The Texas Monthly published its rankings of the best and worst legislators of 2023, based in part on how they voted on Governor Greg Abbott’s must-pass voucher legislation. The Governor spent months touring religious schools to sell his plan to subsidize their tuition. Two dozen Republican legislators in the House voted to prohibit public funding of private schools. Governor Abbott has promised to call special session after special session until he gets an “educational freedom” bill to pay private and religious school tuition. Those Republican legislators, known as “the Dirty Two Dozen” are standing in his way.

There are 150 members of the Texas House of Representatives. Eighty-six are Republicans; 64 are Democrats.

Here’s one big difference between the legislatures of Texas and Florida: Florida Republicans do whatever Governor Ron DeSantis tells them to do. Texas Republicans tell their governor to get lost when his plans are bad for their district.

That’s why Florida is going to spend billions on vouchers for whoever wants them, rich or poor, but vouchers were defeated in the Texas legislature by the votes of mostly rural Republicans.

The Texas Monthly writes:

Sound and fury signifying nothing: that’s the Texas Legislature, the overwhelming majority of the time. Lawmakers yell and scrap for 140 days every other year, nibble around the edges of issues that require urgent action, and typically produce little worth remembering. On two occasions, the Eighty-eighth Legislature stood tall: when the House expelled a member, Bryan Slaton, for sexual misconduct and again when it impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton. But for the most part the session was a drag.

It could have been different: this session offered transformational opportunities for Texas. The GOP’s control of redistricting in 2021 ensured safe seats for almost all its members for the rest of the decade, and lawmakers came to town with an unprecedented $33 billion budget surplus, the largest in state history. Previous generations of legislators would have danced with the devil at midnight to be so politically secure and have such ample patronage to dole out. Almost any dream, large or small, could be made real. Connect Dallas and Houston by high-speed rail? No problem. Pull Texas from near the bottom in spending per public school student? We could afford it.

To do any of that, state leaders would have had to put aside their petty intrigues and think big. Instead those intrigues shaped the session. Governor Greg Abbott invested the lion’s share of his political capital in a school-voucher program, knowing full well that rural members of the GOP deeply opposed it. Abbott offered those members their choice of a carrot or a stick and then when they wouldn’t acquiesce, tried beating them with both.

Here are some of the legislators who stood up to Abbott and blocked vouchers:

Representative Ernest Bailes, a Republican from Shepherd, Texas:

Bailes isn’t outspoken or otherwise prominent, like most of the lawmakers on these lists. The Republican has represented his rural southeast Texas district since 2017 but is rarely seen at the House microphones. The big dogs in the room might describe Bailes’s proposals this session as minor—one of his notable bills would have adjusted labeling rules for Texas honey producers.

Rural Republicans who support public schools were in the hot seat this session as the governor pushed a voucher program they saw as inimical to their districts’ interests. That fight brought out the best in Bailes, whose wife works as a schoolteacher and whose mother is a former school board president. The rurals held together and won. On two occasions Bailes won glory for himself.

One small victory came when state representative Harold Dutton, a Houston Democrat, claimed, while laying out a bill, that in one of the school districts in Bailes’s district just 5 percent of third-grade students could read at grade level. The school district was, in fact, “one of the highest-ranked districts in the state of Texas,” Bailes told Dutton from the House floor. Bailes wondered aloud what other falsehoods Dutton was deploying. Dutton’s bill was voted down, and it took him five days to resuscitate it.

A greater victory came when Public Education chair Brad Buckley asked the House to allow his committee to have an unscheduled meeting so that he could pass a hastily drafted voucher bill onto the floor—late at night, without a public hearing. In most cases, these requests are approved, no objection registered. But there, like Leonidas at Thermopylae, stood Bailes at the microphone.

Did Buckley really intend to bring an eighty-page bill to the floor without inviting public comment, Bailes asked? Buckley demurred. Did he not think Texas kids deserved better than “backroom, shady dealings”? Bailes, defender of Texas bees, had the powerful chairman dead to rights. The chamber sided with Bailes. Individual voices still matter in the House. Texans should be glad Bailes used his when it counted.

Representative John Bryant, a Democrat from Dallas.

Bryant is easily the most energetic new voice among Democrats. He’s well prepared. He’s principled. Elected in 2022, he just might be the future of House Democrats. Also: he previously served in the House before some current members were even born and is 76.

But it’s a Sylvester Stallone 76—not, say, a Donald Trump 76. He’s come out of retirement, he’s back in shape, and now he’s whipping up on the youngsters.

Bryant came back to Austin this year with a clear mission: to set an example of how to serve courageously in the minority. Because of his previous tenure in the Lege, he arrived with seniority, landing a nice Capitol office and, more important, a plum seat on the Appropriations Committee, which writes the budget.

Unlike many in his party who seem content to warm their seats, Bryant came armed with facts and tough questions. He impressed and unnerved his colleagues by making Texas education commissioner Mike Morath squirm over the sad state of education funding during a hearing on the budget. Bryant’s genial but ruthless grilling of witnesses earned him a visit from a Democrat cozy with House leadership. Would he please stop asking so many questions? It was upsetting the Republican chairman and jeopardizing certain Democrats’ pet legislation. Bryant declined the request. As he kept pounding—on raising the basic allotment for public schools, on the dismal state of the mental health-care system, on the need to increase funding for special education—he started winning over skeptical colleagues, who saw in him a model for principled opposition.

“Bryant is a folk hero,” said one insider. “He’s reintroduced the spirit of the Democrats in the seventies.” Said another: “John Bryant is a really good John Wesleyan Methodist who believes you do all you can, for as long as you can, for as many people as you can. And that is the only thing that is really motivating him.”

Senator Robert Nichols, Republican from Jacksonville.

There are no Republican mavericks in Dan Patrick’s Senate. But until a real iconoclast shows up, Robert Nichols will do.

Nichols, who represents a largely rural swath of East Texas where few private schools exist, has long opposed creating vouchers, which siphon money away from public schools. Patrick has long supported creating them. So it was notable when the East Texan schooled the lieutenant governor and voted against his voucher plan. “He’s managed to effectively represent his vast district in the politically hostile work environment created by Dan Patrick,” said a longtime Capitol insider.

And Nichols wasn’t just the lone Senate Republican “no” on school vouchers. He’s one of the few Republican legislators to support adding a rape exception to the state’s abortion ban and raising the legal age for purchasing certain semiautomatic weapons to 21. Both of these positions enjoy overwhelming public support yet remain politically untenable because the Republican Party is in thrall to campaign contributors and the 3 percent of Texans who decide its primary elections. When a state’s priorities are set by a small but vocal minority, standing up for broadly popular policies counts for real courage.

So far Nichols appears to have maintained a relationship with Patrick, and he’s been able to get several bills passed. Perhaps Nichols’s greatest accomplishment this session was making Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacogdoches, part of the University of Texas System. Membership in the UT System will provide the East Texas institution, which celebrates its centenary this year, with a much-needed infusion of money and energy.

The Texas Monthly left off a few outstanding Republican legislators who stand strong against vouchers. So I’m adding them here to my own list of the best legislators in Texas because they stand up for the common good and ignore Gregg Abbott’s demands. They are not afraid of him.

Glenn Rogers (R, Graford)

Glenn Rogers has been fearless in his fight for public education. He wrote this op-ed in the Weatherford newspaper at the beginning of the session: https://www.weatherforddemocrat.com/opinion/columns/rogers-defending-our-local-schools/article_8fb5b78c-1057-5a84-ba96-a60de51bd65c.html. And this one from last year against vouchers: https://www.brownwoodnews.com/2022/04/03/school-vouchers-a-slippery-slope/. Glenn is only in his second term. The billionaire Wilks brothers will come after him again in the 2024 primaries.

Steve Allison (R.-San Antonio)

Steve Allison from Alamo Heights in San Antonio. served on the Alamo Heights ISD school board for many years before running for the House in 2018. He has voted against vouchers and in favor of raising pay for teachers, librarians, counselors, and school nurses. He increased funding for women’s health care, providing lower-income women increases access to cancer screenings and mammograms.

Drew Darby (R.-San Angelo)

Drew Darby is a veteran legislator who strongly supports public schools and opposes vouchers. In this interview with the local media, he explains why he opposes vouchers. He says there is already plenty of choice in his district. The crucial issue, he says, is whether it is right to take money away from public schools and give it to schools that are completely unaccountable and that choose which students they want to educate. Greg Abbott can’t scare him! He has been recognized by the Pastors for Texas Children as a “Hero for Children.”

Charlie Geren (R.-Fort Worth)

Charlie Geren is a veteran legislator who has stood strong against vouchers repeatedly. He is clear about his advocacy for teachers and public schools. On his Twitter feed, he publicizes his support for teachers. He has been recognized as a “Hero for Children” by the Pastors for Texas Children. Greg Abbott can’t scare him!