Texas Republicans Lose Their Committee Gavels as Democrats Take Congress

Four Texas Republicans who run committees in Congress will give up their gavels in January. Democrats won control of the U.S. House, the Associated Press reported early Wednesday, and CBS News projects they will hold at least 54 seats in the U.S. Senate, with races in Alaska and Mississippi still uncalled. Sen. Ted Cruz chairs the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. In the House, Rep. Jodey Arrington chairs the Budget Committee, Rep. Brian Babin chairs Science, Space, and Technology, and Rep. Roger Williams chairs Small Business. In a Democratic Congress those chairs go to Democrats.

The Texas seat that helped flip the Senate belongs to James Talarico. The state representative beat Attorney General Ken Paxton 5,444,982 votes to 4,249,373, or 55.1 percent to 43.0 percent, in unofficial returns from the Secretary of State, and he will take the seat John Cornyn has held since 2002. Texas had not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since Lloyd Bentsen won in 1988, according to FOX 9. Talarico will serve alongside Cruz, who won a new six-year term in 2024.

Texas was one of seven states where a Senate seat changed parties on Tuesday. The others were South Carolina, Kansas, Maine, Iowa, Ohio and North Carolina, CBS reported, and Republicans flipped no seat held by a Democrat. The House delegation from Texas went 24 Republicans and 14 Democrats on the congressional map the Legislature drew in 2025, the Texas Tribune reported.

The change that reaches furthest into Texas runs through the Senate Judiciary Committee, which screens nominees for the federal district courts in Texas. Under a long-standing practice, the chairman sends a blue form to the two senators from a nominee’s home state, and under Chairman Chuck Grassley a district court nominee needs a positive slip back from both. “Without the blue slip, home-state senators would have no input on who the president appoints,” Grassley said in 2025, as the Congressional Research Service quoted him. The practice is not written into the committee’s rules. The chairman decides how much weight a missing slip carries.

From January, the home-state senators for a Texas nominee will be Cruz and Talarico, and the chairman will be a Democrat. Sen. Dick Durbin, the committee’s top Democrat, is retiring, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has said he plans to seek the post, E&E News reported. Republicans are pushing to confirm nearly two dozen pending judicial nominees before the Senate changes hands, Reuters reported. The committee has also received paperwork on Justice James Sullivan, whom Texas voters removed from the Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday, for a lifetime federal judgeship in Austin.

Texans decided one of the seven Senate seats that changed parties on Tuesday. Voters in six other states decided the rest, and together those seats settled which party will run the committee that screens every federal district judge who will sit in Texas.