Dustin Burrows walks a tightrope seeking Republican and Democratic support for Texas House speaker bid

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Five years ago, Rep. Dustin Burrows’ reputation sustained a major blow among his House colleagues.

The Lubbock Republican resigned as chair of the House GOP Caucus after it was revealed that he and then-Speaker Dennis Bonnen tried to collude with a right-wing activist by providing a list of 10 GOP members they believed should be targeted by the activist’s political organization in the upcoming primary. The actions amounted to a shocking betrayal from House leaders who had previously threatened consequences for any incumbents who campaigned against fellow members in future elections. One of the would-be targets, Rep. Drew Darby of San Angelo, said it was time for the House to “begin to heal and rebuild trust” — something that could only happen if Burrows was “no longer in leadership.”

Bonnen retired. Burrows retreated from the spotlight, but steadily worked behind the scenes regaining his standing in the chamber.

[Dustin Burrows on bipartisanship, school vouchers and why he still thinks he’ll be Texas House speaker]

Five years later, Burrows finds himself at the center of another Republican House leadership skirmish. Yet again, he got there because of his proximity to a sitting House speaker — this time Dade Phelan — who lost favor with a majority of GOP members. And once again he is at odds with many of the same political powers that contributed to his original demise.

Now, Burrows is seeking the gavel for himself, emerging as the chosen pick of establishment and moderate GOP lawmakers — including one-time critic Darby — after Phelan exited the race earlier this month.

His eleventh-hour speakership bid attracted immediate ire from the House’s rightmost faction and their allies outside the chamber. That contingent has vowed to censure and wage aggressive primary challenges against any House Republicans who do not vote for their preferred candidate, Rep. David Cook, R-Mansfield. Cook became the House GOP Caucus’ speaker nominee after some of Burrows’ supporters walked out of the caucus’ meeting last weekend.

State Rep. David Cook, R-Mansfield, holds a press conference after the House Republican Caucus — minus several members, who walked out of the meeting — chose him for House speaker in the upcoming legislative session. (Credit: Bob Daemmrich for The Texas Tribune)

In a declaration of political war, Burrows disregarded Cook’s endorsement and quickly announced that he had enough supporters to win the speakership in January when the full chamber votes. He released a list of 76 supporters, just enough to win, made up equally of Republicans and Democrats. Immediately, a few Republicans named on Burrows’ initial list of supporters asked for their names to be removed.

To date, Burrows no longer has enough public supporters to win. But publicly he is projecting confidence that he will. His path to victory appears to be relying on a coalition made up of more Democrats than Republicans, leading to a situation where his critics on the right are characterizing him as too liberal, while Democrats opposing him complain he’s too conservative. In a blow to Burrows, Gov. Greg Abbott last week urged members to back the candidate “chosen by a majority of Republicans in accordance with the Republican Caucus Rules,” though he did not mention Cook by name.

Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said Burrows’ elevation is partly a matter of fortuitous timing, as Phelan’s right-hand man at the time of his withdrawal from the speaker’s race.

“It's sort of an issue of being in the right place at the right time, and being audacious enough to put yourself out there,” Jones said. “One risk he takes is, if he crashes and burns, he's going to be the guy who defected on the Republican Caucus and tried to conduct a coup with the support of Democrats.”

In an interview, Burrows said the members backing him for speaker are “fighting to make sure we still have a deliberative body, the people's House, where all members are going to have their voice heard [and] be able to represent their districts.”

“It's bigger than one person,” Burrows said. “I just happen to be the figurehead of it.”

Risking a full loss of power

Among the loudest voices against Burrows is Michael Quinn Sullivan, the activist whose 2019 meeting with Bonnen and Burrows led to the downfall of both. Sullivan was the leader of the now defunct far-right political organization called Empower Texans, that was funded by Tim Dunn, the Midland oilman who has led a years-long campaign to scrub alleged moderates from the party. Many of the members opposing Burrows won their seats with the backing of a political network financed by Dunn.

Those efforts contributed to the ouster in this year’s primaries of 15 House GOP incumbents, many of them Phelan supporters who were supplanted by challengers running on pledges to not only depose the speaker and move the House further right, but also strip power from Burrows and the rest of Phelan’s inner circle.

Burrows, center, at the podium while House Speaker Dade Phelan speaks with other representatives during a special legislative session on school vouchers at the state capitol in Austin on Nov. 17, 2023. (Credit: Julius Shieh/The Texas Tribune)

Many of Burrows’ supporters, meanwhile, are members who have survived such primary challenges and faced years of verbal and political attacks from the rightmost wing of the party.

More than two dozen of those Republican members appear to be dug in against Cook, motivated to deny control of the House to his supporters and their far-right political allies even if it means defying GOP caucus rules that require all Republicans to support the group’s chosen candidate. Several of Burrows’ supporters took to social media last week to underscore their support and make the case for his conservative bona fides, including his record of supporting GOP border security measures and private school vouchers.

Burrows found a soft landing five years ago, after Sullivan released a recording of the meeting in which Burrows could be heard listing off the 10 primary targets in exchange for giving Sullivan’s group media access to the House floor. The scandal was damaging enough to end Bonnen’s speakership and spur Burrows’ resignation as House GOP majority leader, but Burrows quickly landed on his feet, landing Abbott’s endorsement — a key stamp of approval in a period of turmoil — and winning a key post when Phelan ascended to the gavel: chair of the powerful Calendars Committee, which controls which bills reach the floor for a vote and which remain bottled up.

Burrows speaks on the House floor while then-House Speaker Dennis Bonnen presides on May 25, 2019. (Credit: Marjorie Kamys Cotera for The Texas Tribune)

Burrows argued that members are “looking for a known quantity” in Phelan’s successor, alluding to the five terms he has served in the House compared to Cook’s two. He also noted that some of his support is coming from members who “were very oppositional” to him around the time of the Bonnen scandal.

“I have gone from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows in that chamber,” Burrows said. “I very much respect [the House], and I know the members know I care very deeply about it. And because I've had all those different experiences — some fantastic, some bad — they know the type of person and leader that I will be.”

This time, however, Burrows’ bid for speaker carries the risk of a full loss of power, with the possibility of being relegated to the background under a Cook-led House. No matter how the speaker race plays out, Burrows could draw a serious primary challenge in 2026 backed by the financial might of Dunn and others who have spent millions targeting Phelan and his allies.

Burrows has never faced a competitive primary challenge in the decade he has represented House District 83, which includes about one-third of Lubbock and extends into several nearby counties.

He flew largely under the radar in his first two terms under Bonnen’s predecessor, former Speaker Joe Straus, before ascending to control of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee in Bonnen’s lone term leading the House. He also was tapped to chair a House panel that investigated the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde — a high-profile assignment during which he established a rapport with some of the Democrats whose support he is now pursuing.

Burrows, chairman of the Investigative Committee on the Robb Elementary Shooting, listens to questions as former state Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman looks on during a press conference in the Civic Center in Uvalde on July 17, 2022. (Credit: Evan L'Roy/The Texas Tribune)

Through his time in the House, Burrows has generally been seen as a mainstream Republican who falls between the most conservative and moderate ends of the spectrum. Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, a group once linked with Sullivan’s now-defunct Empower Texans group, put Burrows near the middle of all House Republicans in its most recent “fiscal responsibility index,” which scores lawmakers based on their votes related to "size and role of government.”

Cook’s supporters have cast Burrows as a RINO — “Republican in name only” — who would be beholden to his Democratic supporters if elected speaker. One Cook-supporting Republican, Rep.-elect Mitch Little of Lewisville, accused Burrows of orchestrating a “brazen attempt to circumvent the will of the voters” by going around the House GOP Caucus.

Jones found in his own ideological ranking that Burrows was among the most moderate GOP members of the House last year, with a voting record farther to the left than all but 11 out of 84 total Republicans.

“If we think about the Texas House as having sort of three main factions — Democrats, center to center-right Republicans, and the most conservative Republicans — it clearly places Burrows in that middle camp,” Jones said of his ideological rankings, which analyzed more than 1,500 contested votes taken by House members across several legislative sessions last year.

In the same analysis, Cook was closer to the ideological middle of House Republicans, suggesting he is far more moderate than the most conservative members who are backing him, yet still farther to the right than Burrows.

In any case, some of Burrows’ supporters outside the chamber have claimed he has a more established history than Cook of delivering conservative wins — and, they claim, the speaker battle is more about political control than where either candidate stands on the ideological spectrum.

“This isn’t about policy; it’s about principle at this point. It’s about the fact that we’ve had more conservative victories than ever before, delivered at a very high frequency per session, yet the goalposts keep getting moved,” Zach Maxwell, a former GOP legislative staffer who has spoken out against the far-right efforts to purify the party, said on social media. “Why? Solely because the self proclaimed watchdogs of the ‘grassroots’ don’t have a buddy as the top guy who will bend the knee and make them feel good.”

A balancing act

As Phelan’s proxy, Burrows is viewed by most Democrats as the more palatable option between the two Republican speaker candidates — as evidenced by the 38 members of the minority party on Burrows’ initial list of supporters. One of those members, state Rep. Josey Garcia of San Antonio, later said she was not supporting anyone for speaker yet. (No Democrats have publicly supported Cook.)

Burrows’ backing among Democrats is far from universal. A group of more than 20 Democratic House members have withheld their support, with some citing his authorship of a sweeping new law, dubbed by opponents as the “Death Star bill,” aimed at sapping the power of local governments, particularly in Texas’ bluer urban areas.

All this has left Burrows to perform a delicate balancing act where his efforts to woo Democrats over to his side could lead to more Republican defections, and vice versa.

Cook, for his part, has vowed to end the practice of appointing Democrats to chair any House committees — a longstanding tradition continued by Phelan and previous GOP speakers, who have all granted Democrats a limited number of chairmanships. Cook has also pledged to ensure that GOP priority bills reach the floor before any Democratic measures.

Burrows said he has not made any concessions to Democrats. On the issue of appointing Democratic committee chairs, he said he would leave it to the members “to work that out amongst themselves” when they approve the House rules next session.

Rather than making specific promises, Burrows said he is courting Democrats by leveraging relationships he has developed working on bipartisan issues, and by signaling support for House rules “that allow the majority to rule but the minority to have their voice heard and respected.”

“And it doesn't hurt that the other side has wanted significant rule changes to shut them out of the process completely,” Burrows said of his efforts to court Democrats.

In an uphill bid to appeal to Democratic members last week, Cook’s allies have circulated a document that calls up comments from Bonnen and Burrows during the 2019 meeting with Sullivan, in which the two Republican lawmakers were caught disparaging local leaders.

During the meeting, Bonnen said his goal was for “this to be the worst session in the history of the Legislature for cities and counties,” something he said he told any mayor or county judge “that was dumb ass enough to come meet with me.” Burrows chimed in that he hoped “the next session is even worse.”

Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston; Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick; Gov. Greg Abbott; then-House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, Burrows at a press conference addressing property tax reform on Jan. 31, 2019. (Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune)

Notably, Burrows’ bill reining in the power of cities and counties was enthusiastically supported by Abbott, who has warned that Texas is being “California-ized” by overregulation of local government. Abbott and Burrows have also been ideologically aligned for years on property tax relief, with the governor citing Burrows’ help shepherding his priority tax reform bill through the House when he endorsed Burrows in 2019; the two also lined up on the same side of a heavyweight clash last year over how lawmakers should provide billions in property tax relief.

Abbott also recently praised Burrows for penning an op-ed in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal in which he alleged that school boards around Texas were raising the prospect of closing schools “to stoke outrage” near the election. In the op-ed, Burrows touted his full-throated support for Abbott’s priority of enacting a voucher-like education savings account program that would allow parents to use public money to help cover their children’s private school tuition.

And yet, Abbott appeared to curtail Burrows’ path to the gavel last week when he broke his silence on the speaker’s race, voicing support on social media for a candidate “chosen by a majority of Republicans in accordance with the Republican Caucus Rules.” Shortly after Abbott gave his tacit sign of support for Cook, one of the GOP lawmakers who was listed on both candidates’ list of supporters, state Rep. Charles Cunningham of Humble, confirmed to The Texas Tribune via a spokesperson that he was supporting Cook.

Cook’s supporters swiftly framed Abbott’s comment as a back-breaking development for Burrows; Cook consultant Elliott Griffin, for one, called Abbott’s statement “tectonic.” Abbott’s word is now thought to carry more heft than ever after the governor flexed his political muscle in this year’s primaries, spending millions to oust Republicans who defied him by opposing his voucher plan.

Others who have made clear they are not backing Burrows despite appearing on his initial list of supporters include Rep. Sam Harless of Spring and Rep.-elects Don McLaughlin of Uvalde and Paul Dyson of Bryan. With Garcia, the Democratic lawmaker, also asking off Burrows’ list, the Lubbock Republican’s public support appears to be at 71 members, down from the 76 he claimed on Saturday.

Renzo Downey contributed to this report.

Disclosure: Rice University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.