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AUSTIN — Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says that even if Democrats gain more seats in the Texas Senate, he’ll urge ruling Republicans to change rules to maintain control of the flow of legislation in the chamber next session.
As long as Republicans retain a majority of the 31-member Senate, they should keep revising rules so Texas continues “leading on federalism,” or a reduced role for the federal government and greater clout for the states, Patrick said Thursday.
Patrick quickly emphasized that he believes the GOP will perform well in the November general election.
But his comments, delivered before a conservative audience at an event sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin, underscored how he remains hostile to Texas Senate traditions that empowered minorities, whether of party or geography.
Speaking with foundation executive director Kevin Roberts and former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint at a luncheon attended by hundreds of conservative activists, Patrick noted that he already helped persuade GOP senators to toss a longstanding “two-thirds rule.”
It required 21 senators’ assent before a bill could be brought to the floor. The current “three-fifths rule,” adopted in 2015, dropped the threshold to 19. Currently, the Senate has 19 Republicans and 12 Democrats.
“I’m right there at that number and if we lose one or two seats, then we might have to go to 16 next session,” Patrick said to scattered applause.
“And I’m saying that … we may have to go to a simple majority because we will not be stopped on leading on federalism for the United States of America!” he said.
Patrick said Texas GOP lawmakers are keenly aware that the state is watched closely by limited-government activists elsewhere as a place promoting free markets and limited government.
“We do not take our responsibility lightly,” he said.
After the November elections, he said, “If we are still the majority but the minority has the power to overrule us, we cannot let that stand. There are some members of the Senate that forget the days when they had to go to a Democrat to get permission to bring a bill to the floor. I remember. I was there. I don’t want to let that happen again.”
Patrick scoffed at Democrats’ claims they have turned Texas into a battleground state.
“But we’re going to be successful in November,” he said. “The president’s going to win, Cornyn’s going to win, we’re going to keep the House and we’re going to keep a majority in the Senate.”
Manny Garcia, executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, criticized Patrick’s threatened rule change.
“The rules of the Senate are there for a reason — to protect the interests of all Texans from right-wing extremist legislation and create a deliberative body,” Garcia said in a written statement.
“Texas Democrats believe that the people of Texas deserve a say in the legislative process,” he said.
But state GOP leaders such as Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott have a pattern of changing rules, Garcia said. He blasted Abbott’s support last year of an unsuccessful, proposed constitutional amendment that would end judicial elections and have him name state judges in highly populous counties where Democrats recently started winning such races, such as Harris and Dallas counties.
“They know they are losing, so they are rigging the rules in their favor,” Garcia said of GOP leaders.
After his luncheon remarks, Patrick told reporters he doesn’t expect Republicans to lose any state Senate seats this year. If the GOP’s majority shrank to 18 or 17, he said senators “would have to look at that.”
Patrick stressed that senators, not he, write the rules for each regular session. The three-fifths majority rule doesn’t apply in special sessions, he noted. The Texas House also generally operates using a majority vote threshold, he added.
Asked if he weren’t promising to react to bad news in an election by changing rules to maintain he and Senate Republicans’ current power, Patrick replied: “I don’t accept that as a criticism. We’re the majority party. People elect us to get things done.”
If a GOP majority of senators ceded to Democrats partial control of the chamber’s floor agenda, he said, “it’d be tyranny of the minority over the majority voice of the people.”