The Battle For Voting Rights In Texas Isn’t Over
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2021
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Texas Republicans, sensing the state’s slow, leftward drift, barreled ahead with legislation to make voting more cumbersome this week. Democratic lawmakers did the one thing they could to resist it: They refused to show up for a vote. But the fight over voting rules isn’t over in Texas, and Republicans maintain the upper hand.
Guest: Alexa Ura, reporter for the Texas Tribune.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Doing business in the Texas legislature means operating under constraints. For one thing, |
| 0:11.9 | state representatives, they only meet every other year. When they do get together, politicians |
| 0:16.9 | can't even consider passing bills for the first couple of months they're in the capital. |
| 0:25.8 | They're supposed to be in committee meetings. And Alexa Oda from the Texas Tribune, |
| 0:33.5 | she says all this creates a logjam. All these things sort of come to ahead in the last few weeks of the session. There are all these deadlines to pass bills. Otherwise, they have to come back |
| 0:39.2 | as sort of what we describe as zombie bills attached to something else. |
| 0:42.8 | I love that there's like this forced pressure where like half the session is just like getting |
| 0:48.5 | to know you time. And then it's like, let's pass a million things right away. |
| 0:52.8 | I mean, I think that the legislative session in Texas, like the process is meant to kill bills, right? |
| 0:58.2 | It's not meant to result in sort of a raft of new legislation. |
| 1:02.8 | In fact, the only thing they're actually required to do is to pass the budget for the next two years. |
| 1:09.8 | And so things get pretty crazy at the end when folks are really hankering to get their |
| 1:15.2 | priorities through. This year, one of the priorities Republicans were hankering to get through |
| 1:21.9 | was an election law. The GOP was trying to limit how, when, and where Texans can vote. It's the same |
| 1:30.0 | fight that's been going on in a lot of Republican-controlled state houses all around the country. |
| 1:34.5 | And when they came out with a bill called SB7, just days before the end of the session, |
| 1:39.3 | things did get pretty crazy. Remember, like Alexa said, the Texas legislature is set up to block bills, |
| 1:47.4 | not pass them. And it sounds like from everything you've told me, Texas loves its rules when it comes to |
| 1:55.0 | the legislature. And there's a rule that you need a quorum of people there to pass a bill, right? |
| 2:01.5 | That's correct. You need two-thirds of the chamber to be there to be able to vote. And so |
| 2:07.4 | Democrats, by walking out, could leave them without that quorum. And without that quorum, they can't vote. And if they don't vote before midnight, the bill is dead. |
| 2:16.4 | Alexa was there this weekend as the fate of SB 7 was decided. |
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