WASHINGTON – Vice President Kamala Harris welcomed Texas lawmakers to the White House on Wednesday, celebrating a brash victory in a late-night walkout that derailed one of the GOP’s most aggressive efforts to rewrite state-level election rules since Donald Trump’s defeat.
“You are courageous leaders and American patriots,” she told the group in the Roosevelt Room, just off the Oval Office.
Harris is the Biden administration’s point person on voting rights.
Like Democratic leaders in Congress who lavished praised on the Texans a day earlier, she held Texas up as an example of Republican ardor for voter suppression and the Democrats in the state House as paragons of resistance.
The Texans spent Tuesday at the U.S. Capitol, recounting the push from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and his allies to curb Sunday morning voting valued by Black churches, in particular, and explaining how Senate Bill 7 would have allowed a single judge to toss out an election even without evidence of widespread fraud.
They also regaled lawmakers, and then Harris, with their exploits in the final hours of the 2021 Legislature, abandoning the House chamber to break a quorum and killing SB7.
And they pleaded for federal legislation to nullify such state-level measures.
“We will do everything in our power as an administration to lift up the voices of those who seek to preserve the rights of the future. We’re not telling people how to vote. And frankly, this is not a Democratic or a Republican issue. This is an American issue,” Harris said.
Sixteen state lawmakers joined Harris at the White House: 13 Texas House members and three state senators.
On Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi also hailed the Texas House members as “American patriots,” and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and others called them an “inspiration” in the fight to avert Jim Crow era-type obstacles to ballot access, particularly for minority voters.
But their lobbying likely won’t be enough to get stalled federal voting rights legislation across the goal line.
Republicans are dug in against HR 1, the For the People Act, which the Democratic-controlled House approved. That bill would overhaul campaign finance laws and overturn state-level restrictions on voting access.
Republicans also oppose reinstating federal scrutiny of Texas and other states with a history of discrimination in elections.
Both bills face a GOP filibuster in the Senate, and too little appetite among Senate Democrats to scrap that arcane tradition.
Harris noted that in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court neutered the civil rights era landmark Voting Rights Act by tossing out the formula for determining which states had an egregious enough record of discrimination to justify a requirement for “preclearance” from the Justice Department before changing any election rules.
“We have seen exactly what we feared when that case came down in 2013. Because that case was an opening, a door to allow states to do what otherwise we have protected against, which is states putting in place laws that are designed, in many cases quite intentionally, to make it difficult for people to vote,” Harris said. “What’s happening right now in Texas is, of course, a very clear and current example of that.”
She called on Congress to approve the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, to restore the preclearance process so that “as there are new attacks on access to the polls and voting, that we head them off.”
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, among others, has insisted that the 2013 Shelby v. Holder case was decided correctly and that the preclearance scrutiny is no longer justified.
He mocked the Texas Democrats as they headed to Washington, tweeting Monday that “All they did is walk off their job.”
State Rep. Rafael Anchía, D-Dallas, chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, sat at one end of the long table as Harris spoke with the Texas lawmakers.
“The fight to protect our freedom to vote continues after our historic quorum break that prevented the passage of Senate Bill 7, the omnibus voter suppression bill,” he said in a statement. “In the last decade alone, three different federal courts have found the Texas Legislature intentionally discriminated against voters of color in voting rights matters.”
Abbott has vowed to summon the Legislature back to Austin for a special session to resurrect SB 7.
Anchía noted that Abbott has also threatened to defund the legislative branch, in what he called “a crass power grab to silence the vote of Texans and cram through a bill that makes it harder to vote.”
The state House members who attended were Reps. Rafael Anchia, Nicole Collier, Trey Martinez Fischer, Jessica Gonzalez, Gina Hinojosa, Jarvis Johnson, Yvonne Johnson, Jose Menendez, Victoria Neave, Ron Reynolds, Senfronia Thompson, Chris Turner and Armando Walle.
The state senators who joined Harris were Royce West of Dallas, Beverly Powell of Burleson and Carol Alvarado of Houston, who chairs the Democrats’ Senate caucus.
