From the newsroom of the Washington Post.

Hi, this is Tracy Jamm, Colleen from the Post.

I'm a president for Power You Power.

Hi, it's Robert Given at the Washington Post.

This is Post Reports.

I'm Martin Powers.

It's Wednesday, July 14th.

Today, Texas Democrats and voting rights.

Plus, what happens to our bodies during a heat wave?

Today, more than 50 Democratic members of the Texas House left Austin and left Texas.

Now, because we want to, it breaks our heart that we have to do it.

But we do it because we are in a fight to save our democracy.

This week, in an extremely unusual move, dozens of Democratic state lawmakers from Texas packed their bags,

got on a plane and left the state with no clear plan of when to return.

The idea was to break a quorum and basically to prevent the Texas House from having enough members to pass a restrictive voting bill.

There being 80 odds, zero nays, the motion fails for lack of quorum.

Texas Democrats and the legislature are protesting a bill that Republicans are trying to push forward with the support of the Republican governor.

Eugene Scott is a national political reporter for the post.

The liberals say could make voting much more difficult for different groups of Texans, particularly some of the demographic groups that tend to vote more left, such as people of color and working class Texans.

I left because I am tired of sitting as a hostage in a house of Texas House of Representatives, while Republican stripping away the rights of my constituents to vote.

And so what are the Democrats trying to do to prevent that bill from passing?

Well, they are pretty much not present in Austin, the state capital of Texas, and instead have come to Washington, D.C. to put more pressure on U.S. lawmakers and even the president to pass legislation that would supersede any efforts that Republicans and state capitals would put forward that could make voting more difficult for certain groups of Americans.

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