Bill Filing Opens Monday in Austin: Goodwin Will Hold the Senate Gavel, but Republicans Hold 18 of Its 31 Seats

The 90th Texas Legislature starts on paper today: bill filing opens Monday, the first concrete step between last Tuesday's election and the January 12 gavel. At the center of the Senate's session stands Vikki Goodwin, who will preside over the chamber as the first woman to hold the office of lieutenant governor - and as a Democrat presiding over a chamber her party does not control. Republicans hold 18 of the Senate's 31 seats.

The office she is taking is not the ceremonial post it is in most states. In Texas the lieutenant governor serves as president of the Senate, appoints its committees, decides which bills get a hearing and sets the order in which legislation reaches the floor. Goodwin, an Austin-area state representative since 2019, defeated three-term Republican Dan Patrick on November 3; Patrick conceded shortly after midnight, describing the outcome as a wave election in Texas and across the country. She is the first Democrat elected to the office since Bob Bullock, whose final term ended in 1999, and her win closes Patrick's 12 years holding the gavel.

How much that gavel is worth will be decided before any bill is heard. Before the election, Austin political journalist Scott Braddock reported that Republican senators had discussed changing the chamber's rules to limit how far an incoming Democratic lieutenant governor could steer the agenda. Any such change faces a vote of the full Senate when the session opens on Tuesday, January 12, 2027 - which makes the rules vote, not any piece of legislation, the session's first real contest.

Goodwin's own agenda is already specific. Her first priority is public school funding, and she wants to dismantle the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program - the $1 billion education savings account system the Legislature created last year - and move the money into public schools. 'Yes, I really want to take the billion dollars that we have going into that ESA program and bring it back into our public schools,' she told CBS News Texas. Her second pillar is expanding Medicaid, pointing to roughly five million Texans without health insurance. Neither is guaranteed a floor vote in an 18-13 Republican chamber, though the majority's members are not all drawing party lines: Sen. Bob Hall of Edgewood told CBS News Texas he has no plan to oppose bills simply on party lines, and named goals of his own, from physician-ordered transfusions to abolishing the state lottery. And one level up, the session could open with a first in state history: if Houston's Senfronia Thompson is elected House speaker, as she has announced she has the votes to be, a woman will hold the governorship, the lieutenant governorship and the speaker's gavel at the same time.