Texas Supreme Court shoots down GOP governor’s request to punish Dem over protest

The Texas Supreme Court rejected Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts to remove Houston Rep. Gene Wu from office Friday, saying that the Legislature was able to secure House Democrats’ attendance and restore a quorum last summer without involvement from the court.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock — a Republican and former Abbott aide — cited legal precedent in which the courts “have uniformly recognized that it is not their role to resolve disputes between the other two branches that those branches can resolve for themselves.”

“The courts’ institutional ‘reluctance … to involve themselves in contests of factional political power,’ a reluctance we reiterate and reinforce today, is a check on the judicial power ‘of ancient standing,’ not an optional preference we are at liberty to discard,” Blacklock wrote.

Friday’s ruling from the all-Republican Supreme Court is a setback for Abbott, who vowed to expel any members who refused to return to Texas to pass the GOP’s new congressional map. The unusual mid-decade redistricting arose under pressure from President Donald Trump, who sought to shore up the GOP’s narrow majority in the U.S. House by having Texas lawmakers draw new districts designed to give Republicans five additional seats in Texas.

More than 50 Democrats, including Wu — the House Democratic leader — left the state in August to shut down the Legislature and stall passage of the GOP’s map.

Democrats condemned the unusual mid-decade redraw as a partisan power grab that will reduce the power of Black and Hispanic voters. The Legislature adopted the map shortly after Democrats returned, and the U.S. Supreme Court approved its usage for the midterm elections, overruling a lower court’s finding that the map was racially gerrymandered.

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday left open the possibility of getting involved in any future quorum breaks, or when lawmakers purposely deny the Legislature the headcount needed to take up business.

“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,” Blacklock wrote. “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.”

In a concurring opinion, Justice James Sullivan indicated a greater appetite for addressing future quorum breaks and potentially finding that lawmakers had vacated their offices.

“Were it to happen yet again, I believe the next set of quorumbreakers had better be ready to pay us a visit,” he wrote. “Our original jurisdiction to issue writs of quo warranto will empower us to inquire whether they’ve abandoned their legislative offices and, if we so find, to throw them out.”

Quorum breaking has a long history in Texas politics. The state’s founding fathers intentionally set the bar for quorum high, requiring two-thirds of both chambers to show up, compared to a simple majority in most states. Most recently, Democrats fled in 2003 and 2021 to delay redistricting and voting restrictions, respectively.

No Texas lawmaker has ever been removed from office solely for breaking quorum. Never in U.S. history has a governor gotten the courts to remove a member of a legislature for breaking quorum.

Wu on Friday declared victory after challenging Abbott to “come and take it” in August.

“Today, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court said: No. The Constitution does not let a governor erase voters’ choices when their choices are inconvenient to him,” Wu said in a statement. “Abbott was wrong, weak and after all his bluster he couldn’t come and take a damn thing.”

In the emergency petition he filed with the state Supreme Court in August, Abbott argued that Wu had abandoned his office by decamping to Illinois and declaring “this corrupt special session is over” — a signal that Wu and the absentee Democrats planned to stay on the lam long enough to run out the last two weeks of the overtime session, Abbott said.

“What is at stake here? Nothing less than the future of Texas,” Abbott wrote. “If a small fraction of recalcitrant lawmakers choose to run out the clock today, they can do so for any, and every, Regular or Special Session, potentially bankrupting the State in an attempt to get their way.”

In his response, Wu said he had not abandoned his office, and in fact was representing his constituents more fully by refusing to allow the House to pass legislation they opposed.

Wu “has not died and has not been expelled from the House by the constitutionally prescribed means: a 2/3 vote of the House,” his lawyers said in a response. “His presence in another state is not a voluntary resignation — as his opposition to this petition makes evident. Respondent is entitled to serve through the entire term to which he was elected.”

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

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