Friday's Absurdity of the Day: Fugitive Democrats Trickle Back to Austin

The legislature finally had a quorum Thursday, and immediately adjourned until Monday

The fugitive Texas Democrats couldn’t stay gone forever. The state of Texas smartly does not pay its state legislators a living wage, after all, so most members are business owners or professionals in their real lives and have to earn a living. Most also have families that they like to see occasionally; thus, the prospect of their staying outside of Texas indefinitely was never really in the cards.

Despite all the big initial talk by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and House Speaker Dade Phelan about having the Texas Rangers and Department of Public Safety officers arrest the fugitive Dems and lock them up in the state capitol building until the business of the House was completed, members who have been straggling back into Austin over the last couple of weeks have been allowed to quietly return with impunity.

That’s a damn shame, frankly, since their idiotic, 6-week vacation to Washington has disrupted the operation of the state government and cost taxpayers millions of dollars. There should be some penalty extracted from these preening fools for their ridiculous and utterly dishonest actions.

That aspect of this whole sorry episode was totally predictable as well.

But it all just keeps getting more and more absurd. On Thursday, as detailed by the Democrat activists who staff the Texas Tribune, enough of the fugitive Dems had returned to the Capitol for the House to finally form quorum. Because one Democrat member had recently resigned his seat, the number needed to establish a 2/3rds quorum in the 150 seat chamber had dropped to 99, and Phelan managed to round up exactly 99 members to vote “present” when he convened the House.

So, what did Phelan and the Republicans do with their new-found quorum?

Why, they adjourned for the weekend, of course.

No, really: That’s really what they did. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

The margin was razor thin on Thursday and it was unclear for hours before gaveling in whether Republicans had gotten enough members in the chamber to begin their work. Ultimately, 99 members voted that they were present with 49 stated absences. (The regular 100-member threshold for a quorum dropped to 99 on Thursday after San Antonio Democrat Leo Pacheco’s resignation went into effect.) The House then adjourned until 4 p.m. on Monday after referring a slew of bills to committee.

…

The quorum was reached on Thursday with the help of three Democrats who broke ranks with other members still refusing to return — Houston Democrats Garnet Coleman, Armando Walle and Ana Hernandez. The three members arrived together with Walle pushing a wheelchair for Coleman, who’d recently undergone surgery on his leg.

In a joint statement, the three Democrats said they were “proud of the heroic work and commitment” their caucus had shown in breaking quorum.

“We took the fight for voting rights to Washington, D.C. and brought national attention to the partisan push in our state to weaken ballot access. Our efforts were successful and served as the primary catalyst to push Congress to take action on federal voter protection legislation,” the statement read. “Now, we continue the fight on the House Floor.”

[end]

So, what did the Democrats’ “heroic work and commitment” achieve? Nothing of any substance, really.

Several members humiliated themselves during TV appearances by displaying an abject ignorance on the actual content of the election security bill they were protesting and the true state of Texas’s existing laws, but that’s no surprise at all, is it? But hey, they’re too dishonest and ignorant to even really understand how embarrassing their behavior truly was, so they got that bit of bliss going for them.

But it must be pointed out here that, just because Phelan was able to muster a bare quorum Thursday does not mean he will be able to accomplish that feat on Monday. Phelan and Gov. Abbot are too squeamish about getting some negative press - as if they ever get any other kind of press - to do the smart thing and place the returning Democrats under arrest and sequester them in the Capitol Building until the house’s business is complete, as the law very clearly enables them to do.

These bills will all be passed into law eventually, but it’s ridiculous that Republicans weren’t more ready to act quickly and decisively once they had a quorum in place. The rest of us in Texas will just have to wait until next week to see how much longer this farce will continue.

That is all.