Runaway Texas Dems met with DC inaction
Voting reforms stall in Senate
WASHINGTON — Democrats who fled Austin to bring the Texas House to a halt now face a war of attrition.
However long they hold out, Gov. Greg Abbott can counter by calling another monthlong special session of the Legislature, and more after that, until they relent on his demands to rewrite the state’s election rules.
Congress controls the only possible trump cards: a pair of stalled bills that would supersede state laws the Democrats view as voter suppression. The Texas runaways have used their exile to spotlight that effort.
But in their first workweek on the lam, they made no measurable headway.
A handful had a terse interaction with Sen. John Cornyn in a committee room. But the only sitdowns they snagged were with Democrats, nearly all strong allies who need no convincing, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Unless we take action, unless we see model legislation pass, our voices will be silenced,” said Rep. Nicole Collier of Fort Worth, chair of the Black Caucus in the Texas House. “We’re handing the baton to our Senate colleagues, to our Senate members, to finish this for us.”
But unless 10 Senate Republicans break ranks — and there’s no sign that even one will do so — the Texans will find no salvation at the U.S. Capitol for the staredown with Abbott.
“These are Texas House members who are asking the federal government to overrule the decisions made by Texas representatives on how our elections should be conducted,” said Cornyn. “Since when do Texans ask the federal government to run our state? … They can’t stop this forever.”
Two proposals are at issue in Congress: the For the People Act, a sweeping measure that touches on campaign finance, voting rules and government ethics; and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore federal scrutiny of Texas and others states with a history of discrimination that the Supreme Court lifted in 2013.
Both are stalled in the Senate, and there’s no serious doubt that whenever the Texas Democrats decamp from Washington, that will still be the case.
More than 50 Democrats from the Texas House flew to Washington on Monday night to break quorum and block a bill that would expand access for partisan poll watchers, which they say will lead to harassment, restrict mail-in ballots, ban 24-hour voting and make it a felony for an election official to send an absentee ballot application without being asked.
“We are determined to defeat voter suppression in the state of Texas,” said Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, head of the Texas House Democratic caucus. “Our mission here in Washington is … to implore the U.S. Senate to pass the For the People Act, to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, both of which are essential to voting rights in this country.”
The Texans spent days fanning out on Capitol Hill.
Democratic senators commiserated after hearing details from the fight in Austin, and pledged to push for passage of the two bills, though no one revealed a plan to overcome the filibuster.
“We’ve got to have federal standards that push against what we have seen in Texas and what we have seen in Georgia,” said Sen. Rafael Warnock, Georgia’s first Black senator, after meeting with Texans.
One small group met privately with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who opposes the For the People Act and, more crucially, any effort to set aside the rule that requires 60 of 100 senators to agree before a bill can get a vote.
There were no indications of movement.
The Democrat-controlled House approved that bill March 3 on a party-line 220-210 vote. Three weeks ago Senate Republicans deployed a filibuster and killed it.
The massive bill includes a laundry list of reforms long sought by government watchdogs.
Democrats view it as an anti-corruption tonic for dark money, and a prodemocracy
shield against efforts to restrict voting access.
Republicans view it as a power grab that would limit free speech, federalize elections, and gut commonsense laws meant to avert fraud and bolster confidence in election integrity.
The bill would ban partisan gerrymandering, blunt the influence of money in politics, beef up disclosure rules for donations for presidents and other politicians, and thwart state-level voting restrictions.
It would have mandated 15 days of early voting and created a national system to register voters automatically using databases of licensed drivers and taxpayers.
The bill would make it harder to purge voter rolls — inviting fraud, in the eyes or Republicans, or protecting low-income and minority voters who are more apt to relocate often and vote for Democrats, in the eyes of advocates.
It would have nullified voter ID laws in 36 states and bans in 31 states on socalled ballot harvesting, whereby political operatives collect ballots from voters.
It provided 6-to-1 matching funds for campaign contributions under $200 — blunting the influence of wealthy donors, as reformers see it, or “welfare for politicians” in the words of one fierce critic, Sen. Ted Cruz.
By GOP calculations, the 100 senators would have reaped over $1 billion under that provision.
Cruz called it the “Corrupt Politicians Act,” and “the most dangerous legislation we’ve considered in the Senate in the nine years I’ve served in this body. It’s an attempt by Senate Democrats at a brazen power grab.”
“It’s an attempt by Democrats to federalize elections and to ensure that Democrats won’t lose control for the next 100 years,” the Texas Republican said when Senate Republicans shot down the bill.