Texas Republicans passed a platform Saturday that urges lawmakers to prioritize further tightening the state's election rules, including laws to bar mail-in balloting for seniors, require proof of U.S. citizenship to vote and close the primary. The delegates also called for legislation next session that would ban IVF, oppose "all efforts to validate transgender identity" and prohibit any form of tax-subsidized lobby.
The planks in the state GOP's platform and list of legislative priorities were adopted on the final day of the State Republican Convention in Houston with little debate.
Approval of the 58-page documents by the more than 4,000 delegates carries no force of law. Still, it is intended to guide the policy positions for Republican candidates and officeholders heading into the final months of the 2026 midterm election cycle. Typically, the GOP platform skews more conservative than most of the party's rank-and-file voters, and even Republicans running for statewide, legislative and congressional seats. But some of its planks are adopted if not immediately, then over the coming years.
Gov. Greg Abbott and other top Republicans who spoke at the convention enthusiastically embraced at least some aspects of several of the proposals, including a call to cut back property taxes.
"We need to disrupt property taxes as we know them," Abbott said when he addressed the convention on Thursday. "We must abolish school district property taxes on your homesteads."
Here's a look at some of the planks and priorities approved by the delegates:
Election security
This was ranked as the convention's top priority. The platform would require a proof of U.S. citizenship before someone is allowed to register to vote. The plank also calls for English-only ballots and a mandate that every voter present a Texas government-issued photo ID for every election, with no exceptions. Mail-in ballots could only be used by people with disabilities, members of the military and voters who are absent from the state — meaning Texans aged 65 and older would no longer be eligible.
It would also do away with open primaries and require anyone who votes in a primary to register as a member of the party conducting the primary.
Those changes come as a bill in Washington that echoes some of those provisions, and is backed by President Donald Trump, has stalled in the Senate. The chamber's Republicans have only a narrow majority and are short of the 60 votes they need to bring the so-called Save Act to the floor.
Although Sharia law, considered the moral and religious guide for Muslims, is not enforceable anywhere in the United States, the platform demands that Texas formally declare that such it "is an incompatible, seditious, subversive, competing enemy of the Texas and U.S. Constitutions, and that its advocacy or implementation is a seditious criminal act, worthy of criminal punishment, disqualification for public, military, and law enforcement service, denaturalization, and, deportment."
Abortion and IVF
Texas already has one of the most sweeping anti-abortion laws in the nation, but the platform calls for stronger criminal penalties and more "tools to fight abortion and abortion pill trafficking." The delegates also want to "hold rogue officials accountable for failing to defend life; protect vulnerable patients from involuntary termination in medical settings; protect fetal life from destructive practices, such as IVF and commercial surrogacy."
The plank does call for criminal penalties for women who have abortions and delegates rejected an amendment that would have stripped that provision.
LGBTQ rights
The platform defines homosexuality as a choice, and opposes "all efforts to validate transgender identity."
The platform states that "gender modification in any form for minors does not constitute medical care" but instead is child abuse. It would disallow gender affirming care, including medical or mental health intervention, for anyone between the ages of 18 and 26.
No to legalized marijuana, but with an asterisk
Despite Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's pledge to prohibit hemp-derived THC, Abbott ultimately vetoed the blanket ban in favor of regulation.The platform doesn't address that issue, butopposes allowing the legal use of "recreational marijuana." Itwould permit "offering opportunities for drug treatment before penalties for its illegal possession or use."
Taxpayer-backed lobbying
This one is among the few perennial Republican priorities that has not been enacted of the course of several legislative sessions, but Abbott said he is prepared to put the full weight of his office behind the plank when lawmakers return to Austin in January.
"We must ban taxpayer-funded lobbying," the governor told the delegates the day before the platform was adopted. "It’s idiotic that your taxpayer dollars are being used to lobby against your own interests. "
The plank would prohibit local government from using tax dollars to hire lobbyists or third-party contractors, and establish criminal penalties for doing so.