Thursday could determine whether the Lone Star State gets five more Republican-leaning seats next Congress. Yet the state’s Texas-sized influence is beginning to wane.
The Texas GOP delegation is losing its clout due to a combination of redistricting, retirements and bids for higher office.
The group is on track to lose the seniority and committee gavels it once wielded to influence key decisions in the House. With six retirements looming and another five new GOP-leaning seats in the proposed map — the Supreme Court could decide as soon as Thursday whether to approve it — the state is looking at potentially 11 new members in a 30-member delegation.
“There’s going to be a lot of introductory lunches, that’s for sure,” Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-Texas) told POLITICO, noting it’s going to be a “drastic change.”
For decades, the GOP delegation was known for guarding its influence, holding weekly lunches to strategize, amassing seats on the influential steering committee that determines committee assignments and often voting as a bloc on key matters.
But the fact that President Donald Trump started his aggressive redistricting campaign with Texas — and that it proceeded at all — reflects the state’s relative impotence in Trump’s Washington. Republicans wary of the effort eventually folded under pressure from the president, and since then, a fifth of the delegation has announced plans to leave.
Those retirements include Budget Chair Jodey Arrington and Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on two key committees for over a decade. At the start of Trump’s first term, Texas had seven gavels, including influential Armed Services, Financial Services and Ways and Means panels and three coveted Appropriations subcommittee chairs. Now, Texans hold only three committee gavels — including Arrington — and no Texans serve in the House GOP’s elected leadership.
“We were powerful,” said Rep. Roger Williams (R-Texas), who chairs the House Small Business Committee, recounting what the delegation was like when he first arrived in 2013. “But that all cycles.”
What else we’re watching:
— Van Epps seated: Speaker Mike Johnson will swear in Rep.-elect Matt Van Epps (R-Tenn.) on the House floor at 9 a.m., giving the GOP a 220-213 majority.
— Health care talks: Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) plan to introduce a new framework at 9:30 a.m. to reduce health premiums as lawmakers scramble to figure out what to do about expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies. It includes a one-year extension of the subsidies with new guardrails to crack down on fraud and a menu of separate pay-for options — not in the form of subsidies — to keep premiums low.
Senate Democrats are expected to propose a three-year extension of the subsidies, which Senate Majority Leader John Thune said was “designed to fail.”
— NDAA hurdles: Final legislative text on the annual defense authorization bill was originally expected Thursday but has been delayed as GOP leaders work through eleventh-hour intraparty issues that could put its passage in jeopardy. Leaders are now aiming to unveil bill text by the end of the weekend.
Meredith Lee Hill, Jordain Carney, Connor O’Brien and Joe Gould contributed to this report.
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