It’s Thursday, May 15 — Do you know where the Texas Legislature is?

Today’s the deadline for the Texas State House to pass legislation and the body still can’t round up a quorum. The fiasco, however, appears to be drawing to an end.

Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick (R) told reporters yesterday that he’ll probably adjourn the House today, meaning that the Killer D’s — the 55 Democratic lawmakers who left the state to stop passage of Tom DeLay’s congressional redistricting plan — will have won.

While Craddick was making his announcement, the 51 lawmakers holed up in Ardmore, Okla., said they’ll be heading back to work on Friday. Before you start wondering whether the Republicans in the Texas GOP can fiendishly figure out a way to vote on a bill after it misses today’s deadline, the legislature’s rules say they’d need 100 votes to pass a bill after the deadline has passed. If they couldn’t get 100 people for quorum, they surely can’t get 100 votes on the congressional redistricting plan.

The bad news is by adjourning today, the Texas House will not be voting on a series of other bills pending in the legislature. The Killer D’s contacted Craddick yesterday, asking that they be allowed to return and vote on the other bills while having the redistricting plan removed from the schedule. Craddick declined, insisting he would not “negotiate” with the truant Dems.

Though the ordeal may be over soon, several incidents that occurred during the “Texas Tangle” remain controversial. Most notably, reports surfaced yesterday that a federal Homeland Security agency responsible for tracking terrorists and drug traffickers was used earlier this week to track a private plane flown by one of the Democratic lawmakers leaving the state.

The Air and Marine Interdiction Coordination Center was called on to assist Texas law enforcement in searching for a plane used by State Rep. Pete Laney (D), who flew to Oklahoma on Monday.

A spokesperson for the federal agency said they responded to a request for “Texas law enforcement” to “find a missing aircraft.”

This may sound like just another silly tidbit in an already ridiculous story, but several officials in Texas and Washington are outraged by the misuse of federal Homeland Security resources to track the private airplane of one truant state lawmaker.

Someone obviously requested federal assistance for this, but no one seems to want to admit it.

Tom DeLay said Craddick asked the feds to intervene. Craddick said he hasn’t made any calls to any federal agencies, preferring to let state law enforcement deal with the situation.

In light of the confusion, many Dems in Austin and DC are asking for a more formal investigation. U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) has already sent a request to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, asking the department to look into this.

“Why is a federal agent being diverted from that to ask an airport official in Plainview about helping to find some political people?” Doggett said. “We need more information.”

And finally, as a way to help wrap this fun up, I thought I’d encourage everyone to check out today’s column from Fort Worth-based columnist Molly Ivins, one of America’s greatest (and funniest) columnists.

I mention this because Ivins helps explain what led to the whole fiasco in the legislature in the first place.

“Too bad redistricting is such an inside-baseball deal: Only wonks and political junkies care,” Ivins explains. “But redistricting is the proverbial back-breaking straw here: The real reason Democrats are outta here is a session-long display of meanness and unfairness that finally became unbearable. The session was summed up by Rep. Senfronia Thompson when she carried the House rulebook up to the podium and dropped it on the floor. The legislative process has been shredded, rules ignored, points of order pointless. It’s like a parody of the legislative process. Republicans, for the first time ever in the majority of both houses of our Legislature, have been voting in lockstep. No Democratic amendment, no matter how obvious or how sensible, is allowed to pollute Republican bills.”

I’ll let everyone know if there’s any follow-up on this, but I suspect this is the end of the ordeal. To my friends in the Killer D’s, I say, “Thanks for the memories.”

Post script — Am I the only one who thinks this whole ordeal would make a really funny movie?