State Rep. James Talarico:
Well, I’d actually like to disagree with that. I was part of the 2021 walkout, when we broke quorum to fight back against the Republicans’ voter suppression bill.
They were trying to make it even harder to vote in Texas. And Texas is one of the hardest places to vote in the entire country. And by breaking quorum and shining a national spotlight on their bill, we pressured our Republican colleagues to take the worst parts of that bill out, so a ban on Souls to the Polls, which is early Sunday morning voting, when African American churches usually go to vote, a provision that would have allowed Republicans to overturn election results that they didn’t like.
Those were taken out of the bill because of our quorum break. And so while the bill did pass, and I voted against that bill, it was less harmful than it would have been without the quorum break. So these kinds of acts of civil disobedience, of good trouble, they can have a tangible impact on legislation and therefore a tangible impact on people’s lives.
I’m hopeful we can do something like that with this redistricting power grab that Trump is trying to execute in our state.
