Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, is promising to see that Democratic lawmakers are arrested for walking out of session Monday, leaving the House without a quorum necessary to vote on controversial election reform legislation in Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 3.
Fox News reported that Abbott appeared on "The Ingraham Angle" on Monday and said that members of the Texas House of Representatives still in the state can call for the arrests of their colleagues. The members must be arrested in Texas, however, and on Monday the Democratic lawmakers went to Washington, D.C. on a chartered flight.
This is the second time House Democrats left a session in protest before a vote on election reform; they previously walked out in the final hours of the regular legislative session in May. The current session is a 30-day special session called by Abbott to take up election reform, as well as other unresolved legislative issues remaining at the end of regular session.
“It is unfortunate that political stunts have become more important than debate and careful consideration of policy,” Chad Ennis, senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), told the Lone Star Standard. “The folks in the legislature were elected to debate and pass laws. Sometimes you win the debate and sometimes you lose. The appropriate response to losing is not to go home.”
A newly released TPPF poll shows that most Texans oppose lawmakers using procedural maneuvers to prevent voting. More than half of Texans (54%) said they do not support members staging walkouts that would deny the Legislature the quorum it needs to hold votes. Only 27% of Texans say they support the moves.
“Walkouts are only supported by the extreme left,” said Brian Phillips, TPPF’s Chief Communications Officer, in a statement. “Most Texans see it as a childish and desperate move, and they don’t like temper tantrums. We can have respectful disagreements and energetic debates. But the process must move forward. There will be a side that gets the votes and side that doesn’t. If one side can abuse the rules to prevent votes, then we cease to have a functioning democracy. The left is embarrassing themselves and Texas.”
The Texas Legislature has already approved, and Abbott has signed, numerous election reform bills in regular session. Among them: HB 2283, which bans local election officials from taking private money to underwrite the cost of managing elections; SB 1111, which prohibits the use of a P.O. box address for user in voter registration; HB 1264, which tightens the time frame for reporting of deceased residents to a voter registrar and to the secretary of state.
Additional reforms in SB 1 and HB 3 include tightening procedures for voting by mail, including adding an ID requirement for voting by mail. The bills would also restrict ballot harvesting, where third parties collect and mail absentee ballots. And they impose penalties for those “who game the system.”
The bills have been criticized by Democrats and voting rights advocates nationwide for empowering partisan poll watchers, banning drive-thru and overnight options for early voters, and adding criminal penalties for violating voting laws.
In a follow up research paper on election reform, TPPF said that the reform measure has “broad support from Texans.”
