In his two sessions as Speaker of the House, Dade Phelan has delivered on Constitutional Carry; protecting children from gender modification; banning Critical Race Theory, pornography, and boys playing girls sports in our public schools; protecting houses of worship from shutdowns; lowering prescription drug costs; protecting our elections; lowering property taxes; and putting opponents of school choice on record so voters could hold them accountable during the primary process.
When I was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2016, no one thought that so much could be accomplished so quickly, but Speaker Dade Phelan made it happen. Some elements within the Republican Party want to keep you from hearing or thinking about all that has been accomplished, mostly those who can only make money when Republicans are tearing each other apart.
Over the last six months, voters have been inundated with commercials, mail pieces, and emails from “Texans United for a Conservative Majority” (TUCM) and “Texans for Strong Border” (TFSB), claiming that Speaker Dade Phelan supports open borders and that he killed legislation creating a Border Protection Unit on the Texas-Mexico Border under the Texas Department of Public Safety. As someone who was on the House Floor and who helped bring that bill about, I want to set the record straight before you cast your ballot in the upcoming May 28th primary runoff election.
First, some background on who is making these claims. Both TUCM and TFSB are part of Pale Horse Strategies, a group of so called “conservative” activists in Fort Worth who attempted to cover up former Representative Bryan Slaton’s sexual predator behavior and held strategy meetings with self-proclaimed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes while Israel was being attacked by Hamas. They are happy to twist the truth to achieve their own ends, but facts are facts, and voters deserve to hear what happened directly from those who were there when the bills were heard.
A few months before the session, a small group of legislators, including myself, came together to help write a bill to create the Border Protection Unit. At the very outset of the session, Speaker Phelan learned about the legislation and made it clear it would be a Speaker’s Priority Bill. He followed through, giving the bill a low bill number, HB 20, and pushing it as a key item in his agenda. When the bill came to the floor, however, there was an issue that requires getting a bit into the weeds of legislative procedure to understand.
When a bill comes to the floor, if a representative notices that some part of the process was not followed properly, they can call a “Point of Order.” If that point is sustained, the bill must return to the step in the process where the error occurred to correct it. If the point of order is overruled, the process resumes as normal.
When HB 20 came to the floor, the bill contained one provision dealing with the creation of a new agency under DPS to provide additional law enforcement to the border regions of the state, and another provision dealing with how those peace officers would be empowered with new authority, should the governor declare an invasion.
A point of order was brought forward that having both of those provisions in the same bill would violate the provision in Article 3, Section 35 of the Texas Constitution requiring that bills only contain one subject. Their argument was that because domestic law enforcement and national defense response to invasion are separate issues, they should be handled in separate bills.
What the people at Pale Horse Strategies will tell you is that Speaker Phelan chose to sustain this point of order, which stopped HB 20 from moving forward. That is true. But the people at Pale Horse Strategies have gone to great lengths to make sure you do not know the reason that happened, what the House did immediately afterward to save the legislation, and the role the Senate played in preventing a Border Defense Force from becoming a reality.
What Pale Horse’s propagandists will not tell you is that, when a point of order is based on a provision in the Texas Constitution, the Speaker’s decision can be challenged in court even if the bill passed both chambers and was signed by the governor, putting the entire bill at risk of being overturned. There was no doubt that if he had overruled the point of order, it would have tied up HB 20 in courts for years on that ruling alone.
Instead of putting the entire concept of a Border Protection Force at risk, Speaker Phelan and the group of Representatives who helped write HB 20 chose to take the part of the bill that created the agency and place it in another border protection bill, HB 7, where there would be no risk of the entire bill being struck down by a leftist court like Austin 3rd Court of Appeals. We succeeded, and HB 7 passed the House 88 to 58.
So why don’t we have a Border Protection Force today? HB 7 went to the Senate, and the Senator who picked up the bill chose to allow several amendments to it, including the creation of a new criminal offense for unlawful entry into Texas from a foreign nation.
While the provisions added to the bill were excellent ideas that would later pass on their own in a special session of the legislature, it was also a clear violation of the one-subject rule, as the original legislation did not create any new criminal offenses.
Passing the Senate’s version of HB 7 would have caused not only the Border Protection Unit to be vulnerable to a court challenge, but it would also have given the courts an easy way to overturn legislation criminalizing illegal entry into Texas without having to address the Biden administration’s refusal to enforce immigration laws already on the books.
Once Governor Abbott called the legislature back for a special session on the topic, the House and Senate came together to pass legislation regarding illegal entry that is less vulnerable to court challenges. We also worked together to pass over $6.6 billion in funding to continue the construction of the border wall, buoys in the Rio Grande, bolstering Operation Lone Star, and boosting funding for local courts in the border region to handle the increased case load.
Additionally, the work has not stopped on legislation to create a Texas Border Defense Force. Over the last year Chairman Ryan Guillen of the House Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety and I have been working together with Speaker Phelan and his staff to finish the job. Speaker Phelan has made it clear that this legislation will again be a major priority of his in the 89th session.
No state has done more for the border security of our nation than Texas, and it was the combined efforts of Speaker Phelan and Governor Abbott who made it possible. I look forward to working with all of them in the 89th legislature. When we work together, we make our state a better, more secure place.