2025 Texas Legislative session preview: Cannabis ban, school choice, sports betting

AUSTIN – A new legislative session begins at the Texas capitol on January 14.

FOX 7’s John Krinjak sat down with Scott Braddock, the editor of QuorumReport.com, for a preview.

House Speaker Battle

John Krinjak: We need a leader in the House, we still don’t have one. We were talking last month about the fight over the speakership. Where do things stand now?

Scott Braddock: You ever watch a baseball game where neither side is scoring? There’s tension, but it gets boring after a while. We’re kind of at a stalemate right now. You’ve got two Republicans who have declared their candidacies for Speaker. One at first had said that he had the votes, and he had it in the bag. That’s Dustin Burrows from Lubbock, but it turned out he didn’t have it in the bag. Some of the people on his list said that they didn’t want to be on his list and so he’s under the number of votes he needs to be Speaker.

David Cook, another one of the Republicans running, is basically topped out now because he had only said that he would work with Republicans and so there are no Democrats supporting him. It takes 76 votes to win, neither side has it, and so we’re going to have to wait probably all the way until the session starts on January 14th to figure out how this is going to go.

School Choice

John Krinjak: Talking about having the votes, Governor Abbott thinks he has the votes to get his school choice voucher plan passed this time around. Maybe that depends on who the speaker is, maybe it doesn’t, but what are your thoughts on the prospects for that moving forward this time?

Scott Braddock: Staying with baseball, a lot of this game is left to play. I’m not sure that the governor has the votes on this. It really depends on what the bill looks like. You can’t really count the votes on such a significant piece of legislation without knowing what the details are going to be and none of that has been figured out. As you said, it depends on who the leadership is in the House and what their attitude is about it. It may be that whatever the governor is pushing for specifically doesn’t really uh look all that attractive uh to House Republicans even after the brutal primary that they all went through last year where the governor did have some success in taking out those Republicans who disagree with him about the issue. So I think the governor shouldn’t count his chickens before they hatch. It’s not what you should do in a situation like this the governor still needs to work with the legislature to make it happen.

Ban on Cannabis

John Krinjak: Obviously school choice is a divisive issue. Another divisive issue potentially is the fight over cannabis. We saw Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick giving his endorsement to Senate Bill 3 which would ban all forms of THC here in Texas. How do you see that playing out?

Scott Braddock: I think this is something where Texas may go in the opposite direction of a lot of other states. I have had a lot of folks ask me about this. You had the lieutenant governor come out very forcefully and say that the state needs to ban any products that contain THC. He has what I think is a loose argument on this as far as the facts, but he’s arguing that you do have THC being sold in a way that’s not legal, but that there were some holes left in the law, in some previous legislation that was passed. He’d like to see a complete crackdown on all of this, and it’s one of those things I can imagine that he will be able to pressure at least most Republicans to vote his way on it and of course it’s a Republican legislature and if they have the numbers they’ll be able to do it.

Sports Betting

John Krinjak: We have some advocates for legalizing sports betting here in Texas who think 2025 could be the year. What are your thoughts about that issue possibly getting some traction?

Scott Braddock: I don’t think it’s going to go. I think Lieutenant Governor Patrick is doing a little dance on this. He’s not coming out and saying outright that he’s against casino and sports betting. Instead, he does a little sidestep on this, and he’ll say that it’s not really gaining traction. I do think this is one of those issues where the governor and lieutenant governor kind of want to have it both ways. They want the sports betting and casino interest to think that they have a shot, that they have a chance, so they’ll keep spending all that money in Texas politics, but at the same time there’s a huge hurdle for this effort because the Texas Constitution requires a change in the Constitution for you to have expanded gambling. That means a big threshold in the House and Senate. Two-thirds of the House and Senate have to vote for it, and then it goes to a vote of the people. All of the polling has indicated that if it ever got to a vote of the people, if we got to that part of the process, it would pass overwhelmingly. It is always just stuck inside the Texas capitol, where it continues to be a big fight.