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A group of 46 Republican House members and nominees pledged Friday to only back a speaker next session who commits to ending the tradition of appointing Democratic committee chairs — a move that narrows the path to the gavel for House Speaker Dade Phelan, who has vowed to continue the longstanding practice.

To be elected speaker, a House member must secure 76 votes, a majority of the 150-seat chamber. Democrats control 64 seats, meaning a speaker hopeful could theoretically win with full Democratic support and around a dozen of the 86 Republicans. To prevent this scenario, Phelan's rivals have called for speaker candidates to reach a majority by only soliciting GOP support.

That was already a remote possibility for Phelan, a Beaumont Republican who has been a lightning rod for the GOP's ultraconservative wing since he backed the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton last spring. The House is set to include more than 20 GOP members next session who have explicitly vowed to oppose Phelan.

But Phelan still hoped to build a winning coalition that included a majority of House Republicans, even if he also leaned on some Democratic support. With Friday's pledges, Phelan can now secure a GOP majority only by abandoning one of the most powerful olive branches available to secure Democratic backing.

Former GOP state lawmaker Ron Simmons argued on social media that the repudiation of Democratic chairs by a majority of House Republicans “opens up for the real possibility of a liberal Republican to gather 10-15 similar R's and all the D's and be the Speaker” — the very scenario Phelan's critics are hoping to forestall. Some anti-Phelan House members and nominees acknowledged the risk but said it would be worth it to expose the GOP defectors and oust them in the primaries in another two years.

“We're here for it,” Mitch Little, an attorney and House GOP nominee, responded to Simmons. “That will be another 10-15 Republicans back in the workforce, stimulating the economy in 2026.”

The anti-Democratic chair pledges were first reported by The Texan. A spokesperson for Phelan did not respond to a request for comment.

Hardline conservatives have been trying to stave off bipartisan speaker coalitions ever since 2009, when former GOP Speaker Joe Straus won the gavel with a bloc of around a dozen Republicans and most Democrats in the House. Straus went on to serve five terms as speaker, often serving as a moderating force against the more conservative Senate.

Another House Republican nominee, Brent Money, argued that GOP speakers have relied on Democratic support ever since — and that putting members on record will only make it harder to win the gavel through the usual route of backroom talks and deal-making.

“Without this commitment [to oppose Democratic chairs] from a majority of the Republican caucus, the scenario you described is a certainty, as it has been since 2009,” Money said to Simmons. “The difference is that if they run that play this time, it will be on the floor in the light of day instead of under the cloak of darkness.”

Phelan's allies have bristled at comparisons to Straus' coalition. The Beaumont Republican, who took over as speaker in 2021, first announced he had the votes to become speaker in late 2020 with a group of 51 Republicans — including himself — and 32 Democrats. Ahead of last year's legislative session, in a closed-door meeting where Republicans picked who they would nominate for speaker, Phelan won 78 GOP votes, with only six defections.

The debate over Democratic chairs has intensified over the last year or so, becoming a major point of contention for Phelan's critics and emerging as a surprisingly prominent issue in the speaker's own primary, which he narrowly won earlier this week. Last February, already facing a push from the right to reduce Democratic influence in the GOP-led chamber, Phelan selected Democrats to chair eight of the 34 standing committees, down from the 13 he appointed at the start of the prior legislative session.

He has kept Republicans in control of the most coveted and powerful committees, like those that control spending and taxes.

Phelan has continued to defend the practice, telling Spectrum News in March that it made the Texas Legislature “unique, because we have a bipartisan relationship here.”

“This has been going on for decades and decades and decades,” Phelan said. “It keeps us from being like Washington, D.C., where everything shuts down. We don't want the chaos that is in Washington, D.C. We want to get things done for the folks here in Texas.”

Some critics of the tradition have struggled to define specific GOP policies blocked by Democratic chairs, though they insist the positions have been used to create roadblocks in recent sessions.

State Rep. Shelby Slawson, R-Stephenville, announced this week she was challenging Phelan for speaker, announcing her bid in a letter to fellow Republicans in which she condemned the speaker's vow to “continue that power sharing practice over the objections of a large faction of members and an even larger, disapproving Republican party.”

“Last session I gave too much benefit of the doubt to leadership's power sharing with Democrats and then spent many frustrating hours trying to overcome the obstacles created by their empowering minority members at the expense of the majority,” Slawson wrote.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, one of Phelan's main political rivals, praised the letter of anti-Democratic chair pledges and said it meant the only way Phelan could only be reelected “is by a handful of a small minority of Republicans and a huge majority of Democrats.”

“That would be a kick in the teeth to Texans who elected an overwhelming Republican House majority,” Patrick posted on social media.

Before the letter was released Friday, Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said that if Phelan “is forced to form an explicit coalition with Democrats to retain his speakership,” that could lead to less conservative policy-making — the opposite of what his hard right enemies want.

“Ironically for the state's most conservative Republicans, if Phelan returns as speaker in 2025 by winning a majority vote in the Republican Caucus and without the overt need to broker a deal with Democrats, he'd end up with more flexibility to pass priority conservative legislation,” Jones wrote in the Houston Chronicle.

Disclosure: Rice University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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EAGLE PASS — Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday welcomed the first group of Texas National Guard troops to move into a new 80-acre base being built here as part of the state's $11 billion border initiative.

The base, located on the southern edge of the city, has a dining hall with chef-served meals, dorms that will give each soldier a room and a pavilion where troops can have picnics or put up a basketball hoop. Three hundred troops — who have been living in hotels and other temporary lodging in the region and commuting up to an hour to the border — moved in Friday morning, marching single file with their backpacks and rifles into the food hall.

Officials estimate the base will help the state save $11.5 million a month in lodging costs. The state has not released the cost of building the base.

“This base camp is a far superior strategy that for one will allow the state to be able to have our troops right on the border itself,” Abbott said, speaking in front of troops, humvees and a helicopter. “But for another, provide the type of housing and standards of living that improve the quality of life for the men and women who are wearing a uniform.”

Thousands of Texas Guard members have been deployed to the border since the state began Operation Lone Star in March 2021. Along with Department of Public Safety troopers, they are tasked with patrolling the border and apprehending asylum-seeking migrants, who are often charged with trespassing on private property.

A 2022 investigation by the Military Times and the Tribune found that one in five troops reported problems with their pay, shortages of critical equipment and living in cramped trailers. At least four members died by suicide in the first few months after the mission began.

A group advocating for a compassionate approach to border and environmental issues denounced the base's opening.

In a statement Thursday night, the Eagle Pass Border Coalition pointed to its location next to a sewage treatment plant and a concrete plant that could expose soldiers to health risks. The group also juxtaposed the state's investment in the base with the lack of state investment in nearby colonias — low-income neighborhoods that don't have basic infrastructure like running water.

“This is a waste of funds; there is no significant threat,” Eagle Pass native Yocelyn Riojas said in the statement. “Our tax dollars could be used investing in our community.”

Five phases of construction remain to be completed, each one expected to take about 30 days and providing housing for 300 more troops.

The base is the latest in a state buildup in Eagle Pass, which has been the center of a standoff with the federal government after the state began deploying concertina wire along the Rio Grande and seized a public park against the city's wishes. Thousands of migrants once crossed the border into the city a day, but now only a handful enter, Abbott said.

The state will keep its presence at the border unless “we have a president who's actually gonna fully enforce” federal immigration laws, Abbott added Friday.

“The people who are in charge of bringing people across the border illegally are the drug cartels. The drug cartels haven't closed out business, they haven't gone away,” Abbott said. “We cannot relent in our security of the border.”

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When Texas state Sen. Charles Perry sat down this week in a packed room at the state Capitol to hear testimony on whether to ban some psychoactive hemp products from being sold in the state, he already knew what was coming.

The Lubbock Republican's 2019 agricultural hemp legislation — a bipartisan, farmer-friendly bill — had opened up the state's hemp industry and, in doing so, touched off a massive new consumable hemp market in Texas as well.

Perry had suspected at the time, he said at a Senate committee hearing on Wednesday, that the new law would eventually be exploited by an expansive and unregulated retail market dealing in psychoactive products.

Sure enough, the sale of cannabis products in Texas soared as the loopholes Perry worried about in his own bill remained open for the next five years.

“I told these retailers, ‘If you guys screw this up by being cute and getting people high off it, there will be consequences,' ” he said during a Texas Senate State Affairs Committee interim hearing on consumable hemp on Wednesday. “I'm disappointed, but I'm not surprised that we are here today.”

Retail cannabis dispensaries sprang up by the thousands in the wake of Perry's legislation — an enabling statute that followed a similar federal farm bill the year before. Now, state lawmakers are waking up to a hemp-boom hangover and realizing that the time has long-since arrived to start getting a handle on an exploding market.

Five years after hemp sales were greenlit by state and federal regulators, Texas is home to more than 7,000 registered consumable hemp retail spots — in gas stations, store fronts, bars, coffee shops, strip malls and mobile trailers — selling gummies, candies, drinks, and smokeables with low-dose tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.

That certainly, Perry says now, was not the intent of the legislation. While stopping short of suggesting an outright ban on those products, Perry indicated that the burgeoning industry was in for some much stricter regulations — at the very least — when lawmakers convene in their regular session next year.

“With statute, we can clean this mess up that the industry chose to do,” Perry said. “Because clearly it was foretold this could happen, and now we've got people getting high off of something in Texas we have said we don't do, and it's by virtue of a very ‘cute' industry making a lot of money at people's expense. I hope we fix this. It's time. It's past time, actually.”

Consumable hemp products contain industrial hemp or hemp-derived cannabinoids, including the non-intoxicating cannabidiol known as CBD. They may not contain more than 0.3% concentration of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the intoxicating part of the cannabis plant that comes in forms known as delta-8, delta-9 and THCA.

The difference in the legal and illegal products lies in the plants from which they come. Hemp and marijuana plants are both cannabis plants. Marijuana plants have high THC. Hemp has low THC.

Texas is one of about a dozen states that has not legalized marijuana in any form for broad use. The state's very narrow Compassionate Use Program allows medical marijuana, which can contain up to 1% THC by weight, to be prescribed and distributed for a short list of conditions. About 8,000 people participate in the program.

But state and federal law allow dispensaries in Texas to sell hemp-derived products that look, taste and sometimes intoxicate similar to their more potent sibling — with no age limits, loose and inconsistent testing requirements, and no limit on the number of licenses allowed in the state.

And because only one THC form, delta-9, is singled out in the laws, products made with other types of THC — the synthesized molecule known as delta-8 with similar structure and effects and another one called THCA that's derived from immature plants — can be produced and sold within the gray area of the law and with no limits at all. There are at least 10 cannabinoids in the market right now, experts testified, and yet only one is regulated.

Absent that clarity, state health officials' attempts to regulate those products through agency rules have been met with lawsuits and injunctions.

Meanwhile, Texas rakes in taxes and fees as retailers thrive among increasing public calls for better research on and access to potential health benefits of low doses of THC and its non-psychoactive relative, CBD.

While the state comptroller's office doesn't keep track of how much sales tax the hemp industry brings in specifically, retailers testified that they are without a doubt contributing to the state's robust economy.

“We have already paid $1 million in state taxes, and we are one small fish in a big pond,” said Kyle Arora of Texas Happy Club LLC and Green Genius Supplies in Houston, who said he supports “a forward thinking approach that aligns with Texas' pro-business ethos.”

But some in the medical and scientific community warn that the products are often found to contain heavy metals, pesticides and fungus — not to mention much higher amounts of THC than the law allows.

They also expressed deep concern about how the brightly colored, sweet-tasting gummies, chocolatey brownies, and fizzy drinks in bright-colored cans are enticing to young people and sold in locations that are easy for them to find.

The situation finds Texas lawmakers struggling to balance constituents demands for medicinal cannabis products with a wildly growing market that is outpacing meaningful regulation, enforcement and safety standards.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick gave them some direction, as well as an indication of his interest in the issue, earlier this year when he told the State Affairs committee to look into the sale of consumable hemp in Texas before lawmakers meet in 2025.

His charge to the panel included possibly banning products containing delta-8 and delta-9 or looking into more regulations on those products, as well as investigating their marketing to and access by children.

Banning any of the delta products outright was met with a smattering of support by anti-drug advocates and some parents, but saw mostly opposition from the witnesses this week.

The notion of better standards and more resources to enforce the law, however, was an idea that few people — from retailers to consumers, doctors to chemists to law enforcement to the lawmakers themselves— argued with during the five-hour discussion in Austin.

If they address the issue during the next session, lawmakers could consider age limits, childproof packaging, advertising restrictions, strict third-party testing rules, adjustments on how the THC is measured inside the products, and licensure of retailers instead of simple registration.

Several argued for regulations in conjunction with making the medical marijuana program more accessible, saying the state should keep both avenues available to those seeking their benefits.

“Many veterans prefer delta-8 and delta-9 because it's cheaper and more accessible,” David Bass, president and founder of Texas Veterans for Medical Mariuana. “Common sense regulations …are, in my opinion, more logical than banning them.”

Texas health and law enforcement officials painted a complex picture of their attempts to separate the legal from the illegal, to find useful ways to enforce vague laws with no dedicated staff, and to protect the rights of businesses owners and consumers to defend their access to a legal product.

Texas state troopers charged with enforcing drug laws find it difficult to determine if someone's vape pen, gummy or even smokeable flower in a pipe is the illegal marijuana or the legal consumable hemp — and therefore it's nearly impossible to enforce those laws, said Major Mark Melson of the Texas Department of Public Safety's criminal investigation division.

“There's a lack of clarity in current law,” Melson testified. “There are no roadside presumptive field tests that distinguish the differences. Drug-sniffing canines are unable to make the distinction between hemp and marijuana, and from an officer's perspective, it's not possible to make a distinction between legal and illegal based on sight and smell.”

State health and agriculture officials, who oversee the state's consumable and agricultural hemp industries respectively, said they have rules on the books that allow them to enforce things like the allowable level of THC in the legal products, the testing of those products, and whether a retailer or manufacturer is legally licensed or registered by the state.

But their staff is stretched, said Tommy Stevenson, who leads the Texas Department of State Health Services' consumer protection division. With the agency's six enforcement officials, he said, the state could do a visit to every retailer about once every five years. Another six are being trained to join them and that will help drop that to three years, he said. Most of the enforcement right now is complaint based, he said.

The hearing on Wednesday included a broader discussion over the potential expansion of the Compassionate Use Program and the potential for pot to be eventually legalized in Texas for recreational use as a way to raise state income, reduce competition with legal weed states, and decrease criminal activity around the black market.

State Sen. Jòse Menendez, D-San Antonio, said it's time Texas begin considering “the reality” of cannabis demand by residents, whether it's for medical or recreational uses, and potentially join other states that have passed cannabis laws that allow consumers to be able to trust that they're getting good products.

“We need to come to the realization that we opened the door,” Menendez said. “I'm not trying to be argumentative, but people have been getting high in this state for a long time. So people feel that by going to a vape shop and buying something, they're buying something that's safe. And the reality is that it's probably safer for them to use a product that's not currently legal in this state, and we need to have a long conversation about that.”

Both of those ideas, while supported by some grassroots on both ends of the political spectrum, have an uphill battle in socially conservative Texas.

“We had a conversation about that in 2019, and we were clear that in Texas we do not want to legalize pot,” said Perry, who supports the state's limited medical marijuana program but not wider expansion of marijuana laws.

There is a much higher chance, however, of movement on hemp, which has a less-divisive public persona thanks to its place in the wellness market, as well as the support it has in the agricultural community as a money crop for industrial use, such as for clothing and rope.

Consumers and retailers, who filled the committee hearing and an overflow room on Wednesday, argued passionately for the ability to continue buying and supplying products they argued had, in some cases, saved their lives, their marriages, their health and their mental states.

The current unregulated environment only serves bad actors, the retailers say, and lack of oversight threatens their industry's ability to survive long-term. On the flip side, a total ban would be no better, they argued.

“The impact of a ban would be far reaching and devastating,” Mary Tello, Co-Founder Green Haus Wellness in Austin, told senators. “Banning delta products would not only jeopardize businesses like mine but also undermine the economic and social fabric of our community. I urge policymakers to consider broader implications, and work toward solutions to support both public health and economic vitality.”

Medical marijuana advocates and industry insiders argue vehemently against the state allowing any sale of those products that would encourage replacing the medical-grade, higher-THC marijuana extracts and gummies that a few thousand Texans can obtain through the Compassionate Use Program, the state's narrow medical marijuana program.

The heavily regulated products in that program have much more research and oversight than the consumable hemp products in question, both on the state and federal level, and Texas probably has “one of the safest compassionate use programs in the country,” said Nico Richardson, CEO of Texas Original, the leading medical cannabis provider in the state.

Consumable hemp products with THCA and delta-8 and 9, by contrast, have not been approved by federal regulators for health uses — and nor has there been any federal stance taken against their health claims, underpinning the uncertainty around those products and opening the door to wide interpretation of their benefits.

The state has no jurisdiction over the out-of-state labs used to test the consumable hemp products for the legal limit of delta-9 and so no way to verify the results — and no legal requirement to test the levels of any other THC compound in the products, Richardson said. As a result, many products enter the market with THC levels well over the legal limit, he said.

Meanwhile, patients are exiting the medical pot program in droves because the regulatory environment surrounding it — while making the product safer — makes it a more expensive product and much harder to access than consumable hemp since it can't be distributed in dispensaries like hemp can, Richardson said.

The number of patients in his program, for example, has dropped by half since 2022, Richardson said. That threatens the existence of the program and puts patients at risk, he said.

“The intoxicating hemp industry in Texas has been marketed as something that's legal, safe and capable of self-regulation,” Richardson said. “However, many hemp products are highly intoxicating, more potent than what's offered in the medical CUP program, and dangerously unregulated.”

The committee plans to meet at least one more time to consider the issue and begin developing some plans for new legislation, senators said. Perry blasted the retail consumable hemp industry for what he described as its refusal to support regulatory changes in the past while now seeming “shocked at what's been happening.”

“This industry knew exactly who they were marketing to and how they were going to get that market opened up,” Perry said. “Now we've got their attention.”

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