In a last-ditch effort to block legislation making it harder to vote, Texas Democrats resorted to a tactic they haven’t deployed since the George W. Bush administration — fleeing the state in order to prevent the legislature from passing laws.
The drama started last week, when Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state lawmakers to return to Austin for a special legislative session. He also instructed those lawmakers to focus on a list of 11 policy items, most of which are Republican pet causes such as forcing social media companies to publish viewpoints that the company does not want to publish, excluding transgender students from sports teams, and attacking “critical race theory.”
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One of Abbott’s top priorities is legislation supposedly “strengthening the integrity of elections in Texas” — but he’s run into a significant hurdle. Early last month, Texas Republicans attempted to pass a similar bill, which would have imposed several restrictions on the right to vote. The bill was blocked after Democratic representatives discreetly abandoned the state House chamber — the Texas House cannot conduct business unless two-thirds of its members are present — until the House lacked a quorum and business was shut down.
On Monday, Texas Democrats revealed that they will repeat this tactic, with much of the state House’s Democratic minority fleeing to Washington, DC, in order to deny Republicans a quorum again. (The Republican majority can send law enforcement to arrest the fleeing Democrats and drag them back to the House floor, but Texas police typically do not have jurisdiction in the nation’s capital.)

 Texas Democrats executed a similar maneuver in 2003, when 11 state senators fled to Albuquerque for 46 days in order to prevent the state senate from passing a gerrymandering bill benefiting Republicans — the standoff eventually ended when one of these Democrats returned home, thus giving Republicans a quorum to pass the gerrymander.