Maybe there’s something comforting about living in a time and place where the corruption is so transparent that even Dade Phelan points it out.
Phelan, the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, seemed to take pleasure in doing so on Monday, as the new special session on school vouchers kicked off. During an impromptu news conference, he was asked about the tension between him and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who had recommended earlier in the day that Phelan resign. Phelan didn’t mention Patrick by name but no one was confused.
“I didn’t take $3 million from a PAC that associates themselves with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers,” Phelan said of the unnamed person. “That’s not my problem. That’s someone else’s problem.”
Phelan (to give him his due, he has more charisma than a whole rotunda of Dan Patricks) didn’t stop there: “We don’t associate ourselves with sexual deviants and misfits and folks who associate with Holocaust deniers.”
Okay, let’s unpack. The $3 million Phelan mentioned was taken, of course, by Patrick, on the eve of the Senate’s impeachment trial of Attorney General Ken Paxton. It came from a group called Defend Texas Liberty PAC, an influence-peddling operation owned by a pair of West Texas billionaires, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. As first reported by The Texas Tribune on Sunday, the president of Defend Texas Liberty, Jonathan Stickland, was seen meeting with white supremacist Nick Fuentes for six hours last Friday at the PAC’s headquarters in Fort Worth.
For those unfamiliar with Fuentes, he is indeed a Nazi sympathizer and a Holocaust denier – the one Donald Trump and Kanye West famously dined with in 2022. He’s a Christian fascist who has praised Hitler and nurtures a fierce if completely unimaginative hatred of Jews. He also hates people of color and the LGBTQ community and Muslims and immigrants and liberals and you get the picture. And he foments violence.
“I didn’t take $3 million from a PAC that associates themselves with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. That’s not my problem.” – Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan
Phelan had begun the first day of the session by sending out a statement about Stickland’s meeting with Fuentes, calling it “indicative of the moral, political rot that has been festering in a certain segment of our party for far too long.” He urged those who have accepted donations from Defend Texas Liberty – most of the Republican Party – to immediately redirect them to a charitable organization. “I call upon elected officials and candidates to state unequivocally that they will not accept further contributions, including in-kind contributions, from the Defend Texas Liberty PAC,” he added.
In his remarks, Phelan connected a respectable number of dots – Dan Patrick, Dunn and Wilks, white supremacy, corruption – but there was one connection he glossed over. That is the fact that Dunn and Wilks are the reason Phelan was talking to the reporters in the first place. Because in addition to associating with Nazis and propping up an attorney general under federal investigation and making a $3 million deposit into the campaign coffers of a lieutenant governor who’s not even up for reelection until 2026, Dunn and Wilks are trying ardently to destroy the state’s system of free public schools. As extreme right-wing lay-preachers, they have, for years, funded efforts to weaken public education. They’re regarded as the principal animating force behind Gov. Greg Abbott‘s demand for vouchers.
Phelan said the state needs to pass bills enshrining vouchers and increasing school funding in the current session. The Legislature was poised to approve $4 billion in school funding this spring, before Senate Republicans tacked a voucher program onto the bill at the last minute. The House Republican who had carried the school funding bill all session, Rep. Ken King, responded by voting against his own bill, along with most of his Republican colleagues and the overwhelming majority of House Democrats.
Abbott hasn’t yet placed school funding on the call of the special session but it’s a sure bet he will if it helps him get vouchers. “We have to have both and we’re having discussions with the governor’s office on that,” Phelan said. “We’re meeting two or three times a day across the House of Representatives spectrum, especially with these rural Republicans, who want to get comfortable with this.”
Do rural Republicans want to “get comfortable with this”? That is the session’s central question. The fact about vouchers is that they take money from public schools and give it to parents to use on private schools. As Rep. James Talarico noted at a Democratic Party press conference on Monday, there aren’t many private schools in rural Texas. “The fact is that 151 counties in Texas [out of 254] don’t even have a private school,” Talarico said. Is it possible the people running the school communities scattered throughout the state, usually their towns’ best informed and most prosperous citizens, will be comfortable letting their representatives diminish their kids’ educations and cut local jobs for nothing in return?
House Democrats are hoping not. They hope the rural Republicans don’t waver. “This is the third special session we have had this year and we have won every round with a bipartisan coalition,” Rep. Gina Hinojosa said. “We intend to keep fighting.”
This article appears in October 13 • 2023.
