Analysis: Texas lawmakers fight for voting rights – and voters’ attention

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Letting the state block restrictive election legislation is no more outrageous than forcing people to stand in line for 5 hours to testify on the same legislation at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

Everything is in the rules, and it is also a sign of how far the elect will go to win a fight. At first glance, this is ridiculous for everyone except the politicians themselves. In any other workplace, this kind of fabricated drama and stress would be ominous.

But these politicians have been fighting for a long time, and what seems trivial to the rest of us is, to Texas lawmakers, just one more day in the office.

And it works, in its weird way. As long as you don’t watch too closely, the process takes issues into account, debates and refines them, and either drops them (most of the time) or turns them into law. And it goes on, constantly changing and reconsidering, never really coming to a final conclusion. Everything is up for debate.

If you look closely, it’s crazy. The players behave like children in a sandbox.

Republican supporters of electoral legislation want to pass it quickly and efficiently, minimize negative attention, and come to terms with politics on rules they prefer to the rules they currently have. They want to ban things like 24-hour voting and generalized mail-in voting that some of them seemed to be helping Democrats in the last election.

Democrats who oppose the legislation want to slow it down, and they have been encouraged by their past success. Their walkout at the end of this year’s ordinary legislative session stalled passage of the bill, and when the details of the bill became apparent, the sponsors removed a few provisions that proved too difficult to digest. One is said to have undermined “souls at the polls” efforts to get church voters to voting booths during early voting on Sunday by moving the polling station opening time to 1 p.m. from 11 a.m. Another would have made it easier for judges to cancel the elections.

Getting more attention to the legislation led to some key changes last time around. From the Democrats’ point of view, nothing else was working. And that lack of success – they’re a political minority, after all, and they don’t have the votes to change the outcome – caused them to step down at the end of the regular session and fly away this week.

They are losing, so they are trying to be a game changer.

Republicans, burned in their previous attempts, rushed the special legislative session. It started last Thursday. They tabled their bills and sent them to committees. They held committee hearings on the bill, among others, on Saturday. People who wanted to testify stood in line for hours, speaking of their support for or opposition to the legislation – most of them opposed – until the wee hours of Sunday morning. And the bill, virtually unchanged by their words, was approved by the committee and sent to the entire House for consideration.

It was, in some ways, the prompt for the Democratic walkout, and the simplest explanation for it: if you can’t win the game that way, find another way to play.

Republicans did so by rushing the review of the legislation, which made it awkward for Texans to share their thoughts on it and send it to a so-called legislative body with a predetermined outcome.

Democrats did this by studying the situation and deciding that staying in place was certain defeat. They probably lose that way too; Abbott has said he will recall them session after session until the next election until lawmakers produce a bill he needs to sign.

They’re all mad at each other, but that part doesn’t really matter. They all make their own version of rule abuse. It doesn’t matter much to normal citizens either.

What matters is the subject of the fight, in this case the voting rights – and whether those normal people care about the outcome. The fighting in Austin and Washington is just a little drama that unfolds as these people learn what is in the law.