AUSTIN – The Texas Legislature began a new special legislative session Friday after Gov. Greg Abbott called lawmakers back to deal with congressional redistricting and a host of other issues – laying down a new gauntlet for Democrats who fled the state nearly two weeks ago to halt a vote on a new district map.
“We will not back down from this fight,” Abbott said in a statement. “That’s why I am calling them back today to finish the job. I will continue to use all necessary tools to ensure Texas delivers results for Texans.”
As it has gone since the Democrats left, House Speaker Dustin Burrows was unable to gather enough House members to establish a quorum and do any official business Friday.
Burrows signed a fresh round of civil warrants on the absent Democrats as soon as the new special session convened. The warrants authorize the Texas Department of Public Safety to search for them and bring them to the Capitol if they are found in the state.
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He instructed all House members to return Monday, saying he has been told to expect the absent members will be back at the Capitol, but be ready to come in on six hours’ notice if enough are found before that.
When a quorum is established, Burrows told the House on Friday, all bills will be referred to committees and those hearings will begin next week. The goal, he said, is to finish the House’s work in time for Labor Day.
“Showing up is half the battle, and those present today will have a say in what we accomplish over the next 30 days – or hopefully fewer,” Burrows said. “So let’s be ready to work.”
The Senate began committee action on several bills Friday afternoon, taking hasty testimony and passing several pieces of legislation, with plans to reconvene on the floor on Monday.
The Senate Special Committee on Congressional Redistricting will hear testimony Sunday on Senate Bill 4, the new legislation containing the redrawn congressional districts. The public is invited to testify at the hearing, which is scheduled for 4 p.m. at the Capitol.
The first special legislative session came to an early halt Friday after Republican state leaders couldn’t drag protesting House Democrats back to the state for a critical vote on new congressional maps. Abbott’s new session call came within an hour after the first one ended.
The agenda includes not only a new congressional redistricting plan – the most recent proposal could shift five Democrat seats to Republican – but also legislation that would further limit access to abortion, outlaw taxpayer lobbying by cities, and regulate the consumable hemp industry.
More than 50 Democrats left the state on Aug. 4 in a quorum-breaking move to stop congressional redistricting by stalling official business in the House. The proposed map, which has overwhelming support among Republican state lawmakers in both the House and Senate, seeks to shift five Texas seats in Congress to Republican from Democrat.
The absconded Democrats have since been the target of fines, attempts to remove them from office, arrest warrants, lawsuits and threats from Austin to Washington to involve the Federal Bureau of Investigation to force them back home.
The political pressure has been mounting alongside the legal heat.
While the House gaveled in and out of floor sessions lasting less than 10 minutes, helpless to do anything as long as the Democrats stay gone, the Senate stacked up legislation on issues ranging from flood relief funds and disaster response equipment to criminalizing the abortion pill and doing away with mandatory STAAR testing at public schools.
The July 4 floods in the Texas Hill Country killed at least 137 people. The damage was most severe in Kerr County, where 27 children and counselors were killed at Camp Mystic.
Related:‘Operation Closure’: The grueling search for the last of the Texas flood victims
None of it could go anywhere until the Democrats return – a point the absent members attempted to use in their favor as they vowed to stay gone until redistricting was placed behind flood relief and other priorities the entire legislature could agree on.
“It’s been six weeks since the flood, six weeks where working families have waited for relief while Governor Abbott sits on billions in disaster funds, choosing to hold our state hostage for his racist, corrupt redistricting scheme,” House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu, D-Houston, said in a prepared statement this week. “Texans are suffering while Greg Abbott chases Donald Trump’s agenda and billionaire donors, ignoring the emergencies facing our neighborhoods.”
A special session can run for 30 days, but lawmakers must start over on items that are not addressed if the governor calls them back for an additional special session. There is no limit to the number of special sessions the governor can call to address a list of agenda items, sometimes one – sometimes more than a dozen.
That made the quorum break a tenuous strategy, since Abbott can spend as much time as he wants trying to get his agenda passed – forcing the Democrats to stay away from their home states, districts, and jobs if they want to shut down the votes on them.
On Thursday, Democrats said they’d return to the state for the second session and allow the vote to happen, choosing instead to “take this fight to the courts” – a reference to earlier redistricting efforts that were stalled by lawsuits, with some parts of new maps eventually struck down.
The main catalyst for that decision is California’s recent move to enact its own redistricting plan to send more Democrats to Washington, Wu said.
Democrats say their main strategy was to inform the public and motivate Democratic states to step in to counteract the Texas redistricting effort – which is driven by President Donald Trump and other national Republicans who want to protect their party’s congressional majority in next year’s mid-term elections.
“We’ve fundamentally changed the rules of this fight,” Wu said. “California is moving forward with plans to flip five Republican seats, and blue states nationwide are mobilized and ready to act if Abbott moves forward with this nationally-damaging redistricting scheme. …
“Abbott can choose to govern for Texas families, or he can keep serving Trump and face the consequences we’ve unleashed nationwide,” he added.
House Republicans picked up that gauntlet and countered with threats to send more Republicans to Washington than the initially proposed five.
“Instead of 5 new GOP seats in [the proposed bill] HB 4, we should take up and pass the map that gives us 9-10 seats,” said Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Allen, in a post on X.
The first special session this year convened on July 21 and was set to expire next Tuesday. When the second special session does convene, likely before the end of the day on Friday, the process could go more quickly than typical sessions do.
Technically, lawmakers have the right to hold public hearings on legislation that had to be filed again in a new session, even if they collected testimony on an identical bill just weeks earlier – but they can suspend certain rules to fast-track bills.
That can come from skipping public testimony to abbreviating or limiting hearings. The Senate could start hearing bills as early as Friday afternoon, officials said.
This is especially the case if they’ve already collected recent testimony on them. Redistricting and flood relief bills, for example, saw hundreds of hours of testimony in both the House and Senate over several weeks this summer.
Legislation banning all consumable products containing tetrahydrocannabinol – or THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana and hemp cannabis plants – got 12-hour hearings in both the House and Senate in the last few weeks as well.
Those bills could speed through the committee process much more quickly in the next session than they did in the first.
A committee chairman in the House can decide to skip the public hearing and only hold what’s known as a “formal hearing” to vote the bill out of committee and get it to the floor for a vote.
Similar rules suspension and fast-tracking legislation can also happen in the Texas Senate, which held full public hearings on nearly all of the bills filed in conjunction with Abbott’s agenda order – passing them from the floor only to watch them stall out behind the House standstill.
Shortly before the chambers adjourned Friday, two families who had been impacted by the floods and two Democrats who had left the state in protest called on Abbott to use his executive powers to release $70 million in disaster relief funds for mental health assistance and debris removal, among other uses.
“He should move all the available resources at the state level,” said Rep. Armando Walle, D-Houston, a lead budget writer in the House. “The governor has had long established budget execution power to transfer funds for urgent needs, and he’s repeatedly refused to do that. Every day that passes is every day that he refuses to transfer any of those dollars using his statutory authority.”