
is something that deserves to be tossed for lack of merit. There's no promise
to that would happen in It might not be the smartest optics in the world
if it did. Even if there are Republican senators who would say right now
that they probably intend to equit. That's even the tournament, and they do
not intend to eject Paxson from office, they have to think long and hard
about what it will look like to toss this thing out on its ear without
even having the trial. The positive the grassroots would love it. You know
this, this got exactly what it wanted. It wasn't worth the paper it
was written on. But to the mushy middle, to independence, to whatever
they might say, hmm, what did they fear from a trial? So
avoid steps taken to avoid the trial are not without risk, right right,
Patrick? You know we we we started this conversation, or I started this
conversation with a kind of rundown of the very complicated politics of the Republican Party
in Texas. Right now, can you kind of set the picture for us
of what can Paxson's relationship with the Senate has been and is over these last
few years. I mean, I know he used to serve of course his
wife is a member of that Senate, But what is that dynamic there and
how might that play into this? Yeah, that's a good question. As
you pointed out, he has some very direct ties to the Senate. Of
course his wife serves there. You know, I think there are probably some
other state senators that he's more personally friendly with, so you have to take
that into consideration. There were some state senators, a couple state senators who
got involved in his re election campaign last year against him. I believe Senator
Charles Schwartner from Georgetown endorsed George P. Bush, who was running against Ken
Paxton in the primary. Last year. You had another senator who was a
House member at the time, May's Middleton, who was a top donor to
Matt Krouse when he ran against Ken Paxton in the primary, and then Louie
Gomert when Matt Krouse dropped out and Louie Gobert ran again Paxixton in the primary.
So some of these guys have you know, more unique personal political history
with Paxxton. We shouldn't, of course, we shouldn't just assume because they
opposed him in a political campaign that they are necessarily inclined to um, you
know, oppose him in a Senate trial. We should certainly give them the
benefit of the doubt. But you know, that's of course political history that
is worth noting when it comes to the lieutenant governor, who doesn't have a
vote in the trial, but acts as the judge in the trial. The
lieutenant governor, you know, ultimately did endorse Paxton for reelection in his primary
runoff last year. Uh, you know, there was a little bit of
question beforehand how committed Patrick was or how interested Patrick wasn't seeing Ken Paxton make
it through that primary. But Patrick, you know, you mentioned are reporting
at the time. But Patrick seemed to put that to bed when he formally
got behind Paxton in the runoff. And so, you know, those are
just some of the political relationships that that may come into play here. Mark
I wonder if what you think about, if what's going on with President Trump
right now affects this in any way. You know, Trump of course spoke
out against the idea of impeachment the morning of impeachment in the House. He
is of course now otherwise occupied, you know, dealing with his own legal
issues, and I don't know how closely he'll be paying attention to this trial
or this case. And also I don't know how much what's going on in
Florida right now sucks up the kind of oxygen around this. Do you think
there is a Trump element to this issue, to this debate over the next
few months. People pay attention to the news, and they notice things happening,
and sometimes there are things that harmonize, there are things that seem to
be traveling on parallel tracks. Without regard to the merit of either of these
observations, I can say that the largely conservative listenership that I have is of
a mind that Trump is being persecuted politically, that even if there are some
things he should have done with those stupid documents, that having this rise to
the level of this indictment is insane and it's a politicized witch hunted down there.
So there's note number one, the note that sings in harmony here.
For Texas conservatives, they take a look at what's happening to Paxman, and
they view a phenomenon that is similar. They take a look at a Texas
house where sixty I believe it was right, sixty Republicans found a reason to
impeach him. And of these sixty, how many of them have been spending
the previous weeks or months or years decrying the horrible ethics of Ken Paxton.
The answer is virtually none of them. And yet all of a sudden day
feeling throws a hissy fit over the three point five million dollars ettlement doesn't want
to pay it, and all of a sudden we get a forty eight hour
impeachment rush. You can't not notice that. It doesn't mean you have to
buy into it and presume that it's exactly the same phenomenon one involving Trump,
one involving Paxton. But there are certain shared characteristics noticed by many. Yeah,
so let's just fly forward in the hypothetical world. Let's say, in
you know, early September, the Senate votes to remove Ken Paxton from office.
On that you know, Tuesday Morning Show or whatever. How angry are
your listeners at the Senate for doing this or are they angry? Okay,
the short answer is they likely will be. There's only one thing that will
prevent you know, flaming torches in the street metaphorically speaking, and that is
it because perfectly phrased question, because let's say it is September. It's kind
of funny though, that'll be a brief trial, won't it, Because I
have started on August, Judia, Please God let it be September rather than
you know, July of twenty four. There's only one thing that will quell
the kind of righteous indignation that what you describe would would yield. And that
is if the trial, which we will all hang on with bated breath,
if the house managers and the attorneys do such a compelling job of painting a
picture of corruption, mouthfeasance, and abuse of office that even the Paxton fan
base has a percentage that says, wow, we love Ken, but that
was bad. So what's the likelihood of that happening? I don't know.
As you guys in past Tribe casts have observed, there's very little in this
that hasn't been swirling around in the ether for in some cases with the securities
broad stuffs. It's twenty fifteen. This is all. I mean, I
don't want to call all of it old news, but the fact of the
matter is that some of the things in the articles of impeachment have worked their
way through the Texas court system and yielded nothing. The whistleblowers, oh,
these whistleblowers who were so up in arms about something, they took their complaints
right to the FBI. FBI investigated it once again yielded nothing. And the
voters throughout this entire process have ruled on two occasions that they overwhelmingly want Ken
Paxton to be the attorney General. So it's going to have to be a
crazy turn of events in that trial to have the Paxton fan base say grudgingly
that his ejection was deserved. So, Patrick, what are you watching for
on Tuesday? Well, first of all, I'm just watching to see how
these rules are proposed, if it's going to even be a public proceeding,
Like we reported in our story today, I mean, there's just not a
lot of not a lot known about this rule. Committee rules, committees,
deliberations, you know, we know the member on the committee. We don't
know if they've met, We don't know, you know, what the contours
of their conversations have been like. And so I'll be just watching Tuesday to
see how we learn about what the proposed rules are. And I should note
in the resolution that the Senate pass that creates this rules process, it just
said they have to present the rules on Tuesday to the full Senate. It
didn't say they necessarily have to vote on them. So I'll just be watching
some of the basic things on Tuesday, like, you know, will we
get a public view of the rules, will they be voted on, because
you know, once they're voted on, that effectively friggers the decision by Dan
Patrick to pick a trial start date sometime between then and August twenty eight.
So I'll just watching the basic things, all right. Let's pause for a
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out more at Texas twenty thirty six dot org. Okay, now, let's
look at the other thing that's been causing a lot of fighting among the Republicans
this week. Property taxes. It another week has passed without much visible progress
on reaching a compromise between the House and the Senate. You know, the
two competing proposals, as listeners of this show will know, is whether the
House or whether the Legislature should spend all of the money that they've set aside
for property tax reduction on essentially compressing lowering property tax rates, or whether some
of that money should be pulled aside to specifically target homeowners and increase their savings
from property taxes is a little bit more than other property owners in the state.
The A dramatic action we've seen around this this week is Abbot's vetos,
which I mentioned earlier in the show, where he vetoed I think eight bills
this week, seven of which by Republicans signing. In his veto note,
you know, this bill is not as important as property taxes, and we
can reconsider this idea once property taxes are past. Patrick, what's the strategy
Here's what's Abbot hoping to accomplish with this well big picture that you know,
as we've discussed before as an almost academic matter, the governor, you know,
often finds himself wanting for tools at his disposal to influence the legislative process,
right, I mean, you know, it's not a position that has
a lot of ways of influencing the legislative process formally other than just using the
bully pulpit. So he's trying to leverage the one tool, you know,
one of the few tools he has at this point, which is the threat
of a veto. He can buy Sunday, he has to either sign or
veto bills or if he doesn't sign them, they still become law. So
he's trying to leverage one of the few, you know, formal tools at
his disposal would try to influence the legislative process. At this point, he's
trying to wield the threat of a veto and the following through a vetoing some
bills to try to coax a compromise out of the House and Senate on property
taxes, something that I think is politically you know, going on. At
the same time, here is he he has seemed in recent days to cool
on his allegiance to the House in this standoff. We saw the House immediately
pass what he wanted in his special session call. He came out that that
evening and said, the House did what I want it. Senate needs to
get this to my desk and we can all go home, basically. And
in recent days he's been far less firmly on the House's side as it has
instead been calling for a House Senate compromise, and is you know, in
my view of it, kind of been leaving the House out to dry after
firmly siding with them early on. And so you know, I think he's
he's had some political missteps in this and probably the past week or so here
and now you know, we're obviously at the point where he's trying to threaten
and take drastic measures by be doing bills. All right, Mark, I
did a temperature check with you on impeachment. Now I'm going to do one
on property taxes. What's the what's the feeling of the listeners on homestead exemptions,
compression things like that? Is that something that there's a lot of debate
over? Is there is that something that even the average texting understands the okay,
define average, but define average that that's going to be probably not giving
credit, especially to the kind listenership that graces me every day paying attention to
the issues up to a certain point. What's the overarching sentiment is how arcane
so much of this is. I know, deep in the weeds, it
really does matter issues of compression of what benefits homeowners versus what benefits This is
the shades of difference between what Patrick and the Senate might want in abbot and
the House might want. But above the din of all of that is a
clarion call from just about every listener I have, not all of them.
Republican is guys, pull your heads out and do something. Texas for years
has gotten away with this reputation as a low tax state, a tax haven,
which in some ways we are. We don't have state income tax,
but property taxes are brutal here. They're absolutely punitive, and ultimately, I
think most listeners and most average Texans are very bottom line oriented. I don't
think that there'll be a lot of people up in arms when one idea prevails
over the other. They just would say, for God's sake, give us
some form of relief. Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say, I
feel like, you know, not that I'm having necessarily having these conversations with
these Texans every single day, but I gotta imagine at this point the average
Texan just frustrated that there's there's no progress. And I feel like to the
average maybe Republican leading voter, they're willing to stomach some intra party sniping on
social issues and things where there may not be Republican unanimity across the board.
But I think it seems like a damaging appearance that Texas Republicans can't find compromise
on issues where they're generally united even which kind of leads to my big picture
question that I wanted to ask Mark, is just what is going on with
They're Republican leaders in Texas right now, why can they not get along on
anything? Okay, this will be by its nature simplistic, but it works
as an overall model. Within the Republican Party. You can say there are
factions that are what you might call the grassroots, the staunch conservatives, the
Trumpian pack stone on in. You know that everybody knows what I'm talking about.
There's also the slice of the Republican pie that is a little more establishment
might have liked McCain and Paul Ryan over Trump, might like Dave Feelan over
anyone of Dan Patrick's Senate Republicans as a group, we are used to doing
ideological battle with the left, with liberals, with Democrats. That's baked into
our daily lives, and there is a certain almost comfort zone to that.
It's like, well, we're on the right, they're on the left.
Let's settle up, let's see what we gotta do. But within the Republican
Party there is a passion and a sharpness to this that exists for the following
reason. The Republican Party since twenty fifteen, when Trump and Melania came down,
that escalator has largely been taken over by a kind of a bold,
unapologetic, grassroots populist conservatism which has proven in enormously popular in the country,
in the Republican America and in Republican Taxas. This has driven establishment moderate Republicans
absolutely insane. They can't believe that there go along to get along three yards
on a cloud of dust, give us ten years will solve this. No
longer finds favor with the public. So to wrap up my really long answer.
What we have here as a battle for what direction the party is going
to take, And in the Paxton battle itself is completely emblematic of this.
Dade Feeland and Ken Paxton hold each other in abysmally low regard, and it's
mostly because of the dichotomy that I've just mentioned. Ken Paxton represents everything that
Speaker Feeland thinks is extreme and unsavory about those Trumpian Republicans, and Dade Feeland
represents to Ken Paxton everything that is squishy and moderate and weak. And so
as that battle takes place, that somebody's going to win, somebody's gonna lose.
Not that not that the Republican Party will unanimously reflect either one or the
other, but lately the victories have been racked up by the more conservative side
of Republican taxes, and I don't see that changing in the near future.
Patrick do agree with that. I mean, there is definitely some ideological components
to this, and the House versus Senate fights, you know, date back
for years. And I also got to think that there's some personalities here right,
Like, really, what you need is someone to just come in and
try to take the temperature down and say, hey, look, we're all
Republicans, we all like tax cuts. This shouldn't be that hard if we
can just be nice to each other for a week. No one seems to
be doing that right now. Patrick, Yeah, I think Mark did a
good job of explaining how this fits into the broader Republican ecosystem right now.
So maybe I'll address the three big personalities that play here and why it's maybe
different than past sessions, the big three, the governor, the Lieutenant governor,
the House Speaker. You know, it's it's in my belief that the
three of them entered this legislative cycle with more individual self adsuredness and the feeling
of an individual mandate than previously. And we just came off of a statewide
reelection cycle where the two statewide officials in that group, Dan Patrick and Greg
Abbott won by probably better than expected margins, I think at least ten points
each. So, you know, each of those statewide officials came into this
legislative cycle, you know, fresh off of the feeling of an overwhelming mandate
by the voters of Texas. And then you have Dave feeling in his second
session as speaker, really starting you know, going into this session starting to
hit his stride, I think, and having a lot more confidence after his
first session. I mean, he was able to get reelected as Speaker by
with only a few, you know, a few dissenting votes. And then,
you know, in addition to that feeling of each of them having such
a strong mandate individually, we saw them start charting priorities that below the top
two or three issues were kind of divergent. Um. You know, obviously
they all agreed, all three of us want property tax, really sure,
all three of us want to secure the border. But you saw Abbot and
Patrick and feeling take ownership individually of priorities that weren't always in alignment with one.
Another great example this at least going into the session, was Patrick's overwhelming
emphasis on the grid, which for the longest time, even Abbott couldn't,
you know, come out and say, we still need to, you know,
reform the grid. You had feeling start prioritizing, uh, you know,
bills that were pretty far off politically from what Abbot and Patrick have been
championing over the years. You know, whether it was you know, some
of the healthcare related bills, criminal justice reform related bills, and So that's
just to say it was kind of a two stage process going into this legislative
session, where we saw each three of these guys feel more of a mandate
than ever before for their agenda from the voters of Texas. And then we
saw them chart out priorities that beyond those first two or three issues really started
clashing, and so I think that set them up on a bit of a
collision course this session in a way that we haven't seen before. Yeah,
market's interesting. You know, when I when I came to the Tribune,
the fights between the House and Senate were over things like the bathroom bill,
and you know, poverty taxes were sailing through. And now we're seeing you
know, the more socially conservative things the you know, related to LGBTQ issues
and things like that getting through fairly easily, but fighting over the property taxes.
It's it's interesting to see how the shifts have have happened here in these
last few years. It is and I think the one thing that can be
for somebody that's covered stuff as much as you have and has been on the
beat as long as Patrick has, one thing that can always be reliably counted
upon is the power of the public will to nudge the prevailing results in a
certain direction. The gender wars SB fourteen and fifteen, gender stuff in women's
sports, and stopping the various procedures for minors. This was something dan Patrick
felt very very strongly about that Dade feeling absolutely did not feel strongly about at
all, and Governor Abbott wanted to feel exactly as strongly as would benefit him
politically. He told me, and that sounds unkind I don't mean it to
me. I was having conversation because I'm very energized by such things. And
I'd have him on the show, maybe like a year ago, and he
said, listen, I think and just Indian just drove him crazy. That
every day to Santis would do something and get huge applause for it and everybody
would look at him go well. And he told me one point on one
of those occasions, he said, I'm going to do something, Mark,
I'm gonna do something like it in the coming days. It'll be just the
same as a state that these procedures. And what it was is some stupid
letter from the Department of Family the Services Health Family Services that essentially says we
consider this to be child abused. Well, what a lovely conceptual thing to
do, but it was a far cry from actually having a law that says
we don't do this. So the governor took a look at the temperature and
wisely, I believe, said this is a bill that I will sign,
and he did. All right. Well, we will see how public opinion
drives the action on impeachment and on property taxes in these in these coming weeks.
Thank you, Mark really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you Pasture joining us,
and thank you to our producer Justin. We'll talk to y'all next week
that you just have to join us in Houston June twenty second for the last
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