The social conservative group Texas Eagle Forum today put House members on notice that their vote for speaker will account for half of the group's rating of them this session.
"We at Texas Eagle Forum believe the vote for speaker of the Texas House is so important we will be weighing this one vote as 50 percent of the total score," Pat Carlson of Fort Worth, the group's president (above, staff photo), said in an email. "Please remember who elected you and why you were elected."
Rep. Burt Solomons, a top lieutenant to current Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, responded by saying Eagle Forum has marginalized itself.
"If you vote for Straus, ... unless they're grading on the curve, you're already starting out with an 'F.' So they become irrelevant," said Solomons, R-Carrollton. He said many members will know they can't get a decent score and will cease paying any heed to the group, which strongly opposes abortion rights and is a happy combatant in what it calls the culture wars. "When you go to those extremes, you become irrelevant," Solomons said.
Carlson, though, said his remark "doesn't make sense." Any Straus supporter must be turning a blind eye, she said, to the speaker's deviations from the conservative line -- especially, his committee assigments last session, when the House was divided 76-74.
"If they're not paying attention to the speaker's race -- with all the outrage about it that's amongst the conservative organizations and the electorate -- they wouldn't be paying attention anyway," said Carlson, who was chairwoman of the Tarrant County GOP between 2000 and 2005.
Source: http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2011/01/eagle-forum-calls-speaker-vote.html
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