"Context Is All"--E.M. Forster

These provisions aren't great, but it sure seems Texas Democrats are overplaying their hand here. https://t.co/SJeymv5Yua

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) July 13, 2021

Yeah, not really. And before we go further:

The legislation that's truly a potential danger is the kind that changes who gets to tabulate, review, and certify election results. That's what everyone needs to focus on.

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) July 13, 2021

No. Just: hell, no. That provision has already been defeated by Democrats denying the House a quorum in the regular session. That denial led to this special session, but the attention on that issue, who gets to count the votes and decide the results, forced that provision to be removed. It's a terrible idea; but it's not the only terrible idea in the bills before the Lege.

Overplaying their hand?  Or pushing the Congress to act? Let us note here that now 9 Texas Senators have gone to D.C., too; though that's not enough to break the quorum in the Senate. 

Now let's turn to the context in Texas.

First:  Texas is used to its Lege meeting for only 5 months every 2 years.  Special sessions are for special circumstances, like re-districting (which can't be done until after September because Trump screwed up the census so badly.  Something the country has been doing for hundreds of years comes a cropper under Trump.  It's that not a symbol of his incompetence and malfeasance, what is?).  Texas suffered a catastrophe in February, but no special session is being called to address that.  Texas may suffer power outages/shortages again before Thanksgiving (when summer weather actually gives way to what passes for autumn down here), but will there be any special sessions to address that?  Nope.  Abbott is playing his hand to appeal to the people who might vote for Huffines or West in the  primaries.  Despite his war chest, that's not necessarily the winning gambit in the general election.

And the Democrats need to make that clear.

Second, the law the GOP wants to pass still includes provisions like this:

Both the House and the Senate versions of the bill would add new restrictions to Texas’s already very restrictive laws governing absentee voting. They also would prevent drive-through polling sites, an innovation that some Texas counties used during the pandemic to protect voter health. And they impose new restrictions and paperwork requirements on individuals who help disabled voters and non-English speakers cast a ballot.

The bills would also make it much harder for election officials to remove partisan poll “watchers” sent by political campaigns or parties if those poll watchers harass voters or otherwise attempt to disrupt the election — with the Senate bill making it particularly difficult to remove such saboteurs. And the Senate bill could impose a draconian array of civil and criminal penalties on election officials, political campaigns, and even individual volunteers who commit fairly minor violations of the state’s election law.

And we've already got this shit going on; the GOP just wants to tighten those screws further:

The state’s Republican leadership, moreover, has made it quite clear that it is willing to wield the criminal law harshly to punish even very minor election-related transgressions. Texas’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton is currently prosecuting a 62-year-old man who mistakenly voted a few months before his right to vote was restored — the man, Hervis Rogers, was nearing the end of his parole period after being convicted of two felonies. If Rogers is convicted, he could face up to 20 years in prison for the crime of voting.

If the GOP’s bill passes, in other words, Texas may do far more than simply make it harder to vote. They could give officials like Paxton broad authority to bring criminal charges against individuals who commit minor offenses no more serious than what Rogers did.

And it's not just voters who could be imprisoned for the act of voting:

Both the House and Senate bills would make it much harder for election officials to remove disruptive poll watchers. The House bill, for example, forbids the state from removing partisan poll watchers, unless certain election workers witness the poll watcher breaking the law, and the poll watcher is given a warning first — although a judge may ask police to remove a poll watcher who commits “a breach of the peace or a violation of law.”

Realistically, however, election workers might be reluctant to remove even the most disruptive individual, because the House bill also makes it a misdemeanor to “intentionally or knowingly refuse to accept a watcher for service when acceptance of the watcher is required by this section.” Thus, an election worker who pushes too hard to keep a particular poll watcher out of a polling place risks being jailed for up to 180 days.

The Senate bill goes even further. It also imposes up to 180 days in jail on election officials who “intentionally or knowingly” deny access to poll watchers, but it does not contain the House bill’s language permitting poll watchers to be removed after election officials witness them committing two separate illegal acts.

The House bill could also lead to prosecutions of people who commit minor paperwork errors. The provision at issue requires election officials to report anyone who unlawfully registers to vote to the state attorney general. That might deter someone from intentionally registering to vote illegally. But a more likely possibility is that voters will be hit with criminal charges for innocent mistakes.

Texas, under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, is required to allow people to register to vote when they apply for a driver’s license. Thus, a noncitizen who accidentally checks the voter registration box on Texas’s driver’s license application form could face criminal charges.

Ken Paxton just charged a man with voting illegally in a primary, 18 months after the fact.  Does anyone really believe Paxton, or the next Texas AG, won't prosecute non-citizens for checking the wrong box on a driver's license application? And we're not finished yet:

Both bills impose some truly ridiculous penalties on individuals who commit fairly benign legal violations. The House bill, for example, makes it a felony for any public official to send many voters an application to vote by mail if the voter did not request such an application.

The Senate bill, meanwhile, makes it a felony for many people to engage in “vote harvesting,” a pejorative term for picking up another person’s absentee ballot and taking it to a polling place. And it allows the state to sue any election official who commits a violation of the state election code. Someone sued under this provision may face “termination of the person’s employment and loss of the person’s employment benefits.”

One of the bill’s primary functions, in other words, is to impose potentially catastrophic consequences on election officials who depart even slightly from a complicated array of rules. That’s likely to discourage many people from seeking such jobs in the first place.

At this point I'm wondering what article George Conway read.  Although this is a bit alarmist:  again, context is all.

Even in the best-case scenario for the departing Democrats, in other words, they could need to stay out of the state through the 2022 elections, win either a majority of one house of the state legislature or the governor’s mansion, and then wait until the new lawmakers take their seats in early 2023 before the Democrats can safely return home without risking being arrested and dragged to the House floor.

No, they don't.  The Democrats can only be "dragged to the floor" if the Lege is in session and there is a quorum call AND they can be found within the boundaries of Texas during the term of the session (which can only last for 30 days at a time) after said quorum call.  Abbott is not going to start calling successive special sessions, especially after September 1, because there won't be anybody in the Capitol to empty the waste baskets or vacuum the floors or run any of the legislative agencies the Lege depends on to function.  He can basically pull his stunt one more time before that deadline, and then all predictions go into a cocked hat. (And I still think Abbott is sweating re-districting. He’s hoping either the Democrats save him from his veto, or the staff come to work without getting paid.)

The Dems are "overplaying their hand"?  Hardly.  They are doing what they can to preserve democracy in Texas, while demanding the Democrats who run Congress do their part in D.C.