Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick—a man who usually spends his days finding new and creative ways to make librarians cry—has suddenly looked at a calendar and realized that November is coming. While speaking at a policy summit in Austin (the city he claims to hate but can’t seem to leave), Patrick admitted that Republicans might actually have a “tough time” keeping control of the Texas House. Apparently, even in a state where the GOP has ruled since the Stone Age, there’s only so much “look over there, a border wall!” you can do before people notice their property taxes are still astronomical.
Patrick’s biggest nightmare isn’t actually the Democrats; it’s his own party’s inability to stop stabbing each other in the back for five minutes. He’s terrified that the loser of the Cornyn-Paxton Senate runoff will take their ball and go home instead of helping the winner beat Democrat James Talarico. It’s a classic Texas GOP slap-fight: you have the establishment guy versus the guy who spends more time in court than a court reporter, and Patrick is begging them to “get over it.” Good luck with that; asking Ken Paxton to “get over” a grudge is like asking a Lubbock windstorm to be “mildly refreshing.”
Naturally, our very own Lubbock golden boy and House Speaker Dustin Burrows had to jump in to keep the “everything is fine” facade from crumbling. Burrows took to social media to pinky-swear that they won’t lose a single seat, essentially telling Patrick to take his doom-and-gloom back to the Senate chamber. It’s cute, really. Burrows is promising “prosperity under Republican leadership,” which I assume means more empty storefronts on 50th Street and another five-year construction project on Loop 289 that somehow makes traffic worse.
The fear stems from the fact that being the party in power during a midterm year is historically about as fun as a root canal. Between the school voucher drama that rural Republicans actually hate and the general exhaustion of the electorate, the GOP is looking at their 88-seat majority and sweating through their suits. Patrick is up for reelection too, but he’s mostly worried that if the House flips, he’ll actually have to negotiate with people instead of just ruling like a petty mall Santa.
If the GOP actually loses the House, does that mean we finally have to stop blaming the 1990s Democrats for everything that goes wrong in this town, or will we just find a way to blame the wind?
