Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the man he is vying to unseat in next year’s Republican primary, US Sen. John Cornyn, are both using the powers of their offices to try to pressure Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to prevent a vote on a GOP-led redistricting plan.
Paxton on Friday said he was asking the state Supreme Court to remove 13 of the absent House Democrats from office, arguing in his lawsuit that those lawmakers “made incriminating public statements regarding their refusal to return, essentially confirming in their own words the very grounds for this legal action.”
Cornyn, meanwhile, asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to help track down the absent House Democrats. He said Thursday that FBI Director Kash Patel assigned agents to handle his request for federal assistance, assigning them from Austin and San Antonio.
The standoff over the unusual mid-decade push by Republicans to redraw Texas’ congressional map is shaping next year’s US Senate primaries in both parties.
It’s not clear what role FBI agents could play since the absent Texas Democrats do not appear to have broken federal law by leaving the state. The FBI has repeatedly declined to comment. And Paxton’s legal action – following a similar, narrower filing by Gov. Greg Abbott seeking to remove Rep. Gene Wu, the House Democratic leader – seeks to disqualify elected lawmakers in a seemingly unprecedented way.
“We will not be broken by these antics,” Wu said at a news conference Friday afternoon in Illinois. “We are not here to play games. We are not here to make waves, to go viral or do any of this stuff.”
One of the Democrats targeted in Paxton’s lawsuit, Rep. John Bucy III, said on social media he is “not backing down.”
Texas State Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Democrat, speaks in a crowd of other Democratic state lawmakers outside the Massachusetts State House on August 6 in Boston. – Leah Willingham/AP
Paxton has taken a range of actions seeking to pressure or punish absent Democrats.
He also filed an emergency petition in Illinois’ Eighth Circuit Court to make civil arrest warrants — which were signed by Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows earlier this week — enforceable in the state of Illinois, where dozens of Texas Democrats traveled this week.
And he said he is suing former US Rep. Beto O’Rourke, whose political action committee, Powered By People, has raised money for the travel expenses incurred by Texas Democrats who left the state to block the House from establishing the two-thirds quorum it needs to do business. Paxton’s office said it was requesting a “a temporary restraining order and an injunction” preventing O’Rourke and his PAC from raising money for the Democrats.
On the Democratic side, several people involved in the quorum break are running or talking about running for Senate. State Rep. James Talarico has become a de facto spokesman for the House members who fled. O’Rourke is raising money to foot the Democrats’ travel bills, hotels and more. Former US Rep. Colin Allred, who has already entered the race, is holding events rallying Democrats against the redistricting effort.
Talarico was asked whether his experience in the quorum break would inform his ultimate decision to run for Senate.
“I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t,” he told CNN’s David Chalian for the “Political Briefing” podcast. “I’m still kind of processing everything that’s been happening and I have no doubt that it will inform my decision about how to continue my service.”
The Texas House is set to reconvene on Monday, and Burrows, the House speaker, said the state’s Department of Public Safety will continue trying to enforce the civil arrest warrants he signed for the absent Democrats.
“We have all hands on deck. We are continuing to explore new avenues to compel a quorum and will keep pressing forward until the job is done,” Burrows said.
The speaker said Republicans had asked the sergeant at arms in the Illinois House of Representatives for help returning the Texas Democrats who are staying in Illinois, but the Illinois speaker’s office told CNN the sergeant at arms’ office would not do so.
Burrows on Friday also detailed more punitive measures meant to punish House Democrats who remain outside of the state.
Burrows said that 30% of each absent member’s monthly operating budget “will be reserved and made unavailable for expenditure.”
He said he is now requiring absent members to appear in person to make certain requests, including requests for travel reimbursement, requests to change staff salaries and requests to approve newsletters. He said that if members did not appear in person, newsletters and “the encumbered funds” would be cancelled.
Earlier in the week, Abbott, the Republican who called the special session that Democrats are stopping for now, told NBC that the absent Democrats can’t wait out the redistricting effort, because he is “going to call special session after special session after special session with the same agenda items on there.”
Special sessions in Texas can last no more than 30 days. Democrats say they haven’t yet decided how long they will seek to block the House from establishing a quorum.
“We’re taking this one special session at a time, and my colleagues and I have agreed to stay out of the state capitol for the next two weeks to kill this rigged map and stop this corrupt process,” Talarico told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Friday. “Who knows what will happen after that?”
CNN’s David Wright, Molly English, Aditi Sangal and Arlette Saenz contributed to this report.
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