Two Bexar County Republicans are among the GOP candidates and elected officials pushing their party to restrict Democrats from holding leadership roles in the next legislative session.

Of Bexar County’s three Republicans, Marc LaHood, who unseated state House Rep. Steve Allison (R-121st Texas House District) in the March primary, and state House Rep. Mark Dorzaio, who replaced the more moderate Republican Lyle Larson in 2022, have both signed a letter vowing to only support speaker candidates who agree not to appoint Democrats to chair positions.

John Lujan, who is fighting for reelection in a tough district this November, has not.

The move has irritated some of their Democratic colleagues, who say it would weaken the power of Bexar County’s 10-member state House delegation — which includes seven Democrats and three Republicans — and has historically teamed up on issues of local interest.

“LaHood is seeking to be a part of our Bexar County Delegation — made up of seven Democrats — while proclaiming that Democrats should be wholly shut out from legislating,” Bexar County’s Democratic lawmakers wrote in an open letter to him this month.

To conservatives, however, the policy is less about punishing Democrats and more about tightening the reins on their own party’s leader. LaHood said state House Speaker Dade Phelan doles out chair positions to Democrats in exchange for help shutting down their ideas, like a school voucher program that Gov. Greg Abbott wanted but didn’t make it across the finish line last session.

“Collectively, the Republican Party is in power, the Republican Party needs to figure out how to work together,” LaHood told the San Antonio Report. “Power was brokered between people, and the cost of that was some of the Republican priorities, whether it’s border security or school choice.”

The conservative wave that wiped out many longtime incumbents in the primary and runoff this year stopped short of unseating state House Speaker Dade Phelan, who has no plans to relinquish that role despite losing many GOP allies.

By aligning himself with House conservatives, LaHood could be part of a group that enjoys new power in the next session. Or, the group could enter the session in the crosshairs of a powerful speaker they’ve sought to rebuke.

“I’ll be blunt… we need a new speaker,” said LaHood, whose group is pushing for the Republican caucus to agree to a speaker nominee before Democrats are involved. Republicans control 86 seats in the 150-member house, and a simple majority is needed to elect a speaker.

“There’s 46 people that have openly signed in opposition [to maintaining the status quo], and I expect that number to continue to grow,” he said.

Both LaHood and Dorazio stopped short of signing a wider-ranging conservative manifesto, called the “Contract with Texas,” which aims to further restrict the speaker’s power and diminish Democrats’ power to propose legislation at all. It’s being circulated by some of Phelan’s biggest critics.

Meanwhile, House GOP leaders aligned with Phelan have already moved to punish several conservative lawmakers who campaigned against incumbent GOP moderates in the primary. They’re circulating a letter with a different set of conservative promises, one that doesn’t include torching relationships with Democrats.

Democrats, for their part, are confident they’ll be able to leverage their numbers to stop a conservative onslaught.

“The conventional wisdom is that a speaker’s race is a game of math,” state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer told a Dallas TV station. “As chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, I can give you 64 reasons why we will be relevant in this conversation,” he said, referring to the number of Democrat-held House seats.

House District 121

LaHood, who ran unsuccessfully for Bexar County District Attorney in 2022, surprised some political watchers when he emerged as the candidate to take on Allison, an ally of the speaker who blew up his longstanding relationship with Abbott when he opposed the governor’s school voucher plan.

LaHood’s campaign enjoyed a deluge of spending from Abbott in a primary that wound up focusing more on conservative priorities like border security and election integrity than education.

Now, headed into the November election, Democrats see the seat that was once represented by former House Speaker Joe Straus as one of the top pickup opportunities on the House map. Though Allison defended it easily in recent years, they’re banking on the district’s moderate Republicans being turned off by LaHood’s conservative politics.

“Over the last decade, House District 121 has long played a key role in bridging the partisan divide,” Bexar County’s Democratic lawmakers wrote in the letter. “Marc LaHood’s campaigning is nothing compared to how George W. Bush, Joe Straus, or Steve Allison governed.”

In an interview Monday, LaHood contended that if the Democrats were in power, their members would also complain if their leaders gave chair positions to Republicans.

“Why would they give power to people that are going undercut them? That’s the logic behind it,” he said.

He also noted that he’s not calling to cut them out of the process completely, as some other Republicans have.

“I want a functional House, but I want to be able to debate with people that I don’t agree with,” LaHood said.