The Texas Supreme Court rejected on a Friday a request from Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) to oust Democratic lawmakers who fled the state legislature last summer to protest their Republican counterparts’ mid-decade redistricting efforts, which were ultimately successful.
Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that by breaking quorum, Democrats “abandoned or forfeited their offices.” A quorum requires at least two-thirds of the 150-member Texas House to be present for conducting business. The Democrat-led quorum break shut down the redistricting-related special legislative session Abbott called last year.
More than 50 Texas Democrats fled to New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts at the time, but they eventually returned after Texas Republicans threatened to impose fines.
That threat ultimately came to fruition last month when a Republican-led Texas House committee slapped each Democrat who broke quorum with an $8,000 fine. The fines amounted to nearly $422,000.
Chief Justice James Blacklock determined that the issue was resolved on its own and, as a result, found that the case doesn’t require the Texas Supreme Court to intervene.
“In the end, a quorum was restored in two weeks’ time, without judicial intervention, by the interplay of political and practical forces,” Blacklock wrote in a five-page opinion.
The decision is notable, considering all nine justices on the state’s high court are Republicans.
“Whatever wrong may have been committed by the absent House members, the Texas Constitution’s internal political remedies, none of which involve the judicial branch, were sufficient to the task of restoring the House’s ability to do business,” the opinion stated.
The court left open the possibility of weighing in on a similar case in the future.
“Should those remedies unexpectedly prove inadequate in a future case, we might have occasion to consider whether any judicial remedy could ever be available in circumstances such as these,” the opinion added. “We resolve neither that question nor any other today.”
Texas state Rep. Gene Wu, who leads the Democratic caucus, was targeted specifically in Abbott’s request for removal from office. Wu praised the court’s opinion.
“When Greg Abbott threatened to arrest and expel us for denying him a quorum, we told him he should ‘come and take it.’ He tried,” he said in a defiant statement. “Abbott was wrong, weak, and after all his bluster, he couldn’t come and take a damn thing.”
SUPREME COURT ALLOWS TEXAS’S PRO-GOP REDISTRICTING TO STAND
The Texas Democratic Party and Texas House Democrats also released celebratory statements.
The Democrats staged walkout, however, didn’t deter Texas Republicans from passing a bill to redraw the state’s congressional map. Abbott signed the measure into law on Aug. 29. The GOP-friendly map is expected to be used in the midterm elections following a Supreme Court ruling late last month.