Phelan Passing Hat with Huge Abbott Donor
Amid Attacks on the Border and Democrats
Capitol Inside April 10, 2024
GOP Speaker Dade Phelan faced a tag-team assault on his association with Democrats as he prepared to raise cash on Wednesday at the home of an oil pipeline magnate who's donated more than $3 million in recent years to his primary runoff foe's three most prominent supporters in Donald Trump and his top two Texas allies.
Phelan fundraiser host Kelcy Warren has contributed almost $3 million to Governor Greg Abbott while giving Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton about $700,000 and $300,000 respectively in the past decade. Warren contributed more than $2 million to Trump for the 2020 election before siding for a while with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in his bid for the presidential nomination this year.
While Abbott has played it safe by avoiding the Phelan re-election race in 2024, House District 21 challenger David Covey has counted Trump, Patrick and Paxton as his top supporters in the bid to have the voters in southeast Texas replace the chamber's most powerful member with a far right activist who would be a rookie with no seniority if he knocks the speaker out in overtime next month.
Covey continued a brazen attempt to deceive voters about the Texas House speaker's record on border security in an advertisement that he released on Tuesday. Covey hammered Phelan in the 30-second spot for appointing Democrats to chair key House committees with the false claim that they backed an "open" border.
Covey raised the bar on exaggeration in the new commercial with an assertion that he hired "an Obama lawyer" to kill border security measures in the Legislature's lower chamber. Covey was referring to House co-parliamentarian Hugh Brady, an Austin lawyer who worked for House Democrats before a stint in Barack Obama's administration's when he served as the president.
Phelan effectively derailed a border bill that a right-wing Republican was pushing during the regular session in 2023 when he sustained a Democratic point of order on a faulty caption and other technical grounds based on apparent advice from Brady. But Republican Dennis Bonnen actually enlisted Brady to share the parliamentarian duties when he was the speaker in 2019. Bonnen hired Brady and Phelan kept him on the job when he could have found someone else for the role after claiming the speaker's post in 2021.
To imply that Phelan employed Brady for the sole sake of blocking border security assassin is a wild stretch at best. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Covey and Trump have all tried to portray Phelan as an open border Republican based on the fact that he didn't vote for the controversial immigration enforcement measure that was packed last fall into Senate Bill 4. None of the speaker's detractors have acknowledged that he could have single-handedly buried SB 4 if hadn't passed it several times last year instead.
The Club for Growth Action PAC unleashed an attack on Wednesday that's a variation on the theme that Phelan loves Democrats. The group contended in a new 30-second ad that blasted the speaker for selecting Democratic State Reps. Harold Dutton of Houston and Joe Moody of El Paso last year as the chairmen of the Juvenile Justice & Family Issues Committee and Criminal Justice Committee respectively.
The organization that supports growth depicted Moody as a champion of the police defunding movement while claiming that Dutton favored letting people who rape 14-year-olds off easy. The political committee took a shot at Phelan on Monday with the airing of a separate ad that plays off the solar eclipse that afternoon. The commercial features an image that shows Phelan and four House Republicans who Governor Greg Abbott is targeting in runoffs on the ballot next money in a bid for revenge on the burial of his paramount priority in 2023 with a school choice plan.
Phelan for the record did not vote on school vouchers as well in special session last fall. But he granted the wishes of Abbott, Patrick and others on the far right when he brought education savings accounts to the floor for a vote even though they all knew it lacked sufficient support to pass.
more to come ...
WATCH: Dade Phelan has repeatedly turned his back on Republican priorities and failed to address the growing crisis at our southern border pic.twitter.com/sdVO0uitXz
