After killing a Republican-sponsored bill to restrict voting in the state, Democrats vowed to oppose any efforts to revive it. Republicans pledged to pass it in a special legislative session.
The battle among Texas lawmakers over a bill that would impose some of the strictest limits in the nation on voting access escalated Monday as Democrats and Republicans vowed that they would not back down over a highly charged issue that has galvanized both parties. Stung by the last-minute setback for one of the G.O.P.’s top legislative priorities, after Democrats killed the measure with a dramatic walkout Sunday night, Gov. Greg Abbott suggested he would withhold pay from lawmakers because of their failure to pass the bill. “No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities,” Mr. Abbott, a Republican who strongly supported the bill, wrote on Twitter as he pledged to veto the section of the budget that funds the legislative branch. G.O.P. leaders said they would revive their efforts in a special session of the legislature. The bill’s chief architect in the State House of Representatives, Briscoe Cain, said the walkout may enable Republicans to craft a measure even more to their liking. “At the end of the day, this turned out to be a good thing,” said Mr. Cain, who chairs the House Elections Committee. “We’ll come back with better legislation and more time for it. Special sessions are focused.” Democrats were resolute in their opposition, promising to redouble their efforts to keep a new bill from becoming law. “This is Texas, this is the Alamo,” Representative John H. Bucy III said at an afternoon news conference Monday. “We will do everything we can to stop voter suppression.’’ Despite the Democrats’ success Sunday night, Republicans control both chambers of the legislature, and would be favored to pass a voting bill in a special session. Mr. Abbott has not said when he would reconvene the legislature; he can do so as early as Tuesday, but may wait until late summer when he had planned to recall lawmakers anyway to manage redistricting. No matter when they take up the bill again, they will have to introduce it from scratch and restart a process that could take weeks — though they could start with the provisions in the bill that died Sunday night or even propose one with more severe restrictions. Matt Krause, a conservative Republican from Fort Worth, described himself as “disappointed and frustrated” by the walkout. But he said he believed the bill will ultimately pass, if not in the next special session, then in another after that. “It’s going to be heavily debated and contested,” he said. “But at the end of the day, during a special session, I think we’ll get it done.” He and other Republicans expressed irritation that the walkout had killed not just the voting bill but several others that were important to the caucus, including bail reform. The failure to pass the bill was a striking blow to Republicans and one of the few setbacks they have suffered nationally in a monthslong push to restrict voting in states they control. G.O.P.-controlled legislatures, aligning themselves with former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless fraud claims, have passed new laws in Georgia, Florida and Iowa with expansive restrictions. The Texas bill was viewed by many Democrats and voting rights groups as perhaps the harshest of all; among other provisions, it would have banned both drive-through voting and 24-hour voting; imposed new restrictions on absentee voting; granted broad new autonomy and authority to partisan poll watchers; and increased punishments for mistakes or offenses by election officials.
