HOUSTON — The Republican Party of Texas (RPT) is hosting its biennial convention in Houston this week. The convention is expected to go much smoother than it did in 2020, when the City of Houston banned in-person events at the last minute and forced a makeshift online-only event.
With the event already in full swing, there will be many interesting storylines to watch for during the largest state party convention in the country.
Intra-party battles are expected as delegates to the state convention select the party’s legislative priorities and ratify the official platform.
The party chooses multiple items for lawmakers to prioritize during the upcoming legislative session. In 2020, the party decided on eight topics to prioritize: election integrity, religious autonomy, child gender modification, abortion, constitutional carry, monuments, school choice, and taxpayer-funded lobbying.
Then-party Chairman Allen West later added disaster powers as an executive item.
The RPT’s website lists many topics that the legislative priorities committees will discuss during the convention. They are:
- Medical autonomy
- Religious autonomy
- Parental involvement in school policy
- Critical race theory
- Inappropriate materials in schools
- Child gender modification
- School choice
- Inflation
- Unlawful migration
- Texas’ electrical grid
- Property taxes
- Gun possession and purchase
Whichever of these items makes it onto the final list of legislative priorities is decided by the 10,000 delegates to the state convention.
Platform committees will hold hearings to debate whether any amendments need to be made to the party’s current official platform, which states the party’s official position on various issues.
The committee works diligently to flesh out the tiniest of details, with the debates often turning tense for things as simple as the placement of a comma in the middle of a phrase.
This year some issues are bound to be hot topics for the platform committee to handle, including medical autonomy and government overreach.
The plethora of vaccine mandates across all levels of government and business created concern among Texas Republicans. Republican state lawmakers asked for a special session last year to ban all vaccine mandates. A ban on governmental vaccine mandates was on the agenda for the third special session called by Governor Greg Abbott in 2021, but lawmakers passed no legislation on the topic.
Another item that might draw tense debates is the Republican party platform’s explicit rejection of gay citizens in a section calling for more adoptions in Texas.
“We believe that, in the best interests of the family and child, the State of Texas should allow children to be adopted only by married or single heterosexuals,” reads the provision in the platform that has caused significant differences of opinions in the past.
The Republican party’s stance on LGBTQ issues will not only be highlighted within debates over the official platform but also with the rejection of the Log Cabin Republicans of Texas, an organization made up of pro-LGBTQ Republicans.
The Log Cabin Republicans have been denied approval to place a booth in the exhibition hall at every convention in recent memory, including this year. The Log Cabin’s Houston chapter received an email from the state party saying it would be allowed a booth this year but subsequently received another email saying the opposite. The RPT said the first email was sent by mistake.
Cat Parks, the RPT’s vice-chair, has criticized the Log Cabin Republicans’ previous rejections and again derided the decision this year.
“Looks like I’ll be skipping the Texas GOP convention booth hall,” she posted on social media.
Even though Parks said she would skip the convention booth hall, her position as vice-chair will be up for election at the committee, as will the role of party chair.
Current RPT Chair Matt Rinaldi has not yet drawn an official challenger, making him likely to retain the seat. Last July, Rinaldi took over the position in a special election conducted by the State Republican Executive Committee (SREC). Rinaldi replaced Allen West, who stepped down to challenge Abbott in the Republican primary for governor.
However, convention delegates, not the SREC, will now elect the chairman for the next two-year term.
Texas state code requires each party to have one man and one woman as its chair and vice-chair.
Parks will not be retaining the seat as vice-chair, leaving three leading candidates: Adrienne Peña-Garza, Alma Perez Jackson, and Dana Myers.
Peña-Garza is the three-term Hidalgo County Republican Party chair. Perez Jackson was the RPT’s vice-chair under former Chair James Dickey. Myers, the less known of the three candidates, is a medical consultant and a two-term vice-chair of the Harris County Republican Party.
The election for the chair and vice-chair will be on Friday, June 17. Delegates will finalize the list of legislative priorities and the official platform on the last day of the convention, Saturday, June 18.