Good news, with the usual caveats.
A controversial Texas bill that would restrict the participation of transgender student athletes in school sports ran out of time for consideration in the House as the lower chamber hit a crucial deadline Tuesday night for passing all Senate bills.
Senate Bill 29 would have mandated that transgender student athletes play on sports teams based on their sex assigned at birth instead of their gender identity. The bill’s proponents said it was necessary to protect girls’ sports, arguing that allowing transgender girls to play on school sports teams gave them an unfair advantage because they have higher levels of testosterone.
LGBTQ advocates said the legislation was harmful and discriminatory against transgender Texans. It is among a slate of Texas bills aimed at transgender people this legislative session and the latest to miss a House deadline that needed to be met so they could advance and eventually become law. No legislative measure can be considered dead, though, until the session ends Monday.
No matter the success of the legislation, LGBTQ advocates say the mere specter that such measures could become law has already damaged the mental health of transgender people.
Debate on SB 29 was delayed until 11:30 p.m. Tuesday night, leaving only half an hour for the chamber to pass the bill. Then several other delayed bills ahead of it ran down the clock until there was no time left for the imperiled bill.
House Democrats spent much of Tuesday’s marathon session using delay tactics to keep several GOP-backed bills, including SB 29, from coming up in time to be debated. With less than 10 minutes until the deadline Tuesday, Democrats offered an amendment to an unrelated bill and then asked each other clarifying questions about it as a way to run out the clock.
As the deadline crept closer, representatives circulated transgender pride flags on the floor in an obvious nod to their tactic and target. Austin Democrat Gina Hinojosa smiled and waved the flag alongside members of the House LGBTQ Caucus as the clock hit midnight.
“Democrats had a long, aggressive floor strategy to keep a number of bills, most notably SB 29, from affecting the people of Texas,” said state Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Farmers Branch, treasurer of the caucus, told The Texas Tribune. “I’m really happy we were able to end the session by preserving the dignity and rights of the children of Texas to be free of discrimination.”
See here for the background and here for one of the celebratory photos. The tactic involved is called chubbing, and it has been used to some extent or another in most recent sessions. I’ll return to that in a minute, but first we should note that as is always the case, other bills met their demise as well on deadline day.
In the final 14 hours before the final midnight deadline for advancing Senate bills in the Texas House, Democrats pulled out all the stops Tuesday to keep the body from considering GOP-backed legislation they opposed, spelling death for some of the Senate’s priority bills.
The House had on its calendar several of the Senate’s priorities, including a bill banning social media companies from blocking users because of their viewpoint or their location within Texas, another that would ban local governments from using public funds to pay for lobbyists, and another that would force transgender student athletes to play on sports teams based on their sex assigned at birth instead of their gender identity.
Republicans control all branches of Texas government, and Democrats have been trying to fight back these bills since the beginning of the legislative session in January. The midnight deadline to pass the bills was the minority party’s last hope. And though they ended the night with hoarse voices, House Democrats landed a rare victory this session, killing all three of those bills, and only ceding one other Senate priority bill that banned cities and counties from requiring companies to pay workers more than the federal minimum wage or provide them with benefits like paid sick leave.
Dan Patrick took these defeats about as well we you might imagine.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Wednesday is asking Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special session of the Texas Legislature in June to advance three pieces of GOP-backed legislation that died in the Texas House at midnight on Tuesday.
The bills sought to ban transgender students from playing on sports teams based on their gender identity, prohibit local governments from using taxpayer funds to pay for lobbyists and punish social media companies for “censoring” Texans based on their political viewpoints.
In a statement Abbott said the call was premature and instead urged lawmakers to “work together to get important conservative legislation to my desk.”
“Some are trying to end the game before the time clock has run out,” Abbott wrote. “Members in both chambers need to be spending every minute of every day to accomplish that mission.”
In his call to bring back the Legislature, Patrick said the bills in question have widespread support.
“The TxHouse killed these conservative bills that majority of Texans in both parties support,” Patrick tweeted, without evidence. A Patrick spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question about evidence of such support.
If Dan Patrick says that everybody supports these things, who are we to argue? We know there will be a special session in the fall for redistricting and appropriating federal COVID relief funds, but that’s a lot already for thirty days. Would Greg Abbott accommodate Patrick’s request for an immediate special session for these undone bills? On the one hand, they were on the “emergency items” list, so for sure Abbott supports them. On the other hand, the fact that these bills, which had more time to get passed than any others, couldn’t make it to the floor until the very end, when they were susceptible to this well-known tactic, should tell you something. It is more than a little likely that some number of Republican legislators would have preferred to not have to vote on them. The first job of the Speaker is to protect the members, after all.
Look, Abbott’s gonna do what Abbott’s gonna do, and we should know soon enough what he intends. In the meantime, celebrate the wins that we got. Lord knows, there were plenty of losses. The Chron has more.
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