The Texas Senate’s approval of sweeping election legislation last week was a civics lesson for House Democrats who a month earlier fled the state to prevent the measures from making it to the governor, said Chad Ennis, senior fellow for the Election Protection Project at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
“The latest version of the Senate bill contains some amendments proposed by Democrats,” Ennis told the Austin Journal. “It shows the legislative process works. House Democrats should come back to session and do the same.”
House Democrats placed the legislative process in limbo when 57 of them flew to Washington, D.C. at the start of the first special session, leaving the House with no quorum to move legislation. Since then, some Democratic members have trickled back to Austin but the House remains at least four votes short of a quorum.
Ennis said all expectations are that Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, will keep calling special sessions, which last 30 days, to move not only election reform but other bills left hanging from the end of regular session. Beyond that, Ennis said he will make no predictions about how the stalemate might play out.
“It might be that they have to be arrested (allowed under Texas Supreme Court ruling) and forced to come to the House to do their jobs,” he said.
He added that doesn’t know how the Democratic members will come back and face their constituents after maligning the election reform legislation as “Jim Crow 2.0,” and that it will put “blacks back in chains.”
“I don’t understand where this rhetoric comes from,” he said. “The bills are nothing like Jim Crow.”
The House's version of election reform, House Bill 3, is similar to Senate Bill 1.
The bills would require voters to write their driver’s license or other identification number on absentee ballots. They would also ban state officials from sending out unsolicited mail-in ballots, and would ban 24-hour and drive-in voting.
The Texas Legislature has succeeded in sending other reform bills to the governor. One, signed into law in June, bans local election officials from accepting private money to help underwrite the cost of elections. This after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $350 million to “nonpartisan” groups that turned around and poured the money into Democratic strongholds as part of a thinly veiled get-out-the-vote campaign, conservative critics allege.