He is rarely the public face of these efforts, preferring instead to use his money and influence behind the scenes. Harry Cabluck/APĭunn is a powerful figure in the ongoing struggle for the soul of the Republican party, a fight that has been waged for years between the fiscal conservatives who built the modern party and the social conservatives who want to claim it. Governor Rick Perry, right, talks with Michael Quinn Sullivan, left, before speaking during a “Don’t Mess With Texas” tea party rally at Austin City Hall on Wednesday, April 15, 2009. “There is no place in the speakership race for discussions of people’s religion or lack thereof”. Straus’s religion,” Sullivan told the magazine. In an interview with the Texas Observer, Empower Texans’ director, Michael Quinn Sullivan, called the emails “vile and disgusting.” But he also seemed to take a swipe at Straus. We now want a true Christian conservative running it.” Whether the email campaign was spontaneous or coordinated remains unclear. (While the tea party began as a protest against big government and certain Obama administration programs, as early as 2010 Texas tea party groups had started to morph into vehicles for socially conservative activism.) It wasn’t long after Dunn and Straus met for breakfast that tea party–style conservatives around the state started sending out emails and press releases pushing for a House leader who was both right-wing and a Christian as one member of the State Republican Executive Committee put it in a private note to another member of the committee, “We elected a House with Christian, conservative values. The driving ideological forces behind Dunn’s organizations are small-government libertarianism and a socially conservative agenda, the latter of which has been embraced by the tea party in Texas. Quite likely, a similar amount of his money has flowed in obscurity, through a maze of nonprofit foundations, some of which he controls and many of which hide their true identity and never report their donors. Federal candidates and super PACs have received $3.2 million of Dunn’s money since 2010. Since 2002, he has given at least $9.3 million in publicly reported campaign donations to Texas politicians. When secular governments stray from the Ten Commandments and try to make their own rules, he says, “you have a false perfect government with a false messiah.”ĭunn is probably the most influential donor operating in Texas today. He has stated repeatedly that our democracy must be brought into line with biblical laws. (Dunn begins speaking 58 minutes into the video.) “But pending that, yes, the ideal is a self-governing society.” Dunn’s notion of self-government, though, is different from that of most Americans. “The real biblical approach to government is-the ideal is-a kingdom with a perfect king,” Dunn told a Christian radio audience in 2016. Then the conversation moved on to evangelical social policy, and, according to Straus insiders, Dunn astonished Straus, who is Jewish, by saying that only Christians should be in leadership positions. He demanded that Straus remove a significant number of committee chairs and replace them with tea party activists supported by Empower Texans. He didn’t seem interested in hearing what the Speaker had to say. Bush (a friend of Straus’s mother) and U.S. With plates of eggs before them, Dunn and Straus sat at a table in the Speaker’s Conference Room, surrounded by dark pecan paneling, Audubon prints, and photographs of Straus family members posing with George H. W. Nevertheless, Straus regarded himself as fiscally responsible and thought he and Dunn might find common ground on that subject. Dunn, in other words, had done much to shrink the Speaker’s base of support. ![]() Straus, a San Antonio businessman from a well-off Republican family, had been chosen as Speaker in January 2009 by a coalition that comprised GOP fiscal conservatives like himself and all the chamber’s Democrats.īut in the 2010 election, the Democrats lost 24 seats. Dunn had helped bankroll the tea party surge in Texas, and an organization he started, Empower Texans, had attacked Democrats and participated in rallies across the state protesting property taxes and excessive government spending. ![]() It was an attempt, after a bruising election season, to extend an olive branch. In November 2010, as he was readying for his second term as Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, Joe Straus invited Midland oilman Tim Dunn to breakfast.
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