March 16th 2022 – Second Reading Podcast

Welcome to the second reading podcast from the university of Texas at Austin,

the Republicans were in the democratic party

because there was only one party.

So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas.

The problem is these departures from the constitution.

They have become the norm. Point must a female Senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room.

And welcome back to the second reading podcasts for the week of July 12th, 2021. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. And I’m happy to have as our guests on the podcast today, Ross Ramsey, I’m going to call you executive editor Ross, because I can’t remember.

What’s your interim hire title. Doesn’t matter,

just

some guy. Good, because he’s the same guy. And that same guy was one of the founders of the Texas Tribune and one of the preeminent, uh, journalists covering Texas government and policy. Not only now, but for a while, that will politely put it. And we’re very lucky to have Ross on.

I wanted to have Ross today to talk about the special session of the, of the Texas legislature, which was called by governor Abbott a few weeks ago. And then went into session on Thursday morning with an 11 item agenda near the top of that agenda. If not literally right at the top, I think it was the second agenda.

Was revisiting the Republican sponsored and supported election legislation, which has been very controversial and brought a lot of national attention to Texas, given the general discussion of elections and what is seen by Democrats. And by many even non-democratic exert observers as a nationwide push by Republicans.

At the state level to add voting restrictions to existing law and then modifications to existing law that are seen as likely to limit, turn out into advantage Republican. Moving forward. We’ll talk about that in more detail, but one of the reasons I’m glad Ross is here is because there’s breaking news today.

I guess I should just say here, Ross and I did another online panel with a couple of other colleagues about two hours ago in the interim. NBC first reported, I believe. And then the Texas Tribune was right on their heels that the Democrats are now planning to leave the state in order to break quorum and by break quorum.

Of course, we mean by not showing up in the legislature, in there for. Depriving the legislature of a quorum, which is the, the working, uh, requisite threshold of people present to actually pass laws and to act. So the idea here is, and it’s not a new one as we’ll get into is that if the Democrats leave town and enough of them leave town, There aren’t enough members of the body to do business and they can therefore prevent the legislature from, or the house in this case from, from passing any legislation.

And, and earlier this morning, I think we got a, a little bit of a sketch of this. Yeah. The Senate wound up adjourning early because of many Democrats were also absent. Now, when we have Ross Sears to bring us up to date, and again, this is very breaking news. So it’s even possible. Some of this will change by the time we get this recording in the can and put out later today, but Ross and I are going to take stab at it anyway.

So, so Ross, Ross, what’s the latest that’s being reported by. By the Tribune and other reporters

that the Democrats, you know, enough of them, as you said to deny a quorum, the minimum number of people needed to conduct business are talking about going to Washington. And the idea is to deny the quorum first to sort of freeze the Texas legislature and then to hopefully talk Congress into paying attention to this issue and getting back together on, or at least getting back the effort to.

Limit these voting laws or to control these voting laws from the national level, they’re going to lose at the state level and implicitly. And this is the idea that if we lose at the state level, the only thing that might save the Democrats is some kind of national intervention. And so instead of going to Ardmore, Oklahoma, like they did over redistricting 10 years ago, or Albuquerque New Mexico, they’re going to Washington to try to bring this issue.

To national attention. And more importantly to congressional

attention, you raised an interesting point about this that’s worth making. Is that there’s. Yeah, there’s a two-pronged strategy here, at least theoretically. And just to flesh out your point about national legislation, there, there are two big bills pending in Congress right now that are sponsored by the Democrats.

The first bill is a large omnibus election bill, which I believe is his house bill one at the national level, that would not only. Prevent many of the kinds of changes, you know, put it this way. Preempt many of the kinds of changes being discussed in state law in places like Texas and elsewhere, but that big bill also includes a lot of other provisions that speak to a larger kind of framework of, of, of democracy and the way that institutions are functioning.

I believe that that bill, the last writing I saw has provisioned. To create federal law, to regulate redistricting and make it more non-partisan there’s campaign finance laws in there. So there’s a lot in that bill that has made it very difficult to pass thus far. And so, you know, I think your point Ross, that, that part of what the Democrats are trying to accomplish is to breathe new life into that, by drawing attention to what’s going on in Texas.

And then the other bill is, is a more limited, but it also very far reaching bill, which would be the John Lewis voting rights act, which would. Re-establish and strengthen and to some extensive restore some of the provisions of the voting rights act as it was passed in 1965, and then augmented later on by Congress, but have in the interim been thrown out by the Supreme court, including a decision very recently.

So both of those bills. Would help Texas Democrats in, in their own way. The big omnibus bill would knock out some of the, the election provisions. That Democrats are trying to block in Texas failing that the voting rights, the John Lewis voting rights act would reopen some of the means that Democrats have used in the past to fight voting rights.

So I’m curious, Ross, did you, where you had you anticipated the Washington DC move? I mean, one of the things we were talking about this morning was, you know, where would they go and how long could they stay there? How do you think Washington DC plays in. Well, I think

Washington DC, you know, is, I think the first question is will they leave the state?

I do want to ask you about that because I mean, that’s kind of the way I frame this too, is that, you know, there’s a, there’s a two route strategy here in which you’re. You know, hoping, and, and probably the, you know, the, the preferred, the preferred outcome for the Texas Democrats that are planning, this would be to help out the national Democrats and, and juice up the, the effort to pass, you know, one or the other of the national bills.

But I’m wondering, you know, you know, The second part that you allude to is that you, to some degree opened negotiations and now none of these negotiations, I wouldn’t think would be public, but in which Democrats are on the phone with Republicans in Texas, right. You know, trying to find an ideal point that Democrats could accept for this bill.

You know, I, I don’t know how far that could go. Do you,

And that’s kind of what we were kicking around this morning and where would they go? The idea there is that the Texas Rangers can’t chase them across state lines. So if the speaker of the house decided he wanted a quorum, he could tell the Texas Rangers go find everybody haul them in here. That action is known as putting a call on the house, but if they’re out of state, that doesn’t work.

So that’s the first step. The second step is where do you go? And I know even the last time they did this, where do you go? But so one of the things they didn’t do last time, they were careful not to go to new Orleans or Las Vegas. Or someplace where it would look like they were just partying. And the reason I mentioned that is because this time they’re going someplace where the second story after they left is where did they go?

And they have a story to tell if they go to Washington. So when you pick the place, you’re actually picking the story you want to tell. And in this case, Knowing that they’re going to lose on this issue because they just don’t have the numbers in the house, in the Senate. That’s not cynical, it’s just math and they know that that’s going to happen.

Fairly widespread program, particularly in black churches called souls to the polls, where basically, you know, you go to the service, you get up from the pew and you jump in a car and you go to the polls and you vote, and then you go to lunch. And if you delay that until one, you know, you’ve got a break in that schedule and a break in that program.

And it was seen as a targeted effort to suppress voting. Or one voter turnout tactic that’s used pretty widely by black churches. Once they had called attention to it, the Republicans called it, uh, actually called it a typo. Oh, that wasn’t supposed to be in there. Um, there was another one that would allow now a judge to undo an election.

That one didn’t survive daylight either. So one of the advantages of a delay is that you put a spotlight on things that weren’t spotlighted before and maybe by doing. Kill them. The other thing here is that, you know, maybe they will get Congress to jump or to act or turn this into a national conversation.

And that too could either, you know, subvert a state bill or could bring the state people. You know, the state sponsors, the Republicans who were backing this book. To look at some of the provisions to say, well, let’s tone this down a little bit. I don’t know if it’ll actually be successful, but you know, those, that’s the only strategy they’ve

This gets into a really interesting piece of politics between the house and the Senate. So at the end of the legislative session, or let’s say in the last month of the legislative session, The house passed a voting bill and the Senate passed a voting bill and a Senate bill with much stricter and went much further than the houses did.

And the question was, how are they going to reconcile these bills when they take it to conference committee? And what happened in conference committee was that it stalled for a while. And then in the final days of the session, the conference committee handed up a bill that not only was stronger than the Senate version and included 21 more pages of restriction.

And it went to the floor of the Senate light. It passed the Senate somewhere between two and six o’clock in the morning. I forget on the last, I guess, Sunday morning of the session, it went over to the house in a hurry. The house ran it as quickly as they could, but they got to the end of the legislative day.

And the Democrats looked up at the clock and said, Hey, if we just ditch this place for a couple of hours, we’ll kill this legislation. So you already have a situation where the house has passed. A milder version of the voting rights bill that the Democrats didn’t like, but they could hold their noses and go home, you know, semi happy with the Senate passed one that they just flat didn’t like.

And the question in this special session is which version will prevail. Does the governor care if it’s the strict version or the mild version? Does the house care to pass the bill or vote on the bill that the Senate had? Or can you talk the Senate off the cliff? So if you get the Democrats and you get some outside pressure in that situation, There’s some, I think there’s some room for movement movement that we saw in may in the legislature, even in this special session.

Yeah.

I mean, that’s interesting. I mean, and I can, that sounds pretty good, but I also don’t wonder if now people are, and by people, I mean really the house Democrats. Are now more committed in a way that makes it harder for them to compromise again, in a way that they did. I mean, even if the Senate was to say, we can go down this, you know, too far, but you know, even if the S you know, that the will of the Senate was fine, we’ll go back to that, you know, to that something approximating that version of the bill.

I’m not entirely sure that the Democrats are now in a position to take that deal. Right.

That’s the question. And what do you do with the Senate Democrats? You know, what are they doing right now? W they’re looking like, you know, they’ve got to be feeling like there’s a whole, you know, there’s a whole book here, but they’ve got, gotta be feeling like, you know, the house Democrats are taking a position that they were.

At least publicly not taking the sentence, a peculiar institution right now, the, without trying to sound like a geezer. I mean, there was a time not very long ago when you sort of had to know what the senators thought about a particular issue to figure out where the Texas Senate was going. And then. You really just need to know where the Lieutenant governor wants it to go because the Senate, you know, follows him with a faithfulness that, you know, previous Lieutenant governor’s only dreamed of.

Yeah. I mean, it’s, yeah. It’s a big factor that the, the Texas Senate now is functioning in a way that. Is not, I don’t want to say normal, but it’s, it’s not historically familiar for the Lieutenant governor to have so much influence and for the Senate to be. So, you know, I’m just going to use the word, even though it’s a little unfair, but for the Senate as a body to be so subservient to the Lieutenant governor.

Yeah.

I think that’s right. I think that’s right. So, so the question really the play here is in the house and the, and the question is the speaker has a couple of concerns here. One of them is that he’s a Republican and one of them is that he’s a. And the difference there is, you know, the Republicans want this legislation.

I have no question that, you know, Dade feelin wants this legislation on some level as a Republican, but there’s also a question of, you know, representing the house and, you know, you represent the house in particular. This has always been a function of the, of the Texas house. There’s the house that you see in the house that you don’t see in the house that you see as the one.

This group over here says we want a yes, vote on a piece of legislation. And in this group over here, it says, we want to know, and they’re really demonstrative and they stand up and they get press conferences and all that. The other Senate is the private Senate and that’s the line or the house rather.

And that, that’s the one where there’s a line of representatives outside the speaker’s office, going in there and telling him, look, if this comes to the floor, I’m going to vote for it because everybody’s going to be watching. But I don’t want this to come to the floor because I don’t want to vote. This is what happened four years ago with what was called the bathroom bill and attempt to regulate, you know, transgender people’s use of public facilities.

And, you know, it was one of those things where the speaker at the time, Joe Strauss, his members were telling him they didn’t want to vote on it. And so he took all of the flack for them and didn’t bring it to the floor so they didn’t have to vote. The question I have on this voting bill is how many Republican.

Really want the bill, the Senate passed and how many Republicans in the house really want the bill, the house passed. And I think if there’s any maneuvering room it’s to tell the Democrats, if in case, if in fact this is the case that the house Republicans will vote for them. More diluted version of this bill.

If the Democrats will come back and if the Democrats don’t come back, they’re just going to wait a mountain, pass the Senate version.

And there does seem to be some, you know, a lot of indication and, you know, we have. Representative clarity on the podcast a few weeks ago, that there were clear signals coming from some corners.

And you talked about the different factions in the Republican caucus in each chamber, and that’s, I think that’s related, but nonetheless, you know, representative Clardy was making it pretty clear or that there was a lot of room for compromise among Republicans that they were going to pass a bill. But that, you know, some of the more egregious things that you were talking about could be left out of the bill and that Republicans wouldn’t really mind that very much.

There were a lot of Republicans in the house that wouldn’t mind that very much. So I think that’s right, right. You know, stepping back a second. So, you know, when we were talking about this a few hours ago, You know, as, as I said, at the outset, there are 11 items on the special agenda and one of them is very structurally and institutionally important.

And that’s the item that the governor put on the special call that says that, um, Uh, that, that, you know, it says that the, that the legislature needed to revisit funding for the legislature in the next biennium. That starts September 1st. Now the governor put that on the call cause he beat out the funding for the legislature, amidst much controversy and, and, and creating a lot of hostility, I think for a while, between the legislature and the governor.

Um, but that’s at work here too, that if the Democrats break quorum, as it looks like they’re going to and may leave in the ledge and the house cannot act, one of the things they can act on is funding for the legislative branch. In the net for the next couple of, for the next two years, starting September 1st.

Now that’s not the legislators themselves, but their salary is barely marginal because they only make 7,200 bucks a year, but this is all the staff and the administrative support system that the legislature needs to do among other things redistricting next year. So. You know, how does that, how does that play into the, the tactics?

Well, you know, the governor did this kind of in a fit of peak. It was the, his action. After the Democrats walked out on the voting bill at the end of the session, he vetoed the legislative funding in the budget passed. Signed the rest of the budget and said, I’m going to call you back. And you know, basically said, pass my bill, or you won’t be funded pretty straight up parliamentary face-off there.

And the problem is that, you know, most of the funding for staff a is for Republican state. Yeah. So, you know, people like Dan, like Dave and weren’t happy about it. Uh, the governor is, you know, Messing around with that institutional pride of the house versus the executive or the house versus the Senate or the house and Senate versus the executive.

And, you know, was telling him basically, you know, do this or else. And the RL said good for anybody. It’s not good for the Democrats in the house. It’s not good for the Republicans in the house. It’s not good for the Republicans in the executive. They need that staff back next fall to be drawing political maps, for example, and to do all of the things that make that part of the government work, as you get closer and closer to the September 1st deadline, I think the leverage, the Democrats have begins to rise, you know, where the governor has to come to their side and basically say, okay, okay.

Okay. Sign the. And then we’ll try to pick up the rest of the pieces here right now. The governor is saying, you know, they’re threatening the budget. There’s another item on the agenda. That’s a, what they call a 13th check for teachers. They get monthly retirement checks and a 13th check when there’s enough money in the fund.

Sometimes they write them an extra check and that’s a big democratic constituency. And so I think part of the thinking there is that the Democrats will want to be here for that. Right now, the Democrats are in a position where they’re saying, look, the house and the Senate are running these voting bills through very quickly.

Both of them had their first hearing on these. The sec, the special session started on Thursday. They had, you know, almost all night hearings on these, on the weekend. They’re supposed to vote on them. Uh, I think this week in both places and the Democrats are saying, you know, slow your roll there. We’re going to go to Washington, Oregon to make this an issue.

We’re going to talk about that. And if you want to, you know, make us any offers about, you know, what you’ll do if we come back, we’re all ears.

And in the meantime, you know, that the functioning of one branch of government is, is in question. I mean, one of the really interesting things about that was that it really does raise really highlights that, you know, separation of powers and checks and balances.

Are real things that, you know, we’re, we’re so used to watching in recent times because of hyper-partisanship and, and how different and, and hostile the parties have become to each other. We’re used to watching most of the battles being Democrats versus Republicans. And, and, you know, as you kind of implied, and I’m just trying to draw it out a little bit, that the governor, you know, in vetoing the legislative article, that in the, in the budget.

Really drew, you know, just invited a conflict between the executive and the legislative branch. And you know, so we’re seeing this, you know, the, this, this emerging kind of friction and this, this fluctuation between on one hand, as we were discussing earlier this morning, as you mentioned, you know, speaker day feeling probably very unhappy.

You know, having to hear from his majority caucus that they’re not going to be able to pay their staffers and that their, their staffers are understandably worried about their livelihoods or his own separateness and yeah. And his own staffers. And that this has been done by a Republican governor. And so.

The fact that that’s brewing beneath this highly partisan conflict between Democrats and Republicans over voting ads, as you kind of implied in some ways, a very unnecessary level of conflict here. I think when the governor did, you know, threaten to defund the legislature and DeVito that article. I mean, I was skeptical.

He would carry it out, honestly, cause I thought cooler heads would prevail. And that that’s really just not been the case. There were no

cooler heads, you know, it doesn’t really help in these arguments when you’re fighting over something to introduce a second thing to fight about, you know, you’ve got a distraction now, you know, you’re fighting over this voting lawn, you know, you can, you can argue your side and you can argue provision by provision or you can argue the omnibus versus the omnibus, but it’s a fight about voting.

It’s largely. Loaded as a partisan issue. And to a great extent comes out of, you know, in particular Republican questions about the veracity of the election result in 2020 and, and, and the issues that former president Trump has raised and all of that stuff. So you’ve got the sort of giant partisan boil.

That is a lot, I mean, it’s a big fight and there’s no reason to add to it. And then the governor adds this other institutional fight. And it blurs the loyalties. What were fairly clear partisan lines in the other fight are now blurred, as you said, between not just parties, but also the executive versus the legislative and some of the legislators on the governor’s side, who agree with the governor on the bill and on the legislator.

Are ticked off about this legislative thing and ticked off about the use of this particular veto as a tool in the governor’s

box. Yeah. I mean, I think that frustration has, you know, has it’s been in public, it’s been muted, but only compared to, you know, normally, I mean, I think you’re still having some Republicans.

I think it, it was expressed. It’s been expressed by Republicans as a kind of Republican legislators as a kind of be wilderness rather than an open anger at the gun. Right. So kind of an Aw shucks. I don’t really know why he did that. And then, you know, you get off the record and people start cussing. I don’t know if you’ve had that experience, that same

conversation.

I went to where we were talking to the same people. That’s funny.

So the, the modulation of those two things, I, you know, I think the other thing that, um, you know, it, it’s interesting to go back to a beat just for a point you made earlier is that, you know, there is something about the democratic strategy.

The Texas Democrats strategy here that is very risky in the sense that I can see where they may think this is the only play they have. And, and it’s done now. So second guessing. You know, could wait for later, but it does seem to me that if the idea is, you know, we can help push the voting legislation that’s been installed at the national level.

Um, we can re-energize this at the national level that may really be underestimating, just how complicated and, and problematic things are. For congressional Democrats and frankly for the Biden agenda right now, because there is a lot, there’s a lot, there’s a lot at play

here. Yeah. There’s, there’s a ton of crossfire and there are probably, there are almost certainly people in Washington who, for various reasons agree with the Democrats on this and that, and the other thing, but are interested in another fight who just feel like this is something that something else that’s going to.

Be a distraction for whatever it is they were trying to get done. Right. I

mean, you’ve got the infrastructure bill at play, which is obviously the Biden administration, certainly their number one priority right now. You’ve got the, you know, that’s been broken up into the fiscal infrastructure and kind of the social human infrastructure spending that would, that was originally all part of the same strategy.

That’s now been defacto broken up. You’ve got a budget resolution. Pending there was a lot going on and I think you’re right. I, I, you know, I liked the way you put that in that, you know, there are going to be Democrats in Washington who will have to greet the Texas Democrats as heroes for political reasons.

But I’ll bet there’s a lot of grumbling behind the scenes,

you know, in some ways it’s the same strategy happening in Washington. That’s happening in Texas. If you, if you have a fight and it’s about one thing, there’s a big advantage. If you’re trying to press a fight like that, you know, and that’s one of the strengths of a governor calling a special session is that you can, if you call a special session on one issue, and that’s the only thing anybody’s talking about, then your idea and your proposal are front and center.

And the minute you begin introducing other things like vetoing, the legislature’s budget or something like that, you begin to dilute the forces and, and your fights not as clean and Washington, is that on steroids, they’ve got 17 different fights going, as you said, And here comes Texas with another distraction and they may be sympathetic to the distraction, but they’re probably some version of, Hey, can’t you tell, we’re trying to do something

else here.

Yeah. Agenda control and agenda management. Really central legislative tools and the special session gives the governor is one of those moments where the governor’s influence increases, because he has so much influence over management of the agenda. Right. You know, I think you’re right. That in the end it does take us back to the fact of the, of the, of the veto of the legislative article and how that seems to have been diluted.

What should have been, uh, a pretty clear advantage. We’re Republicans. So in our last couple of minutes, Ross, I just, I’m going to ask you something really unfair, which is, you know, given all this and given that you’ve had all of two hours to think about it since it happened along with all the other things.

So, you know, you think they’ll come, you think the Democrats will come back before the session is over, or is this this going to last the rest of the special session? And then, you know, we’re going to be at a crisis point and laid off. I’m not

really thinking about it as is when the session is over. I’m thinking about it when the summer is over.

And the reason is, you know, as you pointed out, the current budget goes through the end of August. The new budget starts on September 1st. And the real question hanging here is. Will the legislature’s budget be in place in time for September 1st. So whether it’s in this special session or this one bombs and the governor calls them right back, the real date here is going to be the end of August.

And I don’t think that the Democrats are likely to hold out in Washington or someplace else outside of the state for that period of time. I think you probably come to a head in some way or another. You either get some federal movement on some federal legislation. You get some kind of conversation going on state legislation, you know, the house bill versus the Senate bill or whatever that whatever form that takes or you get this brinksmanship that the governor set up.

And if, you know, if the, this is the one biggest risk that faces Abbott here, he’s sitting pretty in a lot of ways, but if you deliver an ultimatum, it only works the other side folds. And if the Democrats don’t fold here and you can’t get that legislation. Funding back in place, everybody in, you know, at least for near term history is going to be talking about that.

He’s that governor that vetoed the legislature. Yeah.

There’s a, there’s a part of this. That’s just an old fashioned game of chicken, right? I think that’s right. And so you’ve got the governor needing the, you know, needing to get something out of this. And the Democrats facing, you know, not wanting to back down, but facing very difficult conditions.

And I think we were talking about this earlier. I think one thing to remember, you know, from the perspective of the Democrats being in Washington, this is a collection of, you know, more than 50, you know, human beings that are going to have to leave home and then stay out of the state. For as long as it takes and that creates collective action problems.

You got to keep everybody on board and, you know, nobody can defect and you know, as soon as somebody says, oh, I’m tired of this. Like, I can’t do this anymore. I got to come home. It poses a big

problem. And they picked an expensive place to go. Yeah. So if you’re trying to make it from July 12th to August 30th, you know, Ardmore, Oklahoma is probably the hotel rates.

Yeah.

Yeah. And, and the Democrats, you know, I mean, look, some of them individually are fine, but as a party and as an entity, you know, there, there are not infinite resources to pay for this and that will become an issue and it will be, you know, there will be news stories. I’m sure. I’m sure you guys are working out and I’m sure reporters all over the state, if not the country are going okay.

So how are they going to pay for this? Where are they staying? What’s it costing? Where’s the money coming from? Well, I

think the money piece, you know, I mean, there is an interesting thing here. I mean, this is like so many things in politics right now. It’s a fundraising opportunity, send money and keep the Democrats in Washington, keep Texas from, you know, you, you could probably, I haven’t looked, we probably both all have all of those emails piling in both Republicans and Democrats.

So that part’s interesting. It is expensive, both in the financial sense though. To do the Washington thing. And as you point out in the personal sense, I’m away from the kids, the family, my work that pays me a salary, all of that. Stuff’s a real, real boiler

on that happy note, but it’s a practical note really.

Reminding people that legislators are real people as well, which, you know, in these fights can sometimes get lost. Ross. Thanks for being here much. Appreciate the time on what I know is a very busy day. Always a pleasure. Thanks. And thanks to our crew in the liberal arts development studio in the college of liberal arts at the university of Texas at Austin.

Thanks to you for listening and, uh, programming note. I will be out of town next week. And so we won’t have a podcast next week. But then we’ll come back and see how much things have changed or how much they’ve not changed a week after that. So take care all. And we’ll talk to you soon.

The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin.