AUSTIN — Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick wields vast power in the Texas Senate with a warm smile and a grandfatherly wit that belies the quietly relentless nature behind each gavel strike.
Since taking office in 2015, the three-term, 74-year-old lieutenant governor has remade the Senate in his image, allowing his conservative agenda to fly through with little resistance.
Patrick’s reign over the Senate puts him among the most powerful and successful policymakers in the history of Texas, but he isn’t stopping there.
Breaking an unwritten rule against meddling in the affairs of another chamber in the Legislature, Patrick is vigorously campaigning against House Speaker Dade Phelan, who is in a fight for his political life in a primary runoff.
If Phelan is defeated in the May 28 runoff against relative newcomer David Covey, Patrick would be rid of a rival he’s described as a failed Republican who ignores policies favored by conservatives. Patrick also would be a key step closer to changing the makeup of the House, which has not been welcoming to his priorities on border security, tax cuts, election fraud, school choice and other issues.
“The expiration date on Dade Phelan’s speakership is plainly written on the bottle,” Patrick said after Covey received 46% of the vote in the March primary to Phelan’s 43%.
Even if Phelan survives the runoff, he faces a fight to continue leading the House. State Rep. Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress, recently announced his campaign for speaker, a position selected by a vote of all 150 House members. Oliverson shares a political consultant with Patrick and is the lieutenant governor’s next-door neighbor.
Phelan has said Patrick’s attempts to influence House politics “crossed the Rubicon,” adding that many House Republicans do not appreciate his interference.
Patrick “is not satisfied with being lieutenant governor anymore,” Phelan said. “He wants to be speaker of the Texas House. And no one in the Texas House wants the lieutenant governor to be the speaker.”
The Dallas Morning News spoke to nearly a dozen current and former lawmakers, lobbyists and political experts for this story. The lieutenant governor’s office and Patrick’s campaign did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment, but Patrick has said his effort to oust Phelan is “not personal.”
“It’s about the policy that the people want us to pass that the House continues to kill,” Patrick told WFAA before the March primary.
Bill Miller, a veteran Austin lobbyist, said Patrick is seizing an opportunity against a speaker weakened by an unsuccessful attempt to remove Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from office.
“He’s, in my opinion, the most powerful guy in the state, and his power is growing,” Miller said of Patrick.
Patrick, Phelan relationship has long been broken
It’s no secret that Patrick and Phelan have had a fractious relationship.
The two often sniped at each other last year over policy differences on a multibillion-dollar property tax cut. At one point, Patrick said they had not spoken in two years — a far cry from the weekly leadership breakfasts attended by Patrick, the governor and then-Speaker Joe Straus during Patrick’s early tenure as lieutenant governor.
The Patrick-Phelan relationship took a further turn after the House voted overwhelmingly, with Phelan’s support, to impeach Paxton in May.
Patrick, who served as judge in the impeachment trial before the Senate, kept quiet until senators voted largely along party lines to acquit Paxton. In front of senators, House impeachment managers and cameras, Patrick criticized the process as flawed, rushed and unfair to Paxton. Patrick also called for an audit on House spending and said laws should be changed to prevent hasty impeachments.
Discussing the matter days later, Patrick said he asked Phelan about impeachment rumors when the two met to hash out differences in property tax cut proposals late in the regular session.
Phelan said he knew nothing, Patrick recalled, characterizing the speaker as untruthful or unaware of what his House leaders were doing.
Miller, the Austin lobbyist and a Paxton friend, said Phelan’s primary provided a chance for payback.
Patrick “is returning the favor, if you will, with interest,” Miller said.
Mark Davis, a conservative talk radio host, said the deep rift between Phelan and Patrick was the natural result of the House’s role as a backstop against some of the conservative legislation that has sailed through the Senate.
“The Paxton impeachment merely brought to the surface some procedural frustrations that have bubbled for years,” Davis said. “Phelan’s rush to impeach, featuring obvious pressure on many Republicans to get on board despite voters’ objections, led to a Senate trial that provided exhibit A on the differences between how each house is run.”
Patrick’s frustration bubbled over at the end of a special session in December when a chief conservative policy goal — taxpayer-subsidized private school tuition — failed in the House. In a lengthy news conference, he questioned the speaker’s leadership, saying Phelan should not be in power and was not fit to be in the Republican Party.
Patrick’s campaign against Phelan breaks tradition
It has been a long-standing tradition that the leaders of the Texas Senate and House do not interfere with the elections of the other chamber.
The 2024 primary season has seen that tradition broken. Beyond campaigning against Phelan, Patrick has campaigned against numerous incumbent Republicans, with mixed success.
Eight incumbents are locked in contentious GOP primary runoff elections. Patrick is campaigning against three of them, including Phelan.
Patrick is not the only statewide elected Republican opposing incumbents. Paxton has also sought retribution against several House members who led the effort to remove him from office. And Gov. Greg Abbott has campaigned aggressively against a cadre of Republicans who voted against his coveted private school voucher-like program.
Bill Ratliff, a Republican who served as lieutenant governor for a little over two years after then-Gov. George W. Bush was elected president in 2000, said he got along “famously” with then-Speaker Pete Laney, a Democrat.
“It would be frowned upon in my day,” Ratliff said of Senate leaders attempting to influence the choice for House speaker. “Speaker politics and internal Senate politics were very much riven.”
One of the Republican base’s rallying cries against Phelan is his adherence to the tradition of appointing members of both parties to lead committees.
The practice, dating to the earliest days of the Texas Legislature, is designed to promote bipartisan cooperation while rewarding legislators with subject matter expertise. The Republican Party of Texas and conservative activists pressed to end the practice in recent years, but Phelan declined, naming Democrats to chair nine House committees last year.
Patrick named one Democrat to chair a Senate committee during 2023′s legislative session, former Sen. John Whitmire, who is now the mayor of Houston.
Patrick signaled his intentions on first day in Senate
On Patrick’s first day as a senator in 2007, he called to change a rule requiring support from two-thirds of senators to allow a floor vote on a bill. Lowering the threshold, Patrick argued, would let Republicans advance legislation without support from Democrats. More importantly, it would curb Democratic power to block Republican legislation, he said.
He lost 30-1, but it gave a clear indication that the newly minted senator, a conservative radio personality and an energetic advocate for property tax cuts, was not interested in bipartisanship.
Former Sen. Kel Seliger, an Amarillo Republican, said it quickly became apparent Patrick would run the Senate differently than his predecessors after becoming lieutenant governor in 2015.
Patrick led the way toward cutting the floor-vote threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths of senators, effectively boxing Democrats out of the process. He would later march it down to five-ninths after Democrats flipped a Republican seat blue.
Seliger said informal rules also were established, such as one requiring Democrats to gain support from a significant number of Republicans before getting a floor vote.
Patrick’s legislative goals also became the Senate’s top priority, a situation that was hammered home after Seliger voted against two of Patrick’s priorities, badmouthed fellow Republicans and made a crude comment about a Patrick adviser.
Seliger was removed from leadership positions and relegated to a legislative backbencher as Patrick refused to allow floor votes on some of Seliger’s bills, even though he had enough support to pass them.
“Absolutely vindictive,” Seliger said of Patrick’s leadership. “The members know that and, particularly among Republican members, it makes them very compliant.”
He called Patrick’s move to influence the House’s makeup “shrewd.”
“You can see a situation here, where if the lieutenant governor has tremendous influence in the House, he doesn’t have to worry about negotiation and cooperation,” he said.
Should Patrick gain sway in the House, it could provide an easier path for his agenda to become law.
In 2023, Patrick priorities that failed or were watered down in the House included efforts to lower the bar for prosecuting voter fraud, ban Chinese citizens from owning property in Texas, bar cities and school districts from employing lobbyists and eliminate faculty tenure at public universities.
When Oliverson announced his campaign for speaker in the 2025 legislative session, Patrick’s influence was immediately questioned. When asked whether he thought Patrick was involved, Phelan told Texas Capitol Tonight, “110%.”
“I appreciate his service in the Texas House,” Phelan said of Oliverson, “but yeah, I don’t know why. I know who his neighbor is. His neighbor’s Dan Patrick.”
Oliverson and Patrick live in a gated community in the Houston suburb of Cypress.
During his announcement, Oliverson said he had not consulted Patrick, and Patrick has not commented on Oliverson seeking to become speaker.
“We do have a good relationship,” Oliverson said of Patrick. “So we do talk about things periodically. We have through the years about policy and other matters, and I’m sure we’ll have much to discuss.”
Oliverson did not respond to messages seeking comment for this story.