After Dramatic Walkout, a New Fight Looms Over Voting Rights in Texas
After killing a Republican-sponsored bill to restrict voting in the state, Democrats vowed to oppose any efforts to revive it. Republicans pledged to pass it in a special legislative session.
State Representative Nicole Collier, the chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, speaking with other Democrats against the voting bill at the Capitol in Austin on Sunday.
AUSTIN — The battle among Texas lawmakers over a bill that would impose some of the strictest limits in the nation on voting access escalated Monday as Democrats and Republicans vowed that they would not back down over a highly charged issue that has galvanized both parties.
Stung by the last-minute setback for one of the G.O.P.’s top legislative priorities, after Democrats killed the measure with a dramatic walkout Sunday night, Gov. Greg Abbott suggested he would withhold pay from lawmakers because of their failure to pass the bill.
“No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities,” Mr. Abbott, a Republican who strongly supported the bill, wrote on Twitter as he pledged to veto the section of the budget that funds the legislative branch.
G.O.P. leaders said they would revive their efforts in a special session of the Legislature. The bill’s chief architect in the State House of Representatives, Briscoe Cain, said the walkout might enable Republicans to craft a measure even more to their liking.
“At the end of the day, this turned out to be a good thing,” said Mr. Cain, the chair of the House Elections Committee. “We’ll come back with better legislation and more time for it. Special sessions are focused.”
Democrats were resolute in their opposition, promising to redouble their efforts to keep a new bill from becoming law.
“This is Texas, this is the Alamo,” State Representative John H. Bucy III said at an afternoon news conference on Monday. “We will do everything we can to stop voter suppression.’’
Despite the Democrats’ success Sunday night, Republicans control both chambers of the Legislature, and would be favored to pass a voting bill in a special session. Mr. Abbott has not said when he would reconvene the Legislature; he can do so as early as Tuesday, but may wait until late summer, when he had planned to recall lawmakers anyway to manage redistricting.
No matter when they take up the bill again, they will have to introduce it from scratch and restart a process that could take weeks — though they could start with the provisions in the bill that died Sunday night or even propose one with more severe restrictions.
State Representative Matt Krause, a conservative Republican from Fort Worth, described himself as “disappointed and frustrated” by the walkout. But he said he believed the bill would ultimately pass, if not in the next special session, then in another after that. “It’s going to be heavily debated and contested,” he said. “But at the end of the day, during a special session, I think we’ll get it done.”
He and other Republicans expressed irritation that the walkout had killed not just the voting bill but several others that were important to the caucus, including bail reform.
The failure to pass the bill was a striking blow to Republicans and one of the few setbacks they have suffered nationally in a monthslong push to restrict voting in states they control. G.O.P.-controlled legislatures, aligning themselves with former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless fraud claims, have passed new laws in Georgia, Florida and Iowa with expansive restrictions.
The Texas bill was viewed by many Democrats and voting rights groups as perhaps the harshest of all; among other provisions, it would have banned both drive-through voting and 24-hour voting; imposed new restrictions on absentee voting; granted broad new autonomy and authority to partisan poll watchers; and increased punishments for mistakes or offenses by election officials.
President Biden denounced the bill over the weekend, calling it “an assault on democracy,” and urged lawmakers to pass two Democratic voting bills that have been stalled in Congress — a theme that Texas Democrats picked up at their news conference Monday.
“I’m asking Joe Biden, you need to help Texas,” said State Representative Michelle Beckley, a member of the House Elections Committee who consistently opposed the Republican bill. “We have done everything we can. The Democratic senators, you need to pass the voter bills.”
Republicans in Texas and in other states that have passed new voting laws have defended them on the grounds that they will improve “election security,” even though the results of the last election have been confirmed by multiple audits, lawsuits and court decisions.
Democrats stymied the bill late Sunday night by secretly orchestrating a walkout in the House of Representatives that denied the chamber a quorum. As the midnight deadline approached for passing legislation, and with more than five dozen Democrats missing, Republican leaders in the House acknowledged they lacked the required number of lawmakers to conduct a legal vote, and adjourned the proceedings.
Despite the vows to revive the measure in a special session, Republicans were clearly taken aback by their failure. They accused Democrats of an abdication of governing by walking out — “it shuts down the business of the House,” Mr. Krause said — but also engaged in some finger-pointing in their own caucus. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick chided House Republicans for mismanaging the calendar as the deadline approached.
“You can’t take two days off with five days to go,” Mr. Patrick said after the walkout. “You put yourself in a box where you’re up against a deadline, and I can’t even blame it on the other party for walking out.”
Mr. Patrick oversees the State Senate, which passed the bill early Sunday after an all-night session.
Shortly after the House adjourned Sunday evening, Democrats gathered at a predominately Black church two miles from the Capitol and depicted the walkout as a last resort once Republicans made clear to them they would cut off debate in order to pass the bill by midnight. “We had no choice but to take extraordinary measures to protect our constituents and their right to vote,” said Chris Turner, a state representative who is the party’s caucus chair in the House.
The selection of the church as the place to deliver their remarks was an intentional nod to provisions Democrats considered among the most egregious in the bill — those that targeted voters of color.
Gene Wu, a House member from Houston, joined other Democrats in ridiculing Mr. Abbott’s threat to vetoing funding for the Legislature, writing on Twitter that it would punish “working class office staff, maintenance, and other support services because he didn’t get every single one of his demands.”
Discussions about a potential walkout began as early as April, Democrats said, and gained traction as the May 30 deadline for passing bills approached.
The Battle Over Voting Rights
Amid months of false claims by former President Donald J. Trump that the 2020 election was stolen from him, Republican lawmakers in many states are marching ahead to pass laws making it harder to vote and changing how elections are run, frustrating Democrats and even some election officials in their own party.
A Key Topic: The rules and procedures of elections have become a central issue in American politics. The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal-leaning law and justice institute at New York University, counts 361 bills in 47 states that seek to tighten voting rules. At the same time, 843 bills have been introduced with provisions to improve access to voting.
The Basic Measures: The restrictions vary by state but can include limiting the use of ballot drop boxes, adding identification requirements for voters requesting absentee ballots, and doing away with local laws that allow automatic registration for absentee voting.
More Extreme Measures: Some measures go beyond altering how one votes, including tweaking Electoral College and judicial election rules, clamping down on citizen-led ballot initiatives, and outlawing private donations that provide resources for administering elections.
Pushback: This Republican effort has led Democrats in Congress to find a way to pass federal voting laws. A sweeping voting rights bill passed the House in March, but faces difficult obstacles in the Senate. Republicans have remained united against the proposal and even if the bill became law, it would likely face steep legal challenges.
Florida: Measures here include limiting the use of drop boxes, adding more identification requirements for absentee ballots, requiring voters to request an absentee ballot for each election, limiting who could collect and drop off ballots, and further empowering partisan observers during the ballot-counting process.
Texas: The next big move could happen here, where Republicans in the legislature are brushing aside objections from corporate titans and moving on a vast election bill that would be among the most severe in the nation. It would impose new restrictions on early voting, ban drive-through voting, threaten election officials with harsher penalties and greatly empower partisan poll watchers.
Other States: Arizona’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed a bill that would limit the distribution of mail ballots. The bill, which includes removing voters from the state’s Permanent Early Voting List if they do not cast a ballot at least once every two years, may be only the first in a series of voting restrictions to be enacted there. Georgia Republicans in March enacted far-reaching new voting laws that limit ballot drop-boxes and make the distribution of water within certain boundaries of a polling station a misdemeanor. Iowa has also imposed new limits, including reducing the period for early voting and in-person voting hours on Election Day. And bills to restrict voting have been moving through the Republican-led Legislature in Michigan.
Seeing the voting bill as likely to be one of the final battles, and one rooted in a long history of voter suppression tactics in Texas, Democratic leadership began to explore all options that could halt its march.
The discussions about walking out, according to Trey Martinez Fischer, a Democratic representative, were organized on a personal level, similar to whipping a vote.
“Erasing a quorum, you just don’t just say it and it happens,” Mr. Martinez Fischer said in an interview early Monday, after the House had adjourned. “It takes a lot of conversations, lots of meetings, lots of discussions.”
Through most of May, the House caucus remained split on the idea of walking out, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions among Democrats.
But in the final weeks, Republicans angered Democrats by working behind closed doors to finalize the bill in what is known as a conference committee, leaving Democrats who were also on the committee in the dark and denying them input into the final legislation. That led to a change of attitudes in the Democratic caucus. State Representative Terry Canales publicly excoriated Republicans when the bill was released.
“The House Democrat Conferees have NOT even seen a Legislative Counsel Draft!” Mr. Canales said on Twitter. “This is egregious!”
The bill contained some new provisions that particularly enraged Democrats, including one limiting early voting on Sunday to the hours of 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., effectively limiting the traditional “Souls to the Polls” tradition in the Black church.
Lawmakers in the party’s Black Caucus and Hispanic Caucus held a meeting, known as the “Black and Brown Summit” Sunday afternoon, according to an invitation to the meeting obtained by The New York Times. The hosts wanted to discuss “legislation that disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities.”
“As the behavior became a little bit more nefarious, we realized that we needed to start expanding our options,” Mr. Martinez Fischer said. “So I would say the discussions about breaking quorum only intensified within the last 48 hours.”
With a late-night debate scheduled for the voting bill, Democrats still clung to a hope that they would be able to run out the clock with lengthy debate. More than 30 Democrats in the House were prepared to speak against the bill, which would make passage by a midnight deadline difficult.
But when House Republicans moved to limit debate, Democrats saw walking out as their only option. Responding to a text message from Mr. Turner, all but five of 67 had left the House chamber when Republicans tried to move the bill toward passage.
Some Republicans said they weren’t completely surprised by the action.
“There were whispers of it yesterday,” Representative Travis Clardy of Nacogdoches said early Monday. “I really didn’t think they would. I didn’t think they needed to.”
“You come here to work,” he added. “You don’t come here to leave and not finish the job.”
Two previous efforts to break legislative quorums in the Texas Legislature were rich in political theatrics and generated national headlines. In 1979, when state politics was still dominated by Democrats, 11 Democratic state senators dubbed “the Killer Bees” — purportedly because of their unpredictability — hid out for days in an Austin apartment to block passage of a bill that would have created a dual primary system, including a presidential primary and a traditional down-ballot primary.
In 2003, the year that Republicans seized control of the House of Representatives, more than 50 Democratic House members fled to Ardmore, Okla., to protest a Republican redistricting plan.
