Buster and bluster

It was a historic moment on the floor of the Texas Senate this week as Sen. Wendy Davis filibustered (prolonged speechmaking for the purpose of delaying legislative action) to stop SB 5 which would have radically altered access to abortion.  The proposal would have banned most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and required abortion facilities to meet the standards of an ambulatory surgical center.  Having passed in the Texas House earlier in the week, it looked almost certain that 37 of the state’s 42 facilities providing abortions, including many operated by Planned Parenthood would be closing.

That is until Senator Davis tried talking the bill to death and a broad coalition of grass-roots groups (organizations which rely on activist citizen participation) eventually yelled the bill to death.   A number of liberal organizations came together Tuesday night to create such a racket in the Texas Senate chamber that the bill could not be properly voted on.

Senator Davis had been successful in her filibuster until Republicans successfully employed parliamentary maneuvers to end it. At that point, groups supporting pro-choice advocates including local Occupy movement groups, the International Socialist Organization, and GetEqual Texas, a gay rights group had members at the protest began chanting so loudly that business could not be conducted on the Senate floor. Finally at 12:03 a.m. (the special session ended at midnight), the vote was finally taken, but it was too late.

There was a bit of confusion when it was reported that the legislation had actually passed in time to meet the deadline, but Republicans had to recant later when it was discovered that the date time stamp had been changed.  After a meeting that lasted until 3 am, the bill was officially declared dead on arrival.

Another law that was killed this week was section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (1965) which mandates preclearance for all states which are required to comply because they have a past history of discrimination. As a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this week in two Texas cases, one involving voter identification laws, and the other involving a 3 three judge federal court which had invalidated a Texas redistricting map, the High Court held that states need no longer be automatically subject to the preclearance process.

That means that the two lower federal court decisions in those cases must now be reconsidered in light of the Supreme Court’s rulings to determine whether their initial decision should stand, or be busted.

 

 

 

 

A penny for your thoughts

Talk about your law of unintended consequences (that the government’s actions have effects that are unanticipated or unintended), we have a new one for the record.   Texas lawmakers are considering how to reverse a law that accidentally made stealing a penny a crime. What you say? If I find a penny on the ground and pick it up and it’s not mine, I can be prosecuted?

That’s right.

Since 2011 when the Texas legislature passed a law aimed at stopping metal thieves who would sneak onto construction sites and steal metal piping (especially copper wire), stealing any kind of metal worth value can be considered a crime. Originally the law only applied to objects that had a 50% metal threshold – meaning that if the item was made of 50% more of metal it fell under the law to be considered a crime. During the markup session—the process where a committee reviews and debates amendments to a bill before reporting it out for debate before the full chamber—Sen. Royce West took out the 50% requirement which meant that anything with any metal could be eligible for a state jail felony. Pennies, you may not know, contain 2.5% copper. Good news is that the legislature will most likely amend the law to make is so that you have to steal metal valued at $500 or more.  That’s an awful lot of pennies.

And speaking of sharing your thoughts and trying to set a record, our U.S. Senators did that on Wednesday when they engaged in a 12-hour filibuster to stop the nomination of John Brennan to head the Central Intelligence Agency.  A filibuster is the endless talking that can go on when Senators try to “talk a bill to death.”  Under U.S. Senate rules, you must first vote to close off debate (vote of cloture) by 60 votes (or 3/5^th majority).  So even though you may have the 51% (majority) vote you need to pass legislation, take some action, or confirm a nominee, you can never get to that point if you do not have the supermajority (a number substantially greater than 51%) needed to stop the debate in the first place.  Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz joined Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in reading everything from Shakespeare’s Henry V and quotes from the movie “Patton”, to tweets which came in supporting the filibuster. The conservative Senators are unhappy about Brennan’s support for President Obama’s drone program which potentially allows unmanned flight vehicles to bomb U.S. citizens if the government has reason to believe a terrorist target is on U.S. soil.  The Senators finally ended their endless yap session about 1 a.m. with Rand Paul joking that he had wanted to break Senator Strom Thurmond’s previous record of 25 hours filibustering, but that the process had its limits (and “I am going to have to go take care of one of those here.”)

Guess sometimes nature just has to run its course.