According to Texas Scorecard, local party committees may censure a Republican officeholder who has taken three or more actions in opposition to the party's principles or legislative priorities.
If such a resolution is sent to the State Republican Executive Committee (SREC), then penalties can be imposed with a three-fifths vote.
The committee has voted to concur with five censure resolutions for State Reps. Dade Phelan, Angelia Orr, Jared Patterson, Stan Lambert, and Gary VanDeaver but stopped short of invoking a "ballot ban" option.
It is considered an unprecedented attempt by the Texas GOP to punish elected officials for breaking with party protocol and signals an effort to enforce greater party loyalty amid an apparent civil war within the Texas Republican Party.
SREC member Christin Bentley says the main reason this action was taken was because the censured individuals stepped outside of the caucus to elect Dustin Burrows as House speaker over a far-right challenger.
"A minority of Republicans joined a majority of Democrats to elect the speaker," she relays. "That was a running theme in most of the censures. They included that as a violation of principles."
Five other representatives, including Speaker Burrows, were not censured.
"The ones that failed just didn't have as many violations," Bentley explains.
The practice of power sharing was changed in Texas just this year with the new rule that House committees must be led by a member of the majority party and the vice chairs must be members of the minority party.
This stripped Democrats of key leadership positions but gave them a degree of power in the chamber, allowing them to continue to pull the strings.
Conservatives criticized the 2025 House rules package for not fully removing Democrats from positions of power, and the censured representatives' support for the package was viewed as a failure to enforce a stricter party-line agenda, another break with party protocol.
The Texas House vote on this in January marked a sharp move away from the old sharing norms toward a more majoritarian, partisan model, and this development shows the compromises can be dismantled under the GOP's consolidated control.
Following the censures, the Texas GOP decided to campaign against the five lawmakers in the 2026 primary. However, two of the representatives, Phelan and Lambert, had already announced they were not seeking re-election.
Bentley says so many censures have never been approved.
"In the last biennium, we passed three," she notes.
