October 08, 2025 04:37 PM UTC

At Least It's Not Your State Republican Party...Yet

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Texas Tribune’s Renzo Downey reports, the Texas Republican Party is embarking on a purity purge of their own elected officials that would make former Colorado Republican Party chairman and would-be state purger-in-chief Dave Williams blush:

The Republican Party of Texas’ governing board is set to meet in the state Capitol on Saturday to consider censuring state representatives who party leaders deem insufficiently conservative to bear the GOP brand, potentially banning them from the 2026 Republican primary ballot.

The tribunal will be the first of its kind, a daylong meeting to determine whether 10 Texas House Republicans tried to thwart GOP priorities during the Legislature’s 140-day session earlier this year. Although many Republicans lauded the 2025 session as the most conservative ever, some party activists believe members of House leadership scuttled long-sought GOP priorities and should be barred from the primary ballot under an untested rule adopted at the Texas GOP’s 2024 convention.

Among the lawmakers who could be formally reprimanded by the State Republican Executive Committee is first-term House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, who faces a lesser censure that would not explicitly threaten his access to the ballot. But seven members of his leadership team could be banned from the primary: Reps. Angie Chen Button of Garland, Cody Harris of Palestine, Jeff Leach of Allen, Morgan Meyer of University Park, Angelia Orr of Itasca, Jared Patterson of Frisco and Gary VanDeaver of New Boston. Two more retiring members could be banned, as well.

In Texas, Republicans have a rule on the books known as Rule 44, which evolved over the years from allowing the party to formally oppose censured Republican candidates, like the Colorado GOP did under Williams, to a legally dubious outright ban on censured candidates running in Republican primaries passed just last year:

[T]he rule contained a new requirement that prospective candidates affirm that they are not under censure, along with a provision allowing the SREC to direct county GOPs or the state party chair to bar censured officials from the ballot.

Suffice to say that Williams and his self-serving cohort of favored primary losers–excepting Lauren Boebert, of course, who alone among the 2024 anointed managed to win her congressional primary–would have relished the power to simply boot opposing candidates off the 2024 primary ballot in addition to turning the party machinery’s limited resources against them. It remains to be seen whether Texas Republicans will follow through on their threats to bar elected officials from the primary ballot, and then whether their actions against Republican candidates will withstand the inevitable legal challenge.

But in today’s Republican Party, it’s about making up the rules, and worrying about such trivial matters as legality…if possible, never.