Just before midnight on Friday, August 22nd, insects circled the luminous lights outside the texas state capitol and sprinklers watered the lawn. Inside, lawmakers milled around the Senate chamber as a long day threatened to be prolonged.
A few weeks earlier, at the behest of President Donald Trump, texas Republicans had introduced a mid-decade redistricting bill, redrawing the congressional map to give the party the likelihood of five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Without the proposed changes, Republicans were at an “extreme risk” of losing the House, Ken King, a representative from the Texas Panhandle and the bill’s author, said.The bill was a shoo-in in the Republican-dominated Texas legislature. To protest it, a contingent of more than fifty Democrats in the Texas House had fled the state, delaying the vote and drumming up national interest. After two weeks in Illinois and elsewhere, they returned to Texas, where the Republican majority quickly passed the bill. Yet the Democrats claimed a kind of victory. “The quorum break was beyond our wildest dreams,” Gene Wu, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said. “Would you be talking about redistricting, about gerrymandering, about racial discrimination, about trying to cheat the public if we did not do this?” Now the redistricting plan had to clear the state Senate, where a substantial Republican majority made a similar quorum break unfeasible. Instead, Carol Alvarado, a state senator from Houston, prepared a last-ditch effort to filibuster the bill.
Texas has strict rules regarding the filibuster: No eating, drinking, or bathroom breaks; no sitting down or leaning on a desk; no off-subject speech. Texas’s most notable filibusterers of the modern era have been women. “Texas women are tough,” alvarado told me. “We’ve had to be tough.” In 2013, the state senator Wendy Davis spoke for nearly thirteen hours, attempting to delay the passage of a restrictive abortion bill. In 2021, Alvarado herself filibustered for more than fifteen hours, a state record, to protest a bill that imposed new restrictions on voting. (Both laws ended up passing.) This time, she was aiming to break her own record. In order to do so, she’d prepared “mentally and physically,” she said: a good night’s sleep, a hot-yoga class, a big meal of barbecue. She wore a catheter underneath her loose patterned dress, and the same sneakers she’d worn four years ago.
Twelve years ago, Davis’s filibuster kicked off around noon, on a Tuesday in late June. She spoke in front of a packed Senate gallery, with crowds spilling out into the capitol rotunda; a youtube live stream, hosted by the Texas Tribune drew nearly two hundred thousand viewers at its peak, as many as were watching MSNBC at the time.The attention catapulted davis to national fame. Her pink running shoes briefly became Amazon’s top-selling women’s shoes, and she raised nearly a million dollars in campaign funds, most of it from small donors. Texas Republicans seemed to have learned their lesson. In 2021, most of Alvarado’s filibuster took place in the dead of night, owing to procedural delays.Because of Covid restrictions, the public gallery was closed to spectators. “There’s not a lot of fanfare, a lot of people cheering you## The Decline of Collegiality in the Texas Legislature
The state legislature is “the finest free entertainment in Texas,” political columnist Molly Ivins wrote in 1975. “It beats the zoo any day of the week.” Ivins famously documented the legislators’ often-boisterous behavior – fistfights, shoving matches, and heated debates – but also noted a sense of underlying respect. “There is a Texas legislative tradition that allows them to respect publicly, and yes, even love, those canny country bastards who always beat them,” she observed.
However, that spirit of collegiality appears to be waning. today, Texas Republicans, having pursued policies to expand gun access and severely restrict abortion access – including a near-total ban – have increasingly focused on directly punishing their Democratic counterparts. Earlier this year, the Texas House ended a long-standing tradition by prohibiting members of the minority party from chairing committees. State Senator José Menéndez described the atmosphere in the Senate as “much more divisive, meaner,” attributing the shift to the influence of national politics. For over half a century, *Texas Monthly* magazine has published an annual ranking of the state’s best and worst legislators; this year, the editors declined to do so, citing a political climate dominated by “small-mindedness and an emphasis on punishment and coercion.”
Texas Democrats, significantly outnumbered and lacking structural power, find themselves increasingly isolated. Representative Alvarado noted her party is “outnumbered and outgunned,” and facing resistance to bipartisan collaboration. This has led democrats to seek alternative avenues for influence, most notably through a highly publicized quorum break in 2021.
The quorum break, where Democratic lawmakers left the state to prevent a vote on restrictive voting legislation, garnered national attention. During their two weeks away, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced his state would pursue its own partisan redistricting map (though it requires voter approval). The situation was further inflamed by calls from Texas Republican leaders to locate, dismiss, or even arrest the absent lawmakers.Upon their return, Democratic legislators were subjected to surveillance by state troopers to prevent further departures. Representative Nicole Collier, of Dallas, refused the police escort and instead spent two nights sleeping in her office, broadcasting the event live to an audience that, at its peak, rivaled the viewership of Wendy Davis’s 2013 filibuster against restrictive abortion legislation . While the Democrats ultimately lost the vote on the legislation, they succeeded in shifting the focus to their cause and gaining significant public attention.