Push is on in Texas House by GOP member to remove mask mandate, relax COVID restrictions

AUSTIN — Texas House GOP leaders have set a Monday hearing in a key committee on proposals to weaken the COVID-19 safety precautions the chamber approved in January, including a face-covering edict.

The scramble is underway because top lieutenants to Republican Speaker Dade Phelan are trying to handle a tea party-style freshman’s push to eliminate not just the mask requirement but allowances of virtual committee testimony and voting via laptop from just off the House floor.

Earlier this month, newly elected Rep. Bryan Slaton, R-Royse City, introduced a resolution rolling back all of the chamber’s public-health mitigation measures. A bipartisan work group that Phelan named in November, shortly after announcing he’d secured the votes needed to become speaker, crafted the pandemic safety plan.

Slaton, who opposed the provisions, refers to them in his resolution as “allegedly necessary” standards.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s moves this month to rescind his July statewide mask mandate and virtually disable his other COVID-19 restrictions on businesses and public gatherings should prod the House to do likewise, Slaton argued in his preamble.

“In accordance with Governor Greg Abbott’s Executive Order for Texas to be 100% open, the Texas House should also be open 100%,” it says.

Neither House Administration Committee Chairman Will Metcalf, R-Conroe, nor committee member Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress, immediately responded Saturday to requests for comment.

On March 16, eight days after Slaton filed his repealer, Oliverson introduced a resolution that only would lift mask requirements.

Under House rules adopted Jan. 14, members, staff and visitors must wear masks in committee meeting rooms and on the House floor and in its upstairs viewing area known as the “gallery.”

Exceptions were made — when people speak into microphones, or members are separated by plexiglass screens installed in committee rooms.

The rules also allow state representatives to participate virtually in hearings, as long as two House members are present in the hearing room. Committee chairs can invite guests to testify virtually. And to promote distancing, members can vote on legislation from the House gallery and adjoining rooms through secure laptops.

Oliverson, a physician, was chairman of Phelan’s pandemic work group. Another committee member, Fort Worth GOP Rep. Stephanie Klick, is a registered nurse.

If both of the Republican health care professionals on the 11-member committee join its five Democrats in opposing Slaton and Oliverson’s measures, they would fail to pass.

Rep. Michelle Beckley, a Carrollton Democrat who stayed away from the Capitol on the session’s opening day because she viewed the public-health precautions as inadequate, said Saturday that many of Phelan’s committee chairs haven’t enforced the mask mandate.

“Half the time, people don’t have masks on the floor,” she said. “It’s been a joke.”

On the floor and in committees, Beckley added, “They don’t even wipe off the microphones between speakers.”

The Senate has required members, staff and visitors to undergo COVID-19 testing in a tent set up outside the Capitol’s north entrance, and receive a negative result, before entering Senate meeting and office areas, unless they can show proof of vaccination, Beckley noted.

At least a half-dozen House members have tested positive since late last year, she said, though “most of the House members I know are vaccinated already.”

House leaders have arranged for the chamber’s staff members to begin receiving coronavirus shots Monday, Beckley said.

“It’s just continuing the mismanagement that the governor’s had,” she said, referring to the pandemic and the rollback proposals before House Administration.

New cases and hospitalizations and deaths have declined sharply from records set in January, according to state data. However, fewer than 3.5 million of the state’s nearly 29 million residents have been fully vaccinated, according to the Department of State Health Services.

“They want the pandemic to be over,” Beckley said. “It’s not over. Europe’s having a third wave right now. And our vaccination rates are really, really low. So … it’s exhausting [and] I don’t know what to say anymore.”