Texas House, Senate advance GOP bail reform bill.
GOP leaders of panels moving fast to get the legislation approved
More than 200 people showed up Saturday at the Texas Capitol to make their voices heard on the latest Republican-drafted elections bills, the majority party’s top priority for a special session of the Legislature after Democrats stomped out their previous attempt in May.
Committee chairs in the GOP-led House and Senate moved with haste in setting hearings on the bills, which resemble the failed legislation in many ways, just two days after reconvening Thursday.
The two chambers also heard bills Saturday on another Republican priority — tighter requirements for which defendants can be bonded out of jail without cash — which also drew a high volume of people lining up to testify.
The committee chairs made clear at the start of the hearings their intent to advance the legislation out of committee by the end of the day, setting up the possibility that the bills could reach the full House this week and underscoring Republicans’ desire to move aggressively through Gov. Greg Abbott’s 11-point agenda.
That was an about-face from the regular session, when lawmakers were working up until the final hours on the elections bills.
The Democrats staged a walkout that sealed their win and put the leg
islation in the national spotlight as a wave of Republican-led states passed similar restrictions.
“The entire country is watching,” Sen. Borris Miles, D-Houston, told the crowd that gathered Saturday as it began pouring into the Senate hearing. Miles’ office organized sending a busload of people to Austin to oppose the legislation.
Both chambers’ new bills, Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 3, drop several of the most divisive provisions from the earlier legislation, including one that would have made it easier for judges to overturn elections and another that limited early voting hours on Sundays.
Those had been the final provocations for Democrats in the regular session, but even with those removed, the party and civil rights groups are fighting just as hard against the latest bills, arguing that remaining provisions will still make it more difficult for Black and brown Texans to vote.
Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, author of SB 1, said it was unfortunate that the debate over the matter remains “bitterly partisan,” alluding to how his bill is often associated with the larger Republican push nationwide to tighten voting laws after the 2020 election.
That election led a majority of Republicans, polls show, to believe former President Donald Trump’s false claim that his loss could be attributed to widespread voter fraud.
Hughes pointed out he’s been filing similar legislation to SB 1 for over a decade.
“This is important right now, but it’s always been important,” Hughes said. “I’ve been filing bills about, for example, paper backups for electronic voting and security and accessibility for our elections since 2005.”
On Saturday morning, dozens of people formed a line that wrapped around the Capitol extension to get into the room where the House hearing was held. Capitol staff had to open multiple overflow rooms to fit everyone, with every other seat left empty for social distancing.
The majority of the testifiers were against the bill. Many were wearing shirts with the names of civil rights groups and unions written across the fronts and holding signs that urged the Legislature to “Say no to Jim Crow 2.0.”
Birdie Kelley, a Fort Bend County Democratic Party precinct chair and a former election
judge, said many of the voters she encountered at her polling place were older Black people whose parents had told them stories of having to count jelly beans or recite portions of the U.S. Constitution in order to vote.
They were proud to vote, she said, but they often didn’t know
they could vote by mail or how to request an application to do so. She and others played an essential role in giving them an application — something that could open them up to consequences under Republican proposals to make it a criminal offense for an election official to distribute an unsolicited
mail ballot application.
“So what happens now?” she said. “Now we have all these restrictions on the ballot. … I’m just requesting that we not make it harder — we make it easier for them.”
Jonathan White, chief of the Texas attorney general’s election integrity division, testified that SB 1 seems to create “additional tools that could potentially help us be more successful in what we’re doing.”
Miles and Sen. Royce West, DDallas, questioned whether the
office was rooting out the kind of fraud that politicians say concerns them. Both noted an analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union that found that since Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took office in 2015, at least 72 percent of individuals his office has prosecuted for voter fraud are people of color — and primarily women.
They brought attention to the case of Hervis Rogers, a 62-year old Black man accused by the AG’s office of illegally voting before his parole ended. Rogers had attracted national media attention for having waited in line for six hours to vote in the 2020 primary
election. State attorneys are prosecuting the case in the more conservative Montgomery County, though Rogers lives, works and went to a polling place in the more liberal Harris County. The law allows the AG to prosecute cases in adjoining counties.
“That’s the kind of biases that we have to deal with each and every day,” Miles said. “That’s what the citizens, Black, white, brown — mostly Black and brown — have to deal with in the great state of Texas.”
Miles added that Rogers may have broken the law but not the “spirit of the law,” as Rogers has said he believed he was eligible to vote and the law is meant to stop bad actors.
Asked why the case is being prosecuted in Montgomery County, White said the AG’s office has “relationships” with attorneys in that county but not Harris County. He rejected criticism of the decision to take the case there as “forum shopping,” a term that refers to prosecutors choosing the court or jurisdiction based on where they expect to have an edge.