In June, Empower Texans leader Michael Quinn Sullivan revealed that he had secretly recorded a meeting with House Speaker Dennis Bonnen during which, the right-wing hardliner alleged, the speaker presented him with a quid pro quo proposition: the Speaker would provide press passes to MQS’s staff in exchange for MQS directing the political spending of his PAC, Empower Texans, toward certain Republican targets. Since first mention of the tape, its specific contents have been an obsession of all who closely follow Texas politics.
After several weeks of speculation and a slow drip of leaks, MQS finally released the full recording—and it basically confirms everything that he had been saying all along: That Bonnen had indeed wanted MQS to dial down his heavy-handed enforcement of conservative discipline in GOP primaries and instead help Bonnen protect his Republican House majority against the advancing hordes of liberal Democrats. It also confirms that Bonnen proposed a potentially legally dubious political transaction, fueled by the hubris that he could convince Sullivan, the founder of a well-financed PAC that excels at funding right-wing challengers to GOP incumbents, to serve as his hired hand. The final confirmation is of the dog-bites-man variety: The Speaker is conniving, arrogant, and power-hungry, i.e., a politician, though one with little respect for his fellow members in the Legislature.
The recording depicts a more than hour-long meeting between MQS, Bonnen, and House Republican Caucus Chair Dustin Burrows in the Speaker’s office in June, shortly after the 2019 legislative session ended. The tape, an incredibly rare glimpse behind the curtain of power, illustrates—to almost farcical degrees—the cynicism, vindictiveness, and ugliness that sits at the heart of the Texas GOP’s political project. The group’s conversation also articulates the enemy that animates the politics of Texas’s political majority: an obsessive hatred of liberals and local governments—which to them are one and the same.
