Citizens of Texas Take Back Their Power & Call Bullshit On Texas State Senate From The Gallery

Texas Observer

With the Texas Senate poised to approve one the harshest anti-abortion laws in the country—just 15 minutes before the midnight deadline—the citizens took over in a display of democracy in action. Thousands of Texas who packed the Texas Capitol all day (and outnumbered Texas Department of Public Safety officers who were trying to eject them) began roaring louder and louder until they literally shouted down the final minutes of the 30-day special session in a deafening scream before Republicans could pass the bill.

In the confusion, Republican senators ran around insisting that the bill had passed before a midnight deadline. Major news sites including The New York Times reported the bill as passed. But many observers who watched the debate live didn’t see it that way.

The initial time stamp on the Capitol website and on Senate documents placed the vote at 12:02 or 12:03 on June 26 (which would have been past the deadline of midnight). But then someone mysteriously changed the time stamp to make it appear SB 5 passed before the deadline. The time stamp evidence, circulated on Twitter causing the Senators to retreat and meet privately.

Texas Representative Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa holding 2 different time stamps.
Photo: twitter.com/TXChuy

Just after 3 a.m., the Senate finally reconvened following the lengthy private meeting. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst emerged on the dais insisting the 19-10 vote was in time, but said, “with all the ruckus and noise going on, I couldn't sign the bill” before the deadline and declared it dead.

Here’s how it went down.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry called a 30-day special legislative session. On the last day of the session, the hugely Republican majority senate was expected to pass SB 5, a highly restrictive bill on abortion that would have effectively caused all but a handful of the state’s abortion clinics to close because of added costs mandated by the bill to upgrade their facilities.

11 Hours on her feet without breaks or water.Sen. Wendy Davis of Fort Worth, determined to filibuster the bill until the midnight deadline. The rules of the filibuster were demanding. Davis would not be allowed to sit, lean on a desk, take bathroom breaks, talk about anything that wasn’t “germane” to the bill or have assistance from others. The points of order (POO) declared that 3 violations and she would have to stop. She had 13 hours to kill to make it to midnight and block the bill. She made it to more than 11 hours on her feet without breaks or drinks of water.

Her first strike was for discussing Planned Parenthood’s budget which was ruled not germaine.

Davis received her second warning when the Senate voted 17 to 11 to sustain a point of order called by state Sen. Tommy Williams on Davis for receiving assistance to put on a back brace. Sen. Rodney Ellis, helped Davis to put on a back brace, violating a rule that prevents the filibusterer from receiving outside assistance.

Sen. Donna Campbell called the final point of order saying Davis is off-topic for talking about the sonogram law. That point was sustained.

In a dramatic scene, Sen. Davis’ filibuster was cut off, but Democratic senators stalled with questions about procedural rules till 11:45 p.m. Sen. Robert Duncan, presiding in place of Dewhurst, was about to start the roll call on a procedural vote before the final vote on the bill. But Sen. Van de Putte, angry that she hadn’t been recognized earlier, interrupted with a parliamentary inquiry and asked: At what point must a female senator raise her voice to be heard by her male colleagues?

The gallery erupted. And the cheers kept going, drowning out the action on the floor, as Duncan asked for the roll call.

“Members, we’re in the middle of a vote,” Duncan said, somewhat weakly. The yelling got louder. He made another attempt to conduct the vote but that only seemed to increase the shouts from the gallery. Duncan asked repeatedly for order in the chamber.

Order was never returned.But order never returned, and state troopers moved in, trying to remove protesters from the gallery. It was chaos in the Senate that most observers had never seen.

At two minutes to midnight, Sen Duncan asked tentatively if he could have some order, if he could have some attention. He didn’t get it. So he started the vote anyway, said something about the previous question having 17 votes, but his voice was drowned out and then the crowd erupted because when the clock struck midnight.

The filibuster was a defining moment for Davis, a twice-divorced single mother who had her first daughter as a teenager, was the first in her family to go to college, and worked her way from junior college and a Tarrant County trailer park to Harvard law school and the Fort Worth City Council.

As of late Tuesday night, roughly 200,000 people were watching the proceedings on The Texas Tribune’s YouTube feed. Obama tweeted, “Something special is happening in Austin tonight,” followed by the hashtag “#StandWithWendy.” Even filmmaker Michael Moore and comedian Sarah Silverman got in on the social media action as did U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and celebrities like author Judy Blume and actors Lena Dunham and Henry Winkler.