The Hill: “An acrimonious race for Speaker of the Texas House is splitting the state GOP — and forcing a confrontation between the body’s warring Republican camps.
Competing Republican state Reps. David Cook and Dustin Burrows have each declared victory in the contest, along with a mandate for very different visions of Texas’s political future, and the role of Democrats as its minority party.
The fight comes as part of a years-long battle between the state’s old Republican establishment and an ascendant far-right “reformer” movement backed by Texas’s leading executives — as well as national Republicans like Donald Trump Jr., the son of President-elect Trump.
On Monday morning, the president-elect’s son and adviser threw his support behind Cook, a Tarrant County Republican who rose to prominence in his challenge against former state House Speaker Dade Phelan (R)….
“The Speaker’s race is over,” Burrows told reporters over the weekend, according to The Texas Tribune. “I have secured enough to be Speaker of the House for the next session.”
Burrows claimed to have secured 76 of the chamber’s 150 votes from a combination of Republican and Democratic members. It’s not clear how he arrived at this number — both Republicans and Democrats have said they were included in error — but that majority would be enough to secure the Speakership.
Accurate or not, Burrows’s claim of victory infuriated the reformers, who now control the Republican Party of Texas.
That faction backs Cook, who has claimed victory as well, and accused Burrows’s supporters of trying to sabotage the process. “