Don’t mess with Texas, nor with Democrats in the Texas state legislature

The political process gets really fun when politicians do things that are so extraordinary, that you can hardly believe it’s true. For this reason alone, I found the wild events in the Texas Legislature yesterday to not only be surreal, but also to be incredibly amusing.

The Texas House, under GOP control this year for the first time since Reconstruction, has been a hotbed for divisive acrimony the past several months. Rightly or wrongly, the newly elected House Speaker, Tom Craddick (R), has been running the body with an iron fist — killing inoffensive Democratic initiatives out of spite and stacking committees with his loyal cronies.

This week, the Texas House was due to vote on a redistricting proposal, redrawing the lines for the state’s congressional districts. Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), the Majority Leader in the U.S. House, has been working behind-the-scenes with Craddick and other right-wing lawmakers to manipulate the process to give Republicans a chance to pick up a few more seats in Congress.

To be sure, this is gerrymandering at its worst. As the Washington Post noted today, DeLay’s plan carves up several districts currently represented by Democrats, “in some cases creating bizarrely shaped boundaries connecting seemingly unrelated parts of the sprawling state, and slicing up neighborhoods. For instance, in Austin, a city of 678,000 and one of a dwindling number of Democratic enclaves in the state, a single downtown street would be divided into four congressional districts, one of them tortuously connected with the Mexican border about 300 miles away.”

Democrats in Texas, as you’d imagine, are a pretty frustrated bunch. There are 27 statewide officials in Texas, and all of them are Republicans. They’re in the minority in the state House and state Senate, and of course, there’s a Republican governor. But even in their minority status, Democrats saw DeLay’s plan to ram through a bogus redistricting plan as too much to bear.

Justifiably outraged, Dems in the Texas House had few, if any, legislative options. They couldn’t filibuster, they couldn’t pass any amendments, and they couldn’t count on the governor to veto the plan. They also couldn’t stand the idea of letting the bad guys win.

So they left.

59 of the 62 Democrats in the Texas House literally left town yesterday morning, nearly all of them heading out of the state. The desperation move achieved the one thing Dems wanted — without their presence in the legislature, there could be no quorum. No quorum means no vote, and DeLay’s redistricting plan can’t pass without a vote.

You’re probably thinking this is just a temporary stunt. The Dems can’t stay away from the legislature indefinitely and the GOP majority will simply vote on the redistricting plan when the Dems return, right? Wrong.

Under the legislative calendar for the Texas legislature, this Thursday (May 15) is the deadline for passing House bills. Democrats left yesterday and planned in advance to bring enough clothes and necessities to be gone past the deadline.

So House Speaker Craddick said the governor, Rick Perry (R), will simply call for a special session this summer after the regular session ends so that the legislature can vote on the redistricting plan. Fine, Democrats said, we’ll leave town then, too.

Before telling the rest of the story, I’ve got to say how much I admire the Dems for pulling this off. It’s not that I appreciate the predicament they’re in, it’s that I find it amazing that Democrats anywhere can organize this well. These 59 lawmakers had to plan this strategy in secret, coordinating and executing a scheme without tipping anyone off. I can say from experience that getting 59 Democrats to agree to anything is like herding cats. With this in mind, I’m very impressed.

The Dems even released an eloquent statement to the media, explaining their absence.

“We did not choose our path, Tom Delay did,” the statement reads. “We are ready to stand on the House floor and work day and night to deal with real issues facing Texas families. At a time when we are told there is no time to deal with school finance, and when we must still resolve issues like the state budget crisis and insurance reform, the fact that an outrageous partisan power grab sits atop the House calendar is unconscionable. Our House rules, including those regarding a quorum, were adopted precisely to protect the people from what is before the House today — the tyranny of a majority…. The redistricting plan scheduled today before the Texas House of Representatives is the ultimate in political greed — it is undemocratic, unjust and unprecedented. It’s a power grab by Tom DeLay, pure and simple.”

Things got really fun next. Craddick knows the legislative schedule as well as the Dems do and he desperately wants that vote by Thursday. First, Craddick locked down the Texas House, refusing to let anyone else leave. Second, and more importantly, Craddick announced that the missing Dem lawmakers were to be arrested. He ordered the Texas state troopers to track down the absent lawmakers and force them into the House so the legislature would have the quorum needed to vote.

The Texas Department of Public Safety even issued an alert “asking the public for assistance in locating 53 Texas legislators who have disappeared.”

In Texas, all of this is legal. Article 3, Sec. 10 of the state Constitution says the state House can “compel the attendance of absent members, in such a manner and under such penalties as each House may provide.”

Of course, the Dems know that Texas officials have no jurisdiction outside of Texas, so they decided to hide in Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Texas officials, in turn, asked state officials in their neighboring states if they’d help in rounding up the truant lawmakers. New Mexico’s attorney general, Democrat Patricia Madrid, didn’t sound real receptive to the idea.

“I have put out an all-points bulletin for law enforcement to be on the look out for politicians in favor of health care for the needy and against tax cuts for the wealthy,” she said to the great consternation of Republicans everywhere.

Many of the missing Dems were spotted by reporters having dinner in a Denny’s in Ardmore, Okla., last night, but there was nothing Texas Republicans could do about forcing them back to Austin.

The Dems have scheduled a press conference for this afternoon to discuss the “situation.” I’ll write more about developments as I hear about them, but if you find this as amusing as I do, a terrific liberal blogger in Texas called Burnt Orange has been offering detailed updates and analysis since early yesterday, and he’ll be attending this afternoon’s press conference.