Texas politics after Joe Straus

SIX days after upending Texas politics by suddenly announcing his retirement, Joe Straus sounds like a man at peace. “I feel confident it was the right decision,” says Mr Straus, who has served as House Speaker since 2009, longer than any other Republican. “I didn’t want to be one of those people who held on to an office just because he could…There are new players and they deserve to have their voice heard.” Not everyone believes his reasons for leaving are so high-minded. Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, believes that Mr Straus “grew weary and tired of saving the Republican Party from itself, and not only not getting thanked for it, but getting blasted and attacked for it.”

During Mr Straus’s dozen years in office, Texas Republicans have marched further right. Mr Straus, by contrast, is a moderate. Though he worked for Ronald Reagan, Mr Straus drives a hybrid car and his wife served on the board of Planned Parenthood, which provides birth-control services (including abortions) in their hometown of San Antonio—both serious demerits in today’s Republican Party. He won repeated speakership elections with bipartisan support. As his state’s first Jewish Speaker, he weathered anti-Semitic attacks: one member of the state’s Republican executive committee urged members to support “a true, Christian conservative”. His departure illustrates the waning power of his party’s business wing, and presages a bruising intra-party fight in Texas—for which much of the South ought to start preparing.

The party’s right wing is already celebrating. Matt Rinaldi, a member of the House Freedom Caucus who represents a suburban Dallas district, called Mr Straus “a terrible Speaker…almost totalitarian. He silenced the voices of the majority in the House.” Michael Quinn Sullivan, who heads a powerful conservative advocacy group called Empower Texans, said he was “happy…maybe now some pro-taxpayer initiatives can finally move forward.”

Straus’s blue period

Conservatives blame Mr Straus for failing to pass a bill that would have made it easier for citizens to veto a property-tax increase (because Texas has no income tax, local governments rely on property and sales taxes). In this year’s legislative sessions, he successfully opposed a school-voucher programme, measures to limit state- and local-government spending, a bill telling transgender people where they can pee and a bill that would have banned organisations that also provide abortions from receiving any tax money. Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick, the state’s governor and lieutenant-governor respectively, championed these measures, and fumed at Mr Straus after the session ended. With Mr Straus gone, these measures may pass in Texas’s next legislative session in 2019, as could a version of the bathroom bill.

Yet his retirement may put them in the same awkward position. With Mr Straus wielding the gavel, they could advocate—or in the case of Mr Patrick, who heads the Senate, pass—harmful legislation to burnish their social-conservative credentials, knowing it would never pass the House. Indeed, rumours in Austin suggest that Mr Abbott offered precisely that assurance to business leaders on the bathroom bill: Don’t worry, Joe will never let it through. If a social conservative runs the House, they will no longer be able to play both sides; they will have to disappoint either Republican activists or business.

Whoever replaces Mr Straus will probably be more conservative, if only because the median Republican has moved rightward. But his replacement is unlikely to be a bomb-thrower. Hard-right candidates may find themselves challenged early and strongly in next year’s elections. Mr Straus has a $10m war-chest, and vows to “speak out [and] support responsible Republicans.” The business lobby looks likely to break with habit, and get involved in primary campaigns. Chris Wallace, president of the powerful Texas Association of Business (TAB), complains that this year’s radical agenda spearheaded by Mr Patrick was “among the most anti-business legislative sessions we can remember”.

While previously TAB only endorsed candidates, providing no financial support, it has realised its brand no longer carries the weight it did among Republicans. The association has revived its political-action committee to disburse funds to pro-business candidates, even if they challenge Republican incumbents. It is backing a challenger to a north Texas Republican senator who believes, among other things, that bike paths are part of a United Nations plot, that public schools provide “communist indoctrination” and that a previous opponent was controlled by Satan. Mr Wallace even left open the possibility of supporting a Democrat in the general election—a rarity for a business lobby.

Texas is so heavily Republican and redistricted that most races are won in the primaries. Republicans in Texas, and in much of the South, have become what Democrats were for most of the 20th century: the only party that matters. The biggest political fights are within, rather than between, the parties. Low primary-voter turnout gives outsize power to committed activists. Mr Straus and other moderate Republicans identify reversing that trend as their biggest challenge.

Like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, conservative but non-Trumpist US senators, Mr Straus had found himself on the edges of a party he once fitted solidly into. He leaves elected office without regrets. “I spent my time trying to promote good ideas and reaching across the aisle. I don’t apologise for that. More people ought to try it.”