A group of Texas Democrats returned yesterday to the state House in Austin where they spent the night — the latest step in a broader protest over Republican plans to redraw congressional districts in the state.
The state House Democratic caucus said in a news release that eight of its members would return to the floor Tuesday evening, “publicly tearing up the permission slips required by Republicans for members to leave the chamber.”
The Democrats joined state Rep. Nicole Collier, their colleague who has remained locked in the state House chamber since Monday afternoon after she refused the condition of a security escort to leave the chamber.
After Democratic lawmakers fled the state for two weeks, denying the House a quorum to move forward with redistricting legislation, Republican leaders have demanded that Democrats agree to around-the-clock security escorts to ensure they would return to the chamber Wednesday for the redistricting vote.
Collier didn’t agree, so she has remained on the floor, while her party has livestreamed her protest for more than a day. Tuesday night, though, she had company ahead of passage of the redistricting plan in the House, which could happen as soon as Wednesday. The legislation is meant to pad the GOP majority in Washington.
Collier has framed her decision to remain in the Capitol as an act of defiance, telling NBC News she wouldn’t sign the de facto permission slip House GOP leaders presented to Democrats outlining the conditions that allowed them to leave the chamber.
Those conditions are in effect because the House approved civil arrest warrants for the dozens of Democrats who left Texas this month.
Rep. Mihaela Plesa, a Dallas-area Democrat, said during a press conference Tuesday that former Vice President Kamala Harris was among the "history makers" who called Collier to send their support for her protest.
Rep. Penny Morales Shaw, a Houston-area Democrat, told NBC News that she decided to return to stand with Collier because she didn’t want to be seen as “validating” the GOP’s “narrative that we were derelict.”
“Nicole was right. We should not have submitted to this,” she added. “I cannot support this very low and bad precedent for all future legislators.”
Rep. Rhetta Andrews Bowers told reporters that she also believed the decision to have law enforcement follow Democrats was a waste of taxpayer dollars, evoking last month's floods in the Hill Country that killed more than 100 people.
"Families in the Hill Country who lost everything to the devastating floods need our help. Yet instead of providing relief, those dollars are being spent on constant [Department of Public Safety] patrol," she said.
Now that dozens of Democrats have returned to the state, there’s little else they can do to prevent the GOP-controlled Legislature from passing their maps, which could help Republicans flip up to five U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections.
