Texas GOP civil war reaches bruising climax with leadership battle
Source: The Hill
01/05/25 5:00 PM ET
Long-simmering tensions within the Texas GOP are spilling out into the open amid a heated battle for the state House Speaker seat. The fight underscores long-standing friction between the rump of what was once the Texas party’s establishment and the rising far-right faction that now controls most of the state’s government.
It pits state Rep. Dustin Burrows, a top ally to outgoing Speaker Dade Phelan 
R), against state Rep. David Cook, who was voted the state GOP’s Speaker nominee last month, in a struggle that risks further fracturing the state Legislature as it meets to confront some of Texas’s most serious problems.
The Burrows-Cook stalemate has already spilled bad blood across the Republican caucus. On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) turned up the heat, warning of primary challenges for Republican incumbents who make “deals with Democrats to block a Republican majority-elected Speaker.”
If Cook wins, it will be the first time in more than a decade that a candidate from the right wing of the Texas GOP claimed the Speakership — a political earthquake that belies a slower, decades-long process of intrapartisan grinding below the surface. The current standoff is “the culmination of dozens of fights and significant ideological tension over the last two decades,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told The Hill. “This is the final fight.”
Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5066290-texas-gop-speaker-battle/
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