Texas Democrats’ Weapons of the Weak

Just before midnight on Friday, August 22nd, insects circled the bright 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 on,” she said. “But once you get going, you’re kind of going off adrenaline, especially in the middle of the night.”

In August, as Alvarado was preparing for her filibuster, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick called for a three-hour dinner break. Alvarado immediately sensed that something was up. “We all kind of thought, Well, that’s odd. What’s this really for? Because it’s certainly not to eat,” she said. When the legislators returned, instead of calling on Alvarado, Patrick recognized Charles Perry, a Republican from Lubbock, who laid out a dubious objection to Alvarado’s filibuster—she had sent out a fund-raising e-mail that afternoon. “It’s disrespectful, it violates the decorum of the Senate, and personally, I’m offended by it,” he said, and then motioned for an immediate vote on the redistricting bill. It passed along party lines; there would be no filibuster that night. The scattered spectators in the gallery seemed shocked by the speed at which the planned protest had been circumvented. “Fascists! Fascism has come to Texas!” a man yelled. State troopers massed around him; later, he was led out of the capitol in handcuffs.

Aaron Madison, an Austin-based Uber driver, opted to spend his Friday night at the capitol, because he “wanted to see Democrats do something” about the redistricting, he said. “I knew it probably wouldn’t be stopped, but at least to see them fight and delay it. And I was proud that they were going to filibuster.” He’d found the stillborn protest “depressing,” he told me afterward. “I’ve done a lot of volunteering, I’ve worked elections for five years, I’ve volunteered with Beto’s group,” he said, referring to the former Democratic congressman and Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke. “It’s, like, you want to do something to make a difference, but it feels like, no matter what you do, Republicans find a way to get their way.”

The state legislature is “the finest free entertainment in Texas,” the political columnist Molly Ivins wrote, in 1975. “It beats the zoo any day of the week.” Ivins gleefully chronicled legislators’ fistfights, shoving matches, name-calling, and double-crossing. But she also detected a spirit of mutual allegiance. “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 wrote.

Little of that collegiality is in evidence these days. Texas Republicans, having gone nearly as far as possible to expand gun access and to ban abortion, have now turned to directly punishing Democrats. Earlier this year, the Texas House prohibited members of the body’s minority party from being able to chair committees, ending a long-standing tradition. In the state Senate, the atmosphere has become “much more divisive, meaner,” Alvarado said. “I think it’s all driven from national politics.” For more than half a century, Texas Monthly has published an annual list of the best and worst legislators; this year, the editors declared that, in a political context dominated by “small-mindedness and an emphasis on punishment and coercion,” they were unable to do so.

Texas Democrats have little structural power—they’re “outnumbered and outgunned,” as Alvarado put it—and their counterparts across the aisle are loath to work with them, so they’ve increasingly focussed on fighting in a different arena. “You have to resort to things you would not ordinarily be doing,” Alvarado said, of her quorum-breaking colleagues. “If they had stayed put and had a spicy, juicy, lively debate, it would not have gotten national attention.” During the lawmakers’ two weeks on the run, Gavin Newsom announced that California would embark on a partisan redistricting map of its own (albeit one that must first be approved by voters). The drama was further heightened by Texas Republican leaders’ calls to track down, fire, or arrest the quorum-breakers. Once the Democratic legislators returned to Texas, they were tailed by state troopers, to insure that they didn’t leave again. Representative Nicole Collier, of Dallas, refused the police escort and instead spent two nights sleeping in her office, live-streaming to an audience that, at times, rivalled that of Davis’s 2013 filibuster. The Democrats may have lost the vote, but they had gained ground in the war for attention.