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Texas lawmakers will be brought back to Austin on Thursday for a special session designed to focus on conservative priorities and bring the Lone Star State’s struggle for voting rights back into the national limelight.
Governor Greg Abbott unveiled an ambitious agenda about 24 hours before Thursday’s special session began. Electoral integrity, bail reform, border security, social media censorship, transgender sports and critical racial theory are among the issues Abbott wants lawmakers to address during the session, which can last up to 30 days.
“The 87th Legislative Session was a monumental success for the people of Texas, but we have ongoing tasks to ensure that Texas remains the most extraordinary state in America,” Abbott said in a statement.
The special session comes a few weeks after the Texas House Democrats staged a work stoppage thwart a bill that would have revised the state’s electoral laws.
The special session could bolster Abbott’s Conservative credentials ahead of his re-election campaign and also bolster his national profile ahead of a possible presidential run in 2024, his July 4th candidacy.
“The worst-kept secret in Austin is that Greg Abbott is running for president,” Democratic representative Rafael Anchia told CBS News. “Look at the last couple of signing ceremonies from (Florida’s Governor) Ron DeSantis and Abbott will want to live up to that punch after punch.”
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The agenda of the special session also includes the financing of the state parliaments and the legislative staff. Abbott vetoed this funding last month after the Democrats’ strike. Texas Democrats and other organizations have asked the Texas Supreme Court to overturn that veto, but the court has yet to weigh in. A notable item that is not on the agenda: help for them State power gridwho struggled to produce enough electricity for Texans during a heavy snow storm in February.
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Perhaps no issue will receive as much national attention as the renewed battle over proposed changes to Texan electoral law.
That final version of SB 7, the bill that lawmakers failed to pass in May gives an indication of what lawmakers will be focusing on. This bill would have limited the hours of early voting, banned drive-through voting, added new requirements for postal voting, and made it a crime for civil servants to send unsolicited postal voting requests.
Two of the more controversial provisions of this bill, delaying the start time for Sunday’s early voting and lowering the standards for overturning an election on fraud allegations, will not be included in a new electoral law, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick tweeted Tuesday . Patrick also serves as the President of the Senate.
“I’ll be picking at the Texas Senate at 10am tomorrow morning. We stand ready to pass all laws for Governor Abbott’s special session, starting with SB1 – Electoral Security. The hearings start on Saturday, “tweeted Patrick on Wednesday.
The Texas House electoral law, released Wednesday night, contained many provisions similar to SB7. The bill would ban drive-through voting and require early voting between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.
The bill includes some ID requirements for mail-in voting, where voters sign a driver’s license or personal ID number, the last four digits of their social security number, or a statement confirming they don’t have any. It has similar protections for partisan election observers and maintains some criminal penalties set out in SB 7. The bill allows Sunday elections to start as early as 9 a.m. instead of 1 p.m. in SB 7, and does not lower the standard for overturning an election.
Republican Senator Bryan Hughes, one of the authors of the Senate Electoral LawSB1, said the Senate bill would include many provisions from last session’s electoral act, such as z-hour voting. These practices were used by Harris County, home of Houston, during the 2020 election.
“We believe that when people trust the system and know that their vote counts right and right, people want to participate,” said Hughes. “These deal with specific issues that came up in the Texas election.”
The Democrats have tried to keep up pressure against the passage of a comprehensive electoral law. Several Democratic MPs traveled to Washington, DC DC in June Meet with Vice President Harris and the Democrats of Congress on the right to vote.
Trey Martinez Fischer, one of the Democrats who led the strike in May, said: House Democrats and Republicans could work together during the spring session to remove some of the “sharp edges” from an earlier version of the Senate Voting Act. He said the Democrats were ready to work with the leadership again, but didn’t rule out another strike.
“Every option is on the table. The tools we used in the regular session to fight voter suppression will be the tools we will use in the special session,” said Martinez Fischer.
Texas Democrats have a history of work stoppages. They broke the quorum twice in 2003, including leaving the state to go to Oklahoma during a battle over redistribution.
Martinez Fischer and other Democrats sent a letter to Texas House of Representatives Speaker Dade Phelan on Monday asking for a “fair, transparent and accessible process throughout the special session.” They also said no action should be taken against bills until legal funding is restored.
“If they accept our input, then we have the opportunity to govern together,” said Martinez Fischer. “If you want to govern bipartisan, there isn’t a single Democrat who can stay in this House of Commons and let Republicans decide our voting rights.”
Martinez Fischer said he hadn’t received a response from the State House spokesman but was optimistic that a new committee Phelan announced Tuesday would “bring together a more diverse group of leaders” known for being “pragmatic and non-partisan” to be.
Suffrage and electoral reforms were a major political issue in 2021. State lawmakers across the country examined hundreds of bills amending electoral laws. Georgia, Florida and Iowa were among the states that passed some of the key changes. That Ministry of Justice announced in June that it sued Georgia over its new electoral law. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that two Arizona voting rules do not violate any central provision of the voting rights law.
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