Austin, Texas August 10, 2017
Last Thursday, 14 members of the House Republican Caucus wrote a letter to Representative Tan Parker requesting a meeting to develop procedures that the caucus will follow to elect the Speaker of the House for the 86th session as prescribed for in the Republican Party of Texas platform.
Members who requested this meeting were Reps. Matt Schaefer, Jonathan Stickland, Valoree Swanson, Kyle Biedermann, Mike Lang, Matt Shaheen, Matt Krause, Cole Hefner, Scott Sanford, Jeff Leach, Bill Zedler, Matt Rinaldi, Tony Tinderholt, and Briscoe Cain.
At the present time, there are no rules set in place for an election of the speaker from within the caucus as the Republican Party of Texas platform calls for in Plank 70:
Plank 70 of the platform states: We oppose the use of pledge cards and call of the Republican members to caucus after each November general election to determine by secure secret ballot, their candidate for Speaker. We also call for the Republican members to vote as a unified body for their selected speaker candidate when the legislature convenes in regular session.
Today, Representative Tan Parker, House Republican Caucus Chair, has notified members that there will be a meeting on August 17thwhich is next Thursday at 9 am for the sole purpose of discussing and/or adopting procedures to determine the caucus’ nominee for the Speaker of the House in the 86th session.
It is very important that all members be present at this meeting and to publicly state that they will attend.
Contacting your House member can bring awareness to this meeting and can help determine if they will be in attendance. Contact info for House members can be found here.
1 Comments
Natalie
It’s about time. These common sense rules should have been in place long ago. They would help stop the game playing and let the house get on with doing the people’s business. I wonder what our state Rep, Giovanni Capriglione, thinks about this effort.