Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to Empower Texans' Michael Quinn Sullivan: "You are destroying our party"
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Michael Quinn Sullivan, a hardline conservative activist long aligned with the head of the Texas Senate, publicly accused each other of “destroying” the Republican Party on Tuesday — seeming to further a rift that has emerged between the two longtime conservative allies.
The dust-up on Twitter started over gun rights, specifically Patrick’s recent support of requiring background checks for private person-to-person gun sales — an idea Sullivan opposes. But the most aggressive sparring came over a recording Sullivan secretly made of House Speaker Dennis Bonnen during a June 12 meeting at the Capitol. Sullivan has said he caught Bonnen and one of the speaker’s top allies on tape asking Sullivan to target 10 GOP lawmakers in the 2020 primaries, but Sullivan hasn’t made the recording public.
“BTW, release the tape,” Patrick tweeted at Sullivan. “You are destroying our party.”
To be clear, Bonnen and state Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, have forcefully pushed back against Sullivan’s allegations. And both, along with Patrick and other Republicans and Democrats, have also called on Sullivan to release his recording of the meeting. Sullivan has so far declined to do so, though he has allowed certain Republicans to listen to the roughly hourlong audio privately.
Responding to Patrick, Sullivan tweeted that the lieutenant governor hadn’t yet listened to the audio — and suggested that Patrick may be “too scared to make a moral judgment without a poll.”
Read more: https://www.lubbockonline.com/news/20190917/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-to-empower-texans-michael-quinn-sullivan-you-are-destroying-our-party
= new reply since forum marked as read
