Sound and fury signifying nothing: that’s the Texas Legislature, the overwhelming majority of the time. Lawmakers yell and scrap for 140 days every other year, nibble around the edges of issues that require urgent action, and typically produce little worth remembering. On two occasions, the Eighty-eighth Legislature stood tall: when the House expelled a member, Bryan Slaton, for sexual misconduct and again when it impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton. But for the most part the session was a drag.

It could have been different: this session offered transformational opportunities for Texas. The GOP’s control of redistricting in 2021 ensured safe seats for almost all its members for the rest of the decade, and lawmakers came to town with an unprecedented $33 billion budget surplus, the largest in state history. Previous generations of legislators would have danced with the devil at midnight to be so politically secure and have such ample patronage to dole out. Almost any dream, large or small, could be made real. Connect Dallas and Houston by high-speed rail? No problem. Pull Texas from near the bottom in spending per public school student? We could afford it. 

To do any of that, state leaders would have had to put aside their petty intrigues and think big. Instead those intrigues shaped the session. Governor Greg Abbott invested the lion’s share of his political capital in a school-voucher program, knowing full well that rural members of the GOP deeply opposed it. Abbott offered those members their choice of a carrot or a stick and then when they wouldn’t acquiesce, tried beating them with both.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, perhaps bored with his dictatorial reign in the Senate, spent much of his time attempting to annex the House. He tried to strong-arm sophomore Speaker Dade Phelan on property tax cuts and culture-war issues. When the two couldn’t agree, they began killing each other’s priority bills. They had started with low expectations and concluded by not even meeting those, causing the governor to promise a summer of special sessions to try to salvage something.

In the absence of leadership, lawmakers were able to do some good with the bounty they’d been given. They ensured more resources for our underfunded mental health-care system, approved raises for state employees, and injected state parks with cash. But the session still was a missed opportunity. Lawmakers argued about which flawed property tax plan to spend half the surplus on and passed a massive package of corporate subsidies. 

Then legislators set out to hobble three engines of the Texas economy that delivered them the fat surplus in the first place: big cities, the booming renewable-energy industry, and public research universities. They had time left over to restrict cultural expression that offends their sensibilities. Lawmakers fought to pull books—including, according to one North Texas Republican, raunchy smut such as Lonesome Dove—from school library shelves and then to restrict drag performances. In previous years, one longtime lobbyist said, a session would be defined by a few big divisive social debates such as these. Now there are dozens every year. “There’s little time to discuss anything else. That’s the point.” 

No single debate this session exemplifies better the priorities of the Lege than the much-publicized push to legalize casino gambling, which dominated public interest in the session’s early going. Aspiring casino owners had spent several years and millions of dollars buttering up politicians and helping Republicans maintain control of the House in 2020. That debt had to be repaid. Two months before this session even started, gambling advocates had retained the services of more than three hundred lobbyists. It was an orgiastic display of excess of the kind you normally would go to Las Vegas to see.

Had the gambling bills passed, the money tap would have dried up for those in the Capitol fold. Better for many lawmakers if the push made a little headway and then failed, because then the spending could resume next session. So most legislators in the House, in a rare moment of bipartisan unity, played their parts perfectly. After a comical floor debate in which only the few who opposed gambling for moral reasons seemed to express political principles at all, the primary casino proposal fell just short of the one hundred votes it needed to pass the chamber. Republicans showed how hard they were working to make it happen, and House Democratic leader Trey Martinez Fischer repeatedly made clear how he was “not a no” but “a not now,” implying that he was open to changing his mind. As in Vegas, the House always wins. On to 2025! 

For fifty years, we’ve been offering an assessment of each legislative session’s heroes and villains. The archives remind us that though the Capitol has long been a playground for scoundrels, there are always faithful public servants too. We tried to select a group that represents the Legislature as a whole, which is disproportionately white and male, and in which Republicans hold about 60 percent of seats and about 80 percent of committee chairmanships. As ever, we disdain self-dealing and small-mindedness and value integrity, foresight, and the willingness of members to “vote their districts,” whatever part of the great state they may represent. Here are our lists, in no particular order: 

The Best

The Worst

Special Awards and Notable Others

The Best

Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. Ernest Bailes 

R-Shepherd

Bailes isn’t outspoken or otherwise prominent, like most of the lawmakers on these lists. The Republican has represented his rural southeast Texas district since 2017 but is rarely seen at the House microphones. The big dogs in the room might describe Bailes’s proposals this session as minor—one of his notable bills would have adjusted labeling rules for Texas honey producers.

Rural Republicans who support public schools were in the hot seat this session as the governor pushed a voucher program they saw as inimical to their districts’ interests. That fight brought out the best in Bailes, whose wife works as a schoolteacher and whose mother is a former school board president. The rurals held together and won. On two occasions Bailes won glory for himself. 

One small victory came when state representative Harold Dutton, a Houston Democrat, claimed, while laying out a bill, that in one of the school districts in Bailes’s district just 5 percent of third-grade students could read at grade level. The school district was, in fact, “one of the highest-ranked districts in the state of Texas,” Bailes told Dutton from the House floor. Bailes wondered aloud what other falsehoods Dutton was deploying. Dutton’s bill was voted down, and it took him five days to resuscitate it.

A greater victory came when Public Education chair Brad Buckley asked the House to allow his committee to have an unscheduled meeting so that he could pass a hastily drafted voucher bill onto the floor—late at night, without a public hearing. In most cases, these requests are approved, no objection registered. But there, like Leonidas at Thermopylae, stood Bailes at the microphone.

Did Buckley really intend to bring an eighty-page bill to the floor without inviting public comment, Bailes asked? Buckley demurred. Did he not think Texas kids deserved better than “backroom, shady dealings”? Bailes, defender of Texas bees, had the powerful chairman dead to rights. The chamber sided with Bailes. Individual voices still matter in the House. Texans should be glad Bailes used his when it counted.

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. John Bryant

D-Dallas

Bryant is easily the most energetic new voice among Democrats. He’s well prepared. He’s principled. Elected in 2022, he just might be the future of House Democrats. Also: he previously served in the House before some current members were even born and is 76. 

But it’s a Sylvester Stallone 76—not, say, a Donald Trump 76. He’s come out of retirement, he’s back in shape, and now he’s whipping up on the youngsters.

Bryant came back to Austin this year with a clear mission: to set an example of how to serve courageously in the minority. Because of his previous tenure in the Lege, he arrived with seniority, landing a nice Capitol office and, more important, a plum seat on the Appropriations Committee, which writes the budget.

Unlike many in his party who seem content to warm their seats, Bryant came armed with facts and tough questions. He impressed and unnerved his colleagues by making Texas education commissioner Mike Morath squirm over the sad state of education funding during a hearing on the budget. Bryant’s genial but ruthless grilling of witnesses earned him a visit from a Democrat cozy with House leadership. Would he please stop asking so many questions? It was upsetting the Republican chairman and jeopardizing certain Democrats’ pet legislation. Bryant declined the request. As he kept pounding—on raising the basic allotment for public schools, on the dismal state of the mental health-care system, on the need to increase funding for special education—he started winning over skeptical colleagues, who saw in him a model for principled opposition. 

“Bryant is a folk hero,” said one insider. “He’s reintroduced the spirit of the Democrats in the seventies.” Said another: “John Bryant is a really good John Wesleyan Methodist who believes you do all you can, for as long as you can, for as many people as you can. And that is the only thing that is really motivating him.” 

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Eric Gay/AP

Sen. Robert Nichols 

R-Jacksonville

There are no Republican mavericks in Dan Patrick’s Senate. But until a real iconoclast shows up, Robert Nichols will do.

Nichols, who represents a largely rural swath of East Texas where few private schools exist, has long opposed creating vouchers, which siphon money away from public schools. Patrick has long supported creating them. So it was notable when the East Texan schooled the lieutenant governor and voted against his voucher plan. “He’s managed to effectively represent his vast district in the politically hostile work environment created by Dan Patrick,” said a longtime Capitol insider. 

And Nichols wasn’t just the lone Senate Republican “no” on school vouchers. He’s one of the few Republican legislators to support adding a rape exception to the state’s abortion ban and raising the legal age for purchasing certain semiautomatic weapons to 21. Both of these positions enjoy overwhelming public support yet remain politically untenable because the Republican Party is in thrall to campaign contributors and the 3 percent of Texans who decide its primary elections. When a state’s priorities are set by a small but vocal minority, standing up for broadly popular policies counts for real courage.

So far Nichols appears to have maintained a relationship with Patrick, and he’s been able to get several bills passed. Perhaps Nichols’s greatest accomplishment this session was making Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacogdoches, part of the University of Texas System. Membership in the UT System will provide the East Texas institution, which celebrates its centenary this year, with a much-needed infusion of money and energy. 

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. Lacey Hull 

R-Houston

During her freshman session, in 2021, reports of Hull’s alleged romantic relationships with another representative and with a political consultant circulated through the legislative community. Embarrassing text messages were published. These relationships, though salacious, were said to be consensual. They didn’t amount to major offenses, but it was the kind of embarrassment that would cause a lot of folks to pack it in.

Two years later, Hull came back and got to work, reaching across party lines and staying out of the headlines. The list of bills she authored that passed both chambers includes valuable contributions on maternal health care and paid family-leave programs. During the pandemic, the Lege passed a bill to provide cash grants for families with children in special education programs to help them better participate in remote schooling. It was set to expire, so Hull helped renew it.

Perhaps Hull’s most notable success this session came about because of a partnership with Democratic senator Royce West, from Dallas. Every school year there are tens of thousands of incidents in which Texas students are handcuffed, pepper sprayed, tased, or restrained. The overwhelming majority of restraint cases involve students with disabilities, and child-development experts (and common sense) say these aggressive acts are traumatizing to young children. During the 2021 session, a bill to limit the use of restraints on children younger than ten died in the Senate. This session, Hull was able to help pass West’s bill through the House.

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Tamir Kalifa/Getty

Rep. Angie Chen Button

R-Richardson

The sneakers that Representative Button wears on the House floor aren’t an overt political statement, but they say a lot about her approach. She’s more likely to be seen hustling from member to member to discuss bills than making grandiloquent speeches. And when she does step up to the lectern, colleagues listen. They listened when she spoke in favor of the Lone Star Workforce of the Future Fund, which would provide skills training for folks without a college degree. 

They listened when she was a voice of reason amid a rash of Republican-
sponsored bills that targeted individuals and entities from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Senator Lois Kolkhorst, the right-wing Republican from Brenham, introduced a bill that would prohibit Texas residents from those four countries—presumably even dual citizens and other legal residents—from purchasing property in the state. Button, who is Taiwanese American, countered with a bill that would prohibit any foreign government entity from buying Texas agricultural land but didn’t target specific nationalities. “I am well familiar with what happened during World War II to Japanese Americans,” Button said. “This bill eliminates the repetition of that threat without negatively marking loyal Americans of any ethnic background.” Thanks to her passion as well as statewide protests, Button’s proposal to exempt lawful permanent residents eventually made its way into Kolkhorst’s more draconian legislation. (The Kolkhorst bill mercifully failed in the House.) 

While the politics of the Lege can resemble schoolyard antics, Button plays well with others. Consider the competing Republican and Democratic proposals to eliminate the “tampon tax,” which would exempt menstrual products as well as diapers and other baby products from the state sales tax. Button, who was tapped as sponsor for the Republican bill, nevertheless championed the Democratic one, when Dade Phelan made it a priority. In the end, the Republican version with Democratic amendments passed. It was a win for Button and for Texas.

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. Toni Rose 

D-Dallas

Rose is a quietly effective and universally respected negotiator on some of the most important issues at the Lege: health care, child welfare and criminal justice. This year, Rose authored House Bill 12, which expands Medicaid coverage for a year after the end of a pregnancy. Rose had advocated for the measure for years—winning the support of Republican leadership in the House, in 2021, and then the support of the Senate this session. The bill is a major step forward in addressing the state’s maternal mortality problem: it will help save lives across Texas and especially in Rose’s relatively low-income, overwhelmingly minority section of southern Dallas County.

Her leadership was evident on other issues as well. She worked with Republicans such as James Frank and Gary Gates to reform the Department of Family and Protective Services and advocated to strengthen state services for aging and disabled Texans. Rose is comfortable playing the long game, as she did with the Medicaid bill. Starting in the 2017 Legislature, she offered a bill to bar the use of the death penalty on the severely mentally ill. At first it went nowhere. This year it passed the House by a two-to-one margin, with Republican Jeff Leach as a coauthor. The Senate killed it, but anyone who knows Toni Rose knows she’s going to keep coming back.

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. Justin Holland 

R-Rockwall

When a Democratic legislator confided that he found Republican Holland to be a real “human being,” we almost fell off our barstool. Human being? That amounts to high praise among the combatants in modern Texas politics. But that lawmaker had a point. Holland collects political memorabilia, we were told, and he sometimes leaves pins and badges he thinks his colleagues might like on their desks. And when the state GOP chair mocked one junior Republican representative, Holland stood up to defend him while other members stayed silent.

This session, he gave indications that he was one of the rare lawmakers who was really listening to the people around him. Holland broke with his party and was one of only two Republicans in the House to vote out of committee the bill that would raise the minimum age to purchase certain semiautomatic weapons from 18 to 21. This measure received considerable attention as relatives of the Uvalde shooting victims rallied behind it, and gun manufacturers and Second Amendment absolutists campaigned against it. “After listening to many hours of testimony,” he said in a statement, “I became convinced that this small change to the law might serve as a significant roadblock” to mass shootings. Holland knew the bill wouldn’t pass. But he voted for it anyway, shouldering the political consequences.

Texans also have Holland to thank for a strong push to improve public lands this session. A Senate bill and joint resolution he sponsored with Armando Walle, a Houston Democrat, would, pending voter approval, establish a Centennial Parks Conservation Fund to invest $1 billion to buy more land for the state parks system.

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. Todd Hunter 

R–Corpus Christi

In years past, as the longtime chairman of the all-powerful House Calendars Committee, which controls which bills make it to the floor, Hunter was one of the lower chamber’s biggest players behind the scenes. This session he was thrust into the spotlight while performing a different role. As chairman of House State Affairs, he had to handle some of the session’s most high-profile bills. Hunter’s committee heard hours of testimony from drag queens imploring him to help defang the Senate’s antidrag bill—and then switched to consider arcane presentations about electric-grid reliability.

Hunter’s committee was sent bowls of dog food by the Senate, and it typically made them less unpalatable. But it was the electric-grid bill that brought out the fight in Hunter. When it arrived in the House, Senate Bill 7 seemed to be an enormous cash grab by companies that use fossil fuels to generate electric power, at the expense of those who use wind and solar energy. Hunter rewrote the measure, then introduced it on the House floor with a speech that sounded in parts like one that could have been given by Bernie Sanders.

“The owners’ box seems to be up there,” he said, pointing at the gallery where lobbyists sit, “when it should be down here,” pointing to the House floor. He had capped the cost of the bill. He had tried, he said, to center taxpayers and consumers in the discussion. His bill was supported by the Sierra Club and the Texas Oil and Gas Association, which shocked even him. “I had to reread the bill to make sure I was for it,” he said. 

A cynic might doubt the sincerity of Hunter’s populist tone. Some of his legislation gave generous concessions to various industries and their lobbyists, too, particularly House Bill 5, a package of corporate subsidies. But among powerful committee leaders in the House, there are no angels. An unfortunate number of other chairmen disgraced themselves this session. Hunter made bad bills less bad, which is sometimes the best that one legislator can do. 

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. Armando Walle

D-Houston

Time was running out, and the families of children and teachers killed in Uvalde were getting anxious. Months had passed with very little action on their top priority: legislation raising the legal age to purchase certain semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21. The families at least wanted a committee vote, something only an unyielding Republican committee chair, Ryan Guillen, could grant. 

On May 2 survivors of the shooting victims gathered for an emotional, last-ditch plea to Guillen. Standing alongside them were three lawmakers, including Walle, an eight-term liberal Democrat who represents part of Houston and a section of unincorporated Harris County. His attendance was risky—even if the bill got a hearing, it had little chance of becoming law and, moreover, poking his finger in the eye of the GOP leadership could cost him dearly. But Walle is a relative rarity in the Lege: a Democrat on good terms with the Republican inner circle who doesn’t compromise his principles. The bill got a committee vote—it passed with two Republican ayes—and Walle went back to work.

Key to his success was his relationship with Greg Bonnen, the irascible and vindictive Republican chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, whose brother Dennis used to be Speaker of the House. With Greg Bonnen’s blessing, Walle put his mark on the $321 billion state budget. As one of five House budget negotiators, he helped secure an additional 3 percent raise for low-level state employees and fresh funding to tackle air pollution in his industry-heavy district. Bonnen also trusted him to carry popular, bipartisan legislation creating the Centennial Parks Conservation Fund, the $1 billion endowment to help buy land for new state parks. He risked the Republican’s ire by passionately speaking out against GOP efforts to strip diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from Texas universities. And he was one of only 36 lawmakers to vote against HB 5, a Dade Phelan priority.

Walle, a high school football player, pulled off a trick play this session: he ran with team Phelan but played the game the way he wanted. 

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. Andrew Murr 

R-Junction

At 46, Murr is young for the Texas House, but there’s something distinctly old-school about him. Credit his formidable mustache—the Murrstache, as it’s known in the House—which wouldn’t look out of place in a member portrait from the nineteenth century. Credit also the inherited gravitas from his grandfather, Coke Stevenson, the last Texan to hold the three offices of speaker, lieutenant governor, and governor.

This session, though, Murr was an agent of change, part revolutionary and part lawman. His House General Investigating Committee was the instigator of two genuinely radical actions. The first was the unanimous expulsion of Republican Bryan Slaton from the House for sexual misconduct. Murr’s committee produced an eye-wateringly explicit report that left Slaton utterly condemned. 

But it was merely prelude. Late in the session, Murr’s committee announced that it had been conducting a monthslong investigation into Attorney General Ken Paxton’s request for taxpayer money to settle a suit brought by whistleblowers Paxton is alleged to have wrongfully fired. The investigation resulted in twenty impeachment charges, approved by the House with a 121–23 vote margin.

The members of Murr’s committee, especially Democrat Ann Johnson and Republican Charlie Geren, deserve credit. But Murr was the face of the efforts. The first expulsion of a representative since 1927, and the first impeachment of a statewide official since 1917, introduced an increasingly rare value to an increasingly debased body: integrity.

Back to list ⤒

The Worst

Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP

Rep. Shawn Thierry

D-Houston

This session Thierry tried to position herself as a Democrat willing to work with Republicans, which was admirable, in this hyperpolarized state, when she was allied with them on issues relevant to her working-class district south of downtown Houston.

Often that wasn’t the case. During the debate on Senate Bill 14, a hotly contested Republican-sponsored measure that would prohibit gender-affirming care for anyone younger than age eighteen, Thierry delivered a long, tearful speech about protecting children from the possible health consequences of puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgeries. “While many of my constituents encouraged me to vote in favor of this legislation, hostile activists on social media platforms have made horrific, nasty political threats to influence my vote against the bill,” she said on the floor. She used a similar approach for a bill that would ban books deemed sexually explicit from public schools. She denounced works that had been highlighted to her by a Republican Party official, Christin Bentley, who regularly emailed legislators lists of “Filthy Books.” On the floor Thierry claimed that the books expose kids to porn on the internet, as if they didn’t already have Google for that.

Thierry’s votes for the bills didn’t necessarily offend her Democratic colleagues. But some chafed at the way she went about them. One representative said the SB 14 speech felt as if she wanted to “rub it in our faces.” Others speculated that she was positioning herself to win a chairmanship from the Republican leaders of the House. 

Morality is an awkward mantle for Thierry, whom multiple staff members have accused of being verbally and emotionally abusive. In a letter submitted to the House General Investigating Committee, in 2021, former staff members said she had berated them and, on one occasion, threw flowerpots at them. While her erratic behavior behind closed doors is an open secret at the Capitol, more recently critics took to Twitter to resurface some of those earlier claims. When we asked her, Thierry not only denied the allegations of workplace abuse but turned them on their head: Thierry suggested that they were retaliating because of her vote on SB 14, explaining that some staffers identified as LGBTQ+, including one who she said “may have been bisexual.”

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. Dustin Burrows 

R-Lubbock

Dennis and Dustin weren’t as charming a pair as Pancho and Lefty, but they were similarly ill-fated. 

In 2019 a right-wing activist leaked a recording he had secretly made of a conversation in which former House Speaker Dennis Bonnen and Burrows, his right-hand man, schemed against and complained bitterly about their enemies. It ended Bonnen’s speakership and put Burrows, briefly, in the wilderness. 

Some of their harshest words in the recorded talk were reserved for the state’s local officials. Bonnen said he had tried to ensure that 2019 would be “the worst session in the history of the Legislature for cities and counties.” Burrows agreed. “We hate cities and counties,” he said. “I hope the next session is even worse.”  

It took two sessions, but Burrows got his wish. He took a brickbat to local governments, offering a sweeping preemption bill that nullified countless local ordinances and the very authority of cities to set new rules—rules as seemingly inoffensive as mandating water breaks for construction workers.

At his bill’s committee hearing, he repeatedly lost his cool when challenged by others. This bill “has brought out the absolute worst in him,” said one lobbyist.

The growing belief among lawmakers that cities are the enemy is a malign trend. It’s partly selfish. Special interests rain cash on the Legislature because it sets the rules. When cities set them, that threatens the order of things. The big dog eats first, Burrows seemed to be saying. 

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer

D–San Antonio

When Martinez Fischer was elected to lead the House Democratic Caucus, in December, after a contentious struggle, Lege followers who look to the institution for entertainment celebrated. Trey, as he’s often called around the Capitol, is procedurally savvy and tough. His election “could signal a more confrontational posture” toward the GOP majority, wrote the Texas Tribune, in a restrained version of what many were thinking: let the fireworks commence!

The pyrotechnics never came. Martinez Fischer seemed to enjoy the spotlight and being the one to negotiate with House leadership—“It’s the Trey Show,” one staffer said. But much of what the caucus leader typically does is simply keep members informed about the nitty-gritty details of seemingly minor bills, and Martinez Fischer did not seem to like doing his homework. “Who?” said a lobbyist, when asked about Martinez Fischer. “What caucus?”

Even during major votes, Democrats too often seemed to lack a strategy. Before the roll call on House Bill 2, the leadership’s property tax bill, the caucus met. Democrats looked to Trey. What was the plan? “He was basically like, ‘What do you all want to do?’ ” one member recalled. “Then it all devolved into chaos.”

Sometimes he plotted too openly. In March he sent multiple emails discussing strategy on casino bills to House Democrats that were later obtained by reporters at the Dallas Morning News—writing that Democrats played a “pivotal and indispensable role in this debate” and tycoons had given Republicans more money. The emails linked votes and donations in unusually explicit terms. 

To Martinez Fischer’s defenders, the problem is bigger than him: Democrats, who last controlled the House in 2001, are chronically disunited, they say, and too many of them are making their own deals with the House leadership, robbing the caucus of leverage. That’s surely correct. But one reason Democrats are so fractious is the divisive nature of Martinez Fischer’s yearslong push to lead House Democrats. He helped poison the chalice from which he now has to drink. His eventual successor may have an easier time, however. As one member sometimes identified as an ally of Martinez Fischer said, “the caucus has been reunited in their dissatisfaction over TMF’s leadership.”  

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Sen. Lois Kolkhorst

R-Brenham

Ambitious Republican senators have to work hard to get out of Dan Patrick’s shadow. Kolkhorst skillfully built up her profile this year by crusading against three of the session’s biggest scapegoats: foreign nationals, vaccines, and renewable energy. She is likely “your next lieutenant governor,” one lobbyist said, “the most craven person in the building but also probably the smartest.”

Kolkhorst’s most high-profile bill this session would have prohibited folks from certain countries—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—from purchasing real estate in Texas. The bill would have punished innocent people: dual citizens and legal residents who have no connection to the totalitarian governments in the countries of their birth. 

A Capitol insider said that “she didn’t know what [her bill] did.” Midsession, in what seemed like nothing more than a publicity stunt, Kolkhorst invited a group mostly made up of Uyghur Muslims, a persecuted minority group in China, to her committee to give testimony on Chinese tyranny. The irony was that Kolkhorst’s bill, as originally written, would have banned Uyghur refugees from buying a home in Arlington.

As chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, she tried to weaken vaccine mandates, using her committee to air scaremongering testimony about the dangers of getting immunized. And she offered some of the session’s most punitive bills against renewable power providers, subjecting them to fines and regulation other power producers don’t face, warning that Texas didn’t know “the environmental impacts, long-term,” of wind and solar generation. 

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. Tony Tinderholt

R-Arlington

Tinderholt has been prone to paranoid outbursts since his first election campaign, in 2014, during which he insisted that armed resistance was the only thing that would stop a migrant “infiltration” at the border. His constituents in the Arlington area deserve better. So it was heartening, in the 2021 session, to see Tinderholt maturing: playing well with others, cracking jokes on the floor, making valuable contributions to debates. 

This year it all went wrong. He could have continued to evolve and shoulder more responsibilities, like his onetime ally Briscoe Cain. Instead he made himself a menace from the first days of the session. 

He ran for Speaker against incumbent Dade Phelan, knowing that he had no chance of victory and knowing, too, that shooting at the king and missing would strip him of influence for the rest of the session, if not longer. That guaranteed powerlessness brought out some of his worst tendencies. His staffers included a Christian nationalist who tweeted that people who want to take kids to see drag shows should be executed. He leaned into unworkable bills that make headlines but not laws.

Having failed in his leadership bid, he attempted during a debate on the House rules package to shame Phelan into preventing Democrats from chairing committees. This was a bad idea—Phelan needs the support of some Democrats to make the House function—but Tinderholt also went about it incompetently. Easily crushed by senior Republicans, Tinderholt was left sputtering on the floor, making false allegations about the process—comments he was forced to retract.

Finally, on a major school-security bill, he tacked on an amendment to allow private security guards to be paid for with state funding—without telling the floor that he was a senior partner at a company that would likely directly benefit from the bill’s passage. When challenged after the fact, he argued in a statement that he was an “expert in this field” and that no one got upset when doctors voted on health-care bills. 

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. Tom Craddick 

R-Midland

Thanks to weak conflict of interest rules, the Texas Legislature can sometimes seem like a wholly owned subsidiary of the state’s oil and gas industry. But few members are as brazen as Craddick, who for decades has  used his position on the House Energy Resources Committee to regulate an industry from which his family profits enormously. Earlier this year a Texas Monthly investigation discovered that Craddick and his family—including his daughter, Christi Craddick, the chairman of the Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry—made about $10 million in 2022 from royalties on hundreds of Texas mineral leases. 

The Midland lawmaker has leveraged his connections to bring together buyers and sellers of leases. Rather than taking a broker’s fee, Craddick typically receives a percentage of future oil and gas production, known as an overriding royalty interest. Those royalties are a major source of his family’s wealth, and Craddick has aggressively protected them. This session he coauthored a bill that shields owners of overriding royalties from a so-called washout, which is what happens when an oil company terminates a lease, then signs a brand-new agreement for the same mineral interests—wiping out the overriding royalty interests.

Craddick helped pass a nearly identical bill two years ago, only to see it vetoed by Governor Greg Abbott, who said it infringed upon the “freedom of parties to enter into private contracts and to have their bargains enforced.” Despite holding overriding royalties on hundreds of leases, Craddick, during a March committee hearing, denied that the bill would benefit him: “I want that clear. I’m not doing this for myself.” Whether or not members believed him, the bill passed unanimously in both chambers, and this time Abbott didn’t veto it. (The governor didn’t explain why he changed his mind.) Craddick’s bill will keep the money gusher pumping for his family, raising even more questions about whose interests he serves at the Lege. 

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Brandon Bell/Getty

Sen. Bryan Hughes

R-Mineola

Hughes was once asked by a fellow senator if he’d be offended if someone called him a snake oil salesman. Hughes offered a surprising reply: “Not in the least, senator. I’m a politician and a lawyer.” Challenge accepted: Bryan Hughes is a masterful salesman of fraudulent cures to what ails the body politic. 

Hughes carried many of this session’s most controversial pieces of legislation, from a ban on “indecent” material in school libraries to restrictions on drag shows. Such was Hughes’s zeal for right-wing causes that not even the oil and gas industry escaped his wrath. During a presession committee hearing on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing—which conservatives dismiss as “woke capitalism”—Hughes chided a representative of the asset management giant BlackRock for daring to invest $27 billion in Exxon. “That’s our concern,” Hughes said. “We wish you weren’t there.” 

If only the state’s biggest problems were drag queens, woke books, and woke corporations. Unfortunately we have pressing issues, and Hughes too often stands in the way of addressing them. On one occasion he used a point of order to block Senator Roland Gutierrez from offering a bill amendment that would ban Texans younger than 21 years of age from purchasing assault weapons online—sparing his colleagues the painful necessity of voting on the ban. “Even when not pushing leadership’s priority legislation that a majority of Texans don’t support,” said one Capitol lobbyist, “Hughes is willing to do any and all of the dirty work asked of him.”

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Sen. Drew Springer 

R-Muenster

Early this session Springer was spotted at a karaoke bar in Austin flipping the double bird to an audience of lawmakers and staffers as he belted the lyrics to “Zombie,” by the Cranberries, a warning about the ruinous effects of pointless hostility. That’s Springer in a nutshell. His actions give offense. His affect says, “Who, me?” 

Springer “is not smart enough to be a go-to for Dan Patrick or cagey enough to play the lobby,” said one lobbyist. So he’s stuck as a legislative bottom-feeder, pushing initiatives more influential senators wouldn’t touch. This session he targeted renewable-energy producers with punitive taxes. He tried to bar the children of undocumented migrants from attending public school, unless the federal government pays for them. 

On the rare occasions when Springer had a serious bill to offer, he seemed bored. At a hearing he was asked by a fellow Republican if his Second Look Act would allow prisoners who had committed violent crimes as teenagers automatic parole later in life. To anyone who had read the bill’s few pages, the answer was no. But Springer said it would. His response alarmed others on the committee, and the bill died.

He seemed to be motivated by personal animosity more than a desire to make good policy. In late May he singlehandedly bounced 22 bills from the Local and Uncontested calendar, reserved for uncontroversial bills. This was an assertion of Springer’s power. But a closer examination of what he tried to kill just made Springer seem smaller. One bill, later resuscitated, would have helped day care employees participate in local active-shooter trainings. Who, me?

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Sen. John Whitmire

D-Houston

For fifty years, the “Dean of the Senate” has been a morally ambiguous figure, but at his best, he was a passionate, if reluctant, reformer of Texas’s bloated prisons and faulty criminal-justice system. Unfortunately, Whitmire succumbed to his worst impulses this session. 

Instead of reforming, he did a lot of ranting. In the past Whitmire has indulged in a panic about crime, but this time it took on a different tenor, given that he announced a campaign for Houston mayor this past November.

He turned the Criminal Justice Committee, which he chairs, into a platform for monologues that seemed tailor-made for voters who watch a lot of alarmist TV news. “Seniors come up to me and say, ‘Senator Whitmire, please do something, because we don’t leave the house after five o’ clock,’ because they’re afraid,” he declared at one hearing. 

The fact is Houston is getting safer. Homicides have dropped 28 percent from last year, and overall violent crime is down 12 percent in the first quarter of 2023, compared with the same period last year. That didn’t stop Whitmire from shepherding bills through his committee aimed at locking up more defendants before trial. “Harris County has been ground zero for the fight over criminal justice, and he’s been missing in action,” said a Houston criminal-justice reform advocate. 

Maybe Whitmire is just ensuring that donors such as Houston billionaire Tilman Fertitta and Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale continue to fund his mayoral campaign. It’s a pitiful way to behave in what could be the last session of his long legislative career. 

Back to list ⤒
Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Edyta Blaszczyk/Odessa American via AP

Rep. Brooks Landgraf

R-Odessa

Like most state legislators, Brooks Landgraf has two jobs. He’s a state representative and an attorney in private practice. The citizen-legislator model of governance creates an environment rife with potential conflicts of interest. Most lawmakers who engage in self-dealing dress it up in the cloak of public policy. Not Landgraf. He stands nude in the halls of power and asks us to pretend he’s clothed.

If you hate that metaphor, you’ll loathe this example of Landgraf in action: a wealthy Odessa couple hired him to represent them in a dispute with the six-hundred-person village of Volente, on the shores of Lake Travis, hundreds of miles east of his district. At issue was the couple’s $5.4 million lakeside mansion, an Airbnb party house that had spurred neighbors to complain about loud music, trespassing, and debauchery. In August, members of the unpaid Volente village council rejected the couple’s application for a permit to operate their short-term rental. In early March, however, Landgraf filed House Bill 3169, which eliminated the town’s ability to enforce its short-term rental ordinance. “I understand I probably won’t be handed a key to the city as a result of this bill,” Landgraf lamely joked. Later, when asked why he was carrying a bill for his legal clients, Landgraf insisted that he was merely acting in his capacity as a lawmaker. 

It’s understandable why he would have so much time on his hands to do favors for his clients. The committee he chairs, Environmental Regulation, has shown little interest in regulating the environment.

Representative Landgraf, you’ve been exposed.

Back to list ⤒

Bull of the Brazos

Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Brandon Bell/Getty

Sen. Roland Gutierrez

D–San Antonio

Gutierrez’s contributions at the Legislature have often demonstrated more passion than perspicacity. He tended to speak too often and for too long. But with the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Gutierrez found something worth being passionate about.  

After a special committee filed a politely received report in July 2022, intended to be a final official word from the Lege on the shooting before the session began, Gutierrez refused to stay silent. He drew public attention to legislative intransigence on a gun bill that, had it been in place before Uvalde, could have prevented the shooter from obtaining his powerful murder weapon. In a remarkable speech on the floor in May, Gutierrez challenged his colleagues to request the photo and video evidence collected at Uvalde so they could see it themselves. “I’ve been angry for a long time,” he said, his voice breaking. The pictures had changed him. “You’ve never seen so much blood in your life.” He told a reporter that Abbott and Patrick could “go to hell.”

Each session we name one lawmaker the Bull of the Brazos, a nickname first given to the late William Moore, of Bryan, who served as an influential and bumptious member of the Senate for 32 years, through 1981. Like Moore, our designees are big personalities: obstinate and willing to speak truth to power. 

Gutierrez’s persistent focus on gun safety hasn’t always served his constituents, who effectively have been without a senator this year. Patrick froze him out. Gutierrez filed 28 bills; none even got a hearing. It’s possible he’ll never be able to get much done as long as Patrick rules the Senate.

Some Democrats question Gutierrez’s motives. It’s likely he will run for U.S. Senate against Ted Cruz in 2024. “It’s about him and not the [Uvalde] families,” said one former Democratic staffer about Gutierrez.

Ambition is of course not uncommon among politicians who take on big causes. And which is more contemptible: that Gutierrez should talk about the children of Uvalde too much, whatever his reasons, or that so many other powerful Texans would prefer that we forget them?

Back to list ⤒

The Cockroach (Exterminated!)

Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Photograph by Bob Daemmrich

Rep. Bryan Slaton

R–Royse City

Many lawmakers win office hoping to wield power but quickly prove themselves ineffective. The tragedy of Bryan Slaton is that he aspired merely to be a nuisance, but proved unable to do even that, thanks to defects of judgment and character. He started this session as a Lege archetype: a right-wing gadfly who’d offer unpopular opinions and unpopular amendments. If he got up to speak, he was trying to mess up something the grown-ups were doing. This was the same Slaton from 2021, when we named him Cockroach—an old legislative term for a lawmaker skilled at being a persistent irritation. 

But in the run-up to House budget night on April 6, though, Slaton actually got to work. He filed 27 amendments. Then he didn’t show. The House General Investigating Committee, which gets up in lawmakers’ business only when something truly aberrant has happened, had received a complaint about Slaton. 

Turns out that Slaton, a married former youth pastor, had, according to multiple witnesses, invited a nineteen-year-old legislative aide to his residence, where, in full view of other young staffers, he supplied her with alcohol. The two then had sex. The committee published a damning report, he resigned, and the House expelled him anyway, the first lawmaker to be booted from office in nearly a century. The chamber voted 147–0 to bar him from the floor, the kind of tally a lawmaker would normally get only for resolutions celebrating Pecan Pie Day.

There have been multiple reports of sexual harassment and misconduct at the Legislature over the years, ranging from inappropriate comments to much more grave offenses, but Slaton’s case was so egregious, and he was so unloved to start with, that it prodded the chamber into rare action. The defining feature of cockroaches is that they’re hard to kill. Yet the Legislature rid itself of this one. Squish. 

Back to list ⤒

The Furniture

As inert as an oak lectern but with a lot less charm, these legislators spent one of the most consequential sessions in recent history doing—well, we’re not exactly sure what.

Rep. Philip Cortez

D–San Antonio

During the Democratic quorum break of 2021, he first betrayed the Democrats, then crossed the Republicans. But his story is no John le Carré novel, and Cortez is no operator. This session he was left with few allies and little power. 

Sen. Kelly Hancock

R–North Richland Hills

In 2023 Dan Patrick—kennel master of the Senate lap poodles—consigned Hancock to the doghouse as punishment for clashing with him last session over how to fix the electric grid. Hancock spent 140 days just licking his wounds. 

Rep. Sergio Muñoz Jr.

D-Palmview

Muñoz Jr. had a good session for a freshman lawmaker. The problem is he’s served in the House since 2011.

Rep. Charles “Doc” Anderson

R-Waco

A man of few ambitions, this retired veterinarian has accomplished all of them.

Reps. Stan Lambert, Dennis Paul, and John Raney 

R-Abilene, R-Houston, R–College Station

Folks say knowledge speaks but wisdom listens, so given these lawmakers’ aversion to taking the mic, we can only assume these are the three Wise Men. 

Back to list ⤒

The Elephant (Not) in the Room

Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg via Getty

Gov. Greg Abbott

After eight years in the Governor’s Mansion, Abbott was flush with campaign cash and politically secure. But a national profile of the kind that came easily to Florida governor Ron DeSantis eluded him, and, closer to home, he was widely perceived as terrible at persuading legislators to do his bidding. This session he sought to prove his critics wrong. 

He bet big on school vouchers, an easy sell in the Senate but not the House. Abbott attempted to exert pressure on rural Republican representatives by holding rallies at private Christian schools across the state. The governor misjudged how political power works in the House: members answer to voters in their districts and to campaign contributors, not to him. The regular session ended in defeat for many of Abbott’s priorities, especially the voucher proposal. 

Like many potentates before him who have failed to win respect at the negotiating table, Abbott found solace in moving toy soldiers around a map. At a May 8 press conference backdropped by troops boarding cargo planes, he answered one question about a recent mass shooting in Texas. Then he cut the conference short to be interviewed on Fox & Friends. The House is a bore, the Senate a snore, but the bright lights of right-wing TV give him unconditional love.

Back to list ⤒

The Era of Good and Bad Phelans

Best and Worst Legislators
Illustration by Neil Jamieson; Eric Gay/AP

Speaker of the House Dade Phelan

In January 2015, when Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick were sworn in to their current posts at a spectacular party on the Capitol’s south steps, a bright-faced freshman representative from Beaumont named Matthew McDade Phelan was figuring out how to decorate his tiny office buried in the building’s underground extension. Six years later he ascended to the Speaker’s apartment—an astonishing rise. But it wasn’t until this year that Phelan stepped into his power.

In January Phelan’s grip on the gavel seemed weak. Many of his lieutenants were the former lieutenants of his predecessor, Dennis Bonnen, who retired amid scandal. They looked as if they belonged on fraternity row, and sometimes behaved that way. And the ghost of Bonnen lingered: while he haunted the halls in his new capacity as an extravagantly paid lobbyist, his brother, Greg, wrote the House budget. 

Meanwhile Phelan faced pressure from Abbott, Patrick, and state Republican Party officials, with each pulling him in different directions. Patrick, incensed about Phelan’s plan for cutting property taxes, which conflicted with his own proposal, called him California Dade, among the most damning charges he’s ever leveled at a leader of the House. Phelan seemed to be losing control. 

But the spring brought a series of extraordinary developments and reversals. Phelan boldly, and quietly, empowered the House to investigate Ken Paxton, one of the few statewide officials not regularly attacking him—at least, not until the attorney general preempted the announcement of the investigation by saying Phelan was a drunk who should resign. And then, as the end of the session approached, the House and Senate deadlocked, killing many big bills. Patrick blamed Phelan’s intransigence. But when Abbott called his first special session, he strongly endorsed Phelan’s tax-cut bill—which primarily would benefit businesses and wealthier homeowners—over the lieutenant governor’s. 

Patrick and Abbott began sparring, relieving pressure on the House—while Phelan’s other enemies scrambled to react to the Paxton inquiry. The Speaker had emerged stronger. The day after the regular session ended, Patrick complained that Phelan was the reason he had to “take Tylenol three times a day.” Who would have thought this polite, sunny man could be so vexatious?

Back to list ⤒

This article originally appeared in the July 2023 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Best & Worst Legislators 2023.” Subscribe today.

Opening illustration photography credits: Patterson, Patrick: Bob Daemmrich; Abbott: Sergio Flores/AFP/Getty; Phelan: Eric Gay/AP; Paxton: Jacquelyn Martin/AP