- Jan 15, 2013
- 3,280
- 1
- 0
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/us/politics/texas-abortion-bill.html?_r=1&
AUSTIN, Tex. — Hours after claiming that they successfully passed some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country, Republican lawmakers in Texas reversed course on Wednesday and said a disputed late-night vote on the bill did not follow legislative procedures, rendering the vote moot and giving Democrats a bitterly fought if probably short-lived victory.
Multimedia
Jennifer Whitney for The Texas Tribune
A sonogram at the Whole Woman’s Health Surgical Center in San Antonio, one of five Texas abortion clinics that would meet tighter abortion restrictions under a Texas bill. Opponents of the legislation said it would force 37 other clinics to close.
The reversal capped a remarkable day in the Texas Legislature here. Senator Wendy Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat in pink sneakers staged a filibuster marathon of more than 10 hours in which she never sat down. Abortion rights activists succeeded in disrupting Republican senators, and the fate of a bill that Gov. Rick Perry had made a priority devolved into a legislative mess so thick that even senators who had voted on the bill could not say for certain whether they had indeed voted on the bill.
The State Senate’s vote came right at a midnight Tuesday deadline, amid widespread confusion and the noise of a chanting crowd of the bill’s opponents in an upstairs gallery. Senate Democrats said the vote took place past the deadline at 12:02 a.m. or 12:03 a.m., while Republicans disputed those claims, saying the vote was legitimate.
But at 3 a.m., Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the presiding officer of the Senate and a Republican supporter of the bill, told lawmakers and reporters that although the bill passed on a 19-to-10 vote, the bill could not be signed in the presence of the Senate and was therefore dead, blaming “an unruly mob using Occupy Wall Street tactics” as the primary cause.
“With all the ruckus and noise going on,” Mr. Dewhurst said, he could not complete administrative duties to make the vote official and sign the bill. Senate Democrats and women’s right’s advocates said the real reason the vote could not be made official was a time stamp on official documents that showed the bill passed after midnight. The Legislature’s official Web site first posted that the Senate’s vote occurred on Wednesday, after the midnight deadline, but the date was later changed to Tuesday for unknown reasons.
The reversal served as an embarrassing episode for Mr. Dewhurst and Republican senators on a divisive bill that was closely watched around the nation by anti-abortion activists and supporters of abortion rights.
“The G.O.P. Senate leadership comes out of this whole process looking somewhat disingenuous, deceptive and disorganized,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.
In the final minutes before the midnight deadline, Republican senators had interrupted a filibuster that began at 11 a.m. But their efforts to push forward with a vote on the bill caused the bill’s opponents in the gallery to erupt into screams and cheers. Efforts to bring about order failed.
It was in those chaotic moments that Republicans initially said the vote was taken and the bill approved. But after hours of closed-door meetings, Mr. Dewhurst signaled defeat in passing the bill, and as word trickled out with the news, hundreds of the bill’s opponents who had camped out in the Capitol rotunda and in the hallways erupted into loud applause.
The bill sought to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, require abortion clinics to meet the same standards as hospital-style surgical centers and mandate that a doctor who performs abortions have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
Supporters of the bill, including Mr. Perry and other top Republicans, said the measures would protect women’s health and hold clinics to safe standards, but women’s right’s advocates said the legislation amounted to an unconstitutional, politically motivated effort to shut legal abortion clinics. The bill’s opponents said it will likely cause all but five of the 42 abortion clinics in the state to close, because the building renovations and equipment upgrades necessary to meet the surgical-center standards would be too costly.
Republicans, who control the State Senate and House, will likely have a second chance at the bill. The governor, who called the special session and put the abortion bill on the agenda, may now call a second special session and once again tell lawmakers to consider the bill, known as Senate Bill 5. Political analysts said the bill would likely pass if a second special session was called, not only because of the large number of Republicans supporting it, but because the increased time will limit the delaying tactics that can be tried by Democrats.
The bill sought to make Texas the 12th state to bar most abortions at 20 weeks after fertilization and later — a step that has been blocked in three states so far as unconstitutional. The more pressing concern for clinic managers and advocates for women’s rights was the requirement that all 42 abortion clinics in the state be licensed as ambulatory surgery centers.
Five clinics performing late-term abortions already meet that standard. But for most of the remaining 37, the new restriction would require costly renovations or relocation to meet architectural and equipment requirements. The five clinics are in large cities – Austin, San Antonio and Dallas each have one, and Houston has two. The burden on those five clinics to provide women’s health services will be extreme, and women in rural areas and small towns far from those cities will be underserved, advocates for abortion rights said.
Two clinics in McAllen and Harlingen in South Texas — the only abortion providers in the area — would close if the bill had passed, they said, forcing women seeking abortions to travel a few miles across the border into Mexico rather than drive four hours to San Antonio, both for surgical procedures and abortion-inducing drugs.
“We know that it would shut down dozens of clinics in the state of Texas, a state of 26 million people, and there will be women who cannot reach a health care provider to get reproductive health care for hundreds of miles,” said Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and a daughter of Ann W. Richards, the former Texas governor. “This is the thing that’s frightening. Women will do whatever they have to do to take care of themselves.”
The Senate convened shortly after 11 a.m. to take up the version of the bill that the House had already passed. Ms. Davis, began talking at 11:18 a.m. in a filibuster attempt to prevent lawmakers from voting on the bill before the midnight deadline. She spoke for hours in the carpeted chamber. Senate rules set strict requirements on how she could perform a filibuster — she was forbidden from straying off topic or sitting in her chair, for example — and if she was found to have violated the rules three times, her filibuster would effectively come to an end.
Ms. Davis is something of a filibuster star among Texas Democrats. At the end of the legislative term in 2011, she forced Mr. Perry to call a special session after her filibuster ran the clock out on a budget bill that included cuts in public education. But at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, 11 hours after she first stood up, Mr. Dewhurst sustained a violation against her for straying off the topic. It was her third violation. As the senators debated the next steps, Ms. Davis remained standing, because it was uncertain whether the filibuster had officially ended.
Democrats accused Mr. Dewhurst of going back on his earlier statements that he would bring the end of the filibuster to a vote if Ms. Davis had three violations. As the clock neared midnight and the crowd erupted, several Democratic senators said they believed they were voting on a procedural matter when the vote for the abortion bill was taken. “I don’t mind losing fair and square, but this has been a total sham and mockery of the rules,” said State Senator Leticia Van de Putte, a San Antonio Democrat.
Amy Hagstrom Miller, the president of Whole Woman’s Health, which operates abortion and women’s health clinics in Texas and two other states, said the bill would force her to shut down the group’s five clinics in Texas. One of them, in San Antonio, complies with ambulatory surgical center requirements, but Ms. Hagstrom Miller said it had operated at an annual loss of $400,000 since opening two years ago.
Ms. Hagstrom Miller said opening clinics that met the new requirements would be financially untenable. “I believe in providing really compassionate, medically acceptable care, but why would I do it in Texas? I will surely look elsewhere,” she said.
Another of the group’s clinics is the one in McAllen, close to the Mexican border. It was quiet outside the McAllen clinic on Tuesday afternoon, but the area is heavily Catholic, and there is strong opposition to abortion. Signs protesting the clinic are posted on the building next door.
Already a large number of women cross the border to obtain abortion-inducing drugs in Mexico, Ms. Hagstrom Miller said, and she expects the number to rise if the clinic closes.
“We’ve already seen women taking matters into their own hands,” she said, because of an existing state requirement of a 24-hour waiting period for abortions, which forces women to go to the clinic twice. Many women seeking abortions, she said, are already mothers and do not have the time or money to travel long distances for the procedure.
“I’ve seen women who asked their partners to punch them in the stomach repeatedly,” Ms. Hagstrom Miller said, adding that she believed the law and widespread closings of clinics would force more women to attempt “self-induced abortions.”
------------------
I got to tell you I watched almost the enitre Live Stream last night;
The Texas Tribune ran a live feed for the process last night on the controversial push to ban abortions and pass such restrictive legislation in Texas by Dewhurst and other Republicans.
There was a huge public outcry with thousands of protestors inside the Senate House, cheering on Sen. Wendy Davis as she tried to fillibuster the SB5 bill they were trying to ram rod through. She had the support and help or her fellow colleagues Sen. Watkins and Sen. Ellis and others who would bring up "parlimentary inquiries" and questions during the process to try and stall for time. She was told that the Senate Rule book said she could not sit at any time, lean on anything, or be assisted by anybody while she fillibustered, nor could she eat, or take a bathroom break. She was constantly interrupted by other Republican Senators who seem to make up their own Senate Rules as they went along, and tried to force her off the floor on a "3 Germaine strikes your out" enforcement. Germaine being that she was straying from the topic of the bill, yet as she tried to make points by talking about planned parenthood she was told the subject was Germaine and give a first warning, and told at 3 warnings they would stop her fillibuster, then force a majority vote on the bill and pass it. At one point of 9 to 10 hours of standing and talking her points her colleague handed her, her back brace which she placed on her waist, and Repblican Senators who were in strong objection to abortion being legal claimed she was given "aid" or assistance for comfort and thereby violated another "point of order" rule. Dewhurst would not allow others to debate this, and quickly said he ruled she violated it, and gave her her second warning. Then at almost 11 hours of standing she tried to give context to the SB5 bill and its affects on hardship for women by briefly talking about the Sonagram bill that was recently passed, and another Republican Senator said she was being Germaine, and violated another "point of order rule". Dewhurst would not allow debate with anyone but his Republican colleagues on the matter and ruled she had her final warning. Sen. Watkins stood up to ask for an appeal on the process and was ignored, and then Sen. Ellis stood up to appeal the ruling that a motion by a Republican Senator was to table and move to a vote. Most of the Democratic Senators did actually delay the vote, as time went on and objections were raised and dismissed, and the clock ran out and it was midnight and people chanted and screamed that the time was up and by their own Senate rules they must delay the vote for another day. Yet they did not, they pushed a vote through well after midnight blaming the protestors for the delayed roll call and vote, and extended the time.
Here is my take on the whole thing as I watched last night, people went absolutely nuts in the Senate House upset at the Repbulicans completely making up their own rules and ignoring current Senate Rules to push this through:
"I think when there's such an outburst from the public, a bill that ignoring all the rules and regulations set forth by our founders, is breaching the constitution, should not be RUSHED through the system.
I don't know about you, but I was watching most of the proceedings, and there were several times when the republicans IGNORED protocol, skipped appeals, and tried to hastily bypass rules.
not to mention how 2 of the 3 strikes that removed Wendy from the floor was because she talked about Roe v. Wade, and the final one was the bill requiring a woman seeking an abortion to get a sonogram. apparently these do not relate to abortion?
And when Senator Watson tried to appeal the final ruling to end the filibuster, his appeal was BYPASSED by cheating the rules and giving the floor to another senator who wanted to table the motion to appeal when senator watson didn't even get a chance to speak yet. This was some of the DIRTIEST politics I have EVER SEEN. and the crowds reaction was just."
I can't believe we didn't have coverage of this last night, it was huge, and the State Troopers were called in to remove the thousands of protestors while they chanted and called the Republicans cheaters, and liers.. It was like watch some Monarchal rule of law and not an actual democracy. It was disgusting and a disgrace to the Texans who are 90% against this bill being passed.
AUSTIN, Tex. — Hours after claiming that they successfully passed some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country, Republican lawmakers in Texas reversed course on Wednesday and said a disputed late-night vote on the bill did not follow legislative procedures, rendering the vote moot and giving Democrats a bitterly fought if probably short-lived victory.
Multimedia
Jennifer Whitney for The Texas Tribune
A sonogram at the Whole Woman’s Health Surgical Center in San Antonio, one of five Texas abortion clinics that would meet tighter abortion restrictions under a Texas bill. Opponents of the legislation said it would force 37 other clinics to close.
The reversal capped a remarkable day in the Texas Legislature here. Senator Wendy Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat in pink sneakers staged a filibuster marathon of more than 10 hours in which she never sat down. Abortion rights activists succeeded in disrupting Republican senators, and the fate of a bill that Gov. Rick Perry had made a priority devolved into a legislative mess so thick that even senators who had voted on the bill could not say for certain whether they had indeed voted on the bill.
The State Senate’s vote came right at a midnight Tuesday deadline, amid widespread confusion and the noise of a chanting crowd of the bill’s opponents in an upstairs gallery. Senate Democrats said the vote took place past the deadline at 12:02 a.m. or 12:03 a.m., while Republicans disputed those claims, saying the vote was legitimate.
But at 3 a.m., Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the presiding officer of the Senate and a Republican supporter of the bill, told lawmakers and reporters that although the bill passed on a 19-to-10 vote, the bill could not be signed in the presence of the Senate and was therefore dead, blaming “an unruly mob using Occupy Wall Street tactics” as the primary cause.
“With all the ruckus and noise going on,” Mr. Dewhurst said, he could not complete administrative duties to make the vote official and sign the bill. Senate Democrats and women’s right’s advocates said the real reason the vote could not be made official was a time stamp on official documents that showed the bill passed after midnight. The Legislature’s official Web site first posted that the Senate’s vote occurred on Wednesday, after the midnight deadline, but the date was later changed to Tuesday for unknown reasons.
The reversal served as an embarrassing episode for Mr. Dewhurst and Republican senators on a divisive bill that was closely watched around the nation by anti-abortion activists and supporters of abortion rights.
“The G.O.P. Senate leadership comes out of this whole process looking somewhat disingenuous, deceptive and disorganized,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.
In the final minutes before the midnight deadline, Republican senators had interrupted a filibuster that began at 11 a.m. But their efforts to push forward with a vote on the bill caused the bill’s opponents in the gallery to erupt into screams and cheers. Efforts to bring about order failed.
It was in those chaotic moments that Republicans initially said the vote was taken and the bill approved. But after hours of closed-door meetings, Mr. Dewhurst signaled defeat in passing the bill, and as word trickled out with the news, hundreds of the bill’s opponents who had camped out in the Capitol rotunda and in the hallways erupted into loud applause.
The bill sought to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, require abortion clinics to meet the same standards as hospital-style surgical centers and mandate that a doctor who performs abortions have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
Supporters of the bill, including Mr. Perry and other top Republicans, said the measures would protect women’s health and hold clinics to safe standards, but women’s right’s advocates said the legislation amounted to an unconstitutional, politically motivated effort to shut legal abortion clinics. The bill’s opponents said it will likely cause all but five of the 42 abortion clinics in the state to close, because the building renovations and equipment upgrades necessary to meet the surgical-center standards would be too costly.
Republicans, who control the State Senate and House, will likely have a second chance at the bill. The governor, who called the special session and put the abortion bill on the agenda, may now call a second special session and once again tell lawmakers to consider the bill, known as Senate Bill 5. Political analysts said the bill would likely pass if a second special session was called, not only because of the large number of Republicans supporting it, but because the increased time will limit the delaying tactics that can be tried by Democrats.
The bill sought to make Texas the 12th state to bar most abortions at 20 weeks after fertilization and later — a step that has been blocked in three states so far as unconstitutional. The more pressing concern for clinic managers and advocates for women’s rights was the requirement that all 42 abortion clinics in the state be licensed as ambulatory surgery centers.
Five clinics performing late-term abortions already meet that standard. But for most of the remaining 37, the new restriction would require costly renovations or relocation to meet architectural and equipment requirements. The five clinics are in large cities – Austin, San Antonio and Dallas each have one, and Houston has two. The burden on those five clinics to provide women’s health services will be extreme, and women in rural areas and small towns far from those cities will be underserved, advocates for abortion rights said.
Two clinics in McAllen and Harlingen in South Texas — the only abortion providers in the area — would close if the bill had passed, they said, forcing women seeking abortions to travel a few miles across the border into Mexico rather than drive four hours to San Antonio, both for surgical procedures and abortion-inducing drugs.
“We know that it would shut down dozens of clinics in the state of Texas, a state of 26 million people, and there will be women who cannot reach a health care provider to get reproductive health care for hundreds of miles,” said Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and a daughter of Ann W. Richards, the former Texas governor. “This is the thing that’s frightening. Women will do whatever they have to do to take care of themselves.”
The Senate convened shortly after 11 a.m. to take up the version of the bill that the House had already passed. Ms. Davis, began talking at 11:18 a.m. in a filibuster attempt to prevent lawmakers from voting on the bill before the midnight deadline. She spoke for hours in the carpeted chamber. Senate rules set strict requirements on how she could perform a filibuster — she was forbidden from straying off topic or sitting in her chair, for example — and if she was found to have violated the rules three times, her filibuster would effectively come to an end.
Ms. Davis is something of a filibuster star among Texas Democrats. At the end of the legislative term in 2011, she forced Mr. Perry to call a special session after her filibuster ran the clock out on a budget bill that included cuts in public education. But at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, 11 hours after she first stood up, Mr. Dewhurst sustained a violation against her for straying off the topic. It was her third violation. As the senators debated the next steps, Ms. Davis remained standing, because it was uncertain whether the filibuster had officially ended.
Democrats accused Mr. Dewhurst of going back on his earlier statements that he would bring the end of the filibuster to a vote if Ms. Davis had three violations. As the clock neared midnight and the crowd erupted, several Democratic senators said they believed they were voting on a procedural matter when the vote for the abortion bill was taken. “I don’t mind losing fair and square, but this has been a total sham and mockery of the rules,” said State Senator Leticia Van de Putte, a San Antonio Democrat.
Amy Hagstrom Miller, the president of Whole Woman’s Health, which operates abortion and women’s health clinics in Texas and two other states, said the bill would force her to shut down the group’s five clinics in Texas. One of them, in San Antonio, complies with ambulatory surgical center requirements, but Ms. Hagstrom Miller said it had operated at an annual loss of $400,000 since opening two years ago.
Ms. Hagstrom Miller said opening clinics that met the new requirements would be financially untenable. “I believe in providing really compassionate, medically acceptable care, but why would I do it in Texas? I will surely look elsewhere,” she said.
Another of the group’s clinics is the one in McAllen, close to the Mexican border. It was quiet outside the McAllen clinic on Tuesday afternoon, but the area is heavily Catholic, and there is strong opposition to abortion. Signs protesting the clinic are posted on the building next door.
Already a large number of women cross the border to obtain abortion-inducing drugs in Mexico, Ms. Hagstrom Miller said, and she expects the number to rise if the clinic closes.
“We’ve already seen women taking matters into their own hands,” she said, because of an existing state requirement of a 24-hour waiting period for abortions, which forces women to go to the clinic twice. Many women seeking abortions, she said, are already mothers and do not have the time or money to travel long distances for the procedure.
“I’ve seen women who asked their partners to punch them in the stomach repeatedly,” Ms. Hagstrom Miller said, adding that she believed the law and widespread closings of clinics would force more women to attempt “self-induced abortions.”
------------------
I got to tell you I watched almost the enitre Live Stream last night;
The Texas Tribune ran a live feed for the process last night on the controversial push to ban abortions and pass such restrictive legislation in Texas by Dewhurst and other Republicans.
There was a huge public outcry with thousands of protestors inside the Senate House, cheering on Sen. Wendy Davis as she tried to fillibuster the SB5 bill they were trying to ram rod through. She had the support and help or her fellow colleagues Sen. Watkins and Sen. Ellis and others who would bring up "parlimentary inquiries" and questions during the process to try and stall for time. She was told that the Senate Rule book said she could not sit at any time, lean on anything, or be assisted by anybody while she fillibustered, nor could she eat, or take a bathroom break. She was constantly interrupted by other Republican Senators who seem to make up their own Senate Rules as they went along, and tried to force her off the floor on a "3 Germaine strikes your out" enforcement. Germaine being that she was straying from the topic of the bill, yet as she tried to make points by talking about planned parenthood she was told the subject was Germaine and give a first warning, and told at 3 warnings they would stop her fillibuster, then force a majority vote on the bill and pass it. At one point of 9 to 10 hours of standing and talking her points her colleague handed her, her back brace which she placed on her waist, and Repblican Senators who were in strong objection to abortion being legal claimed she was given "aid" or assistance for comfort and thereby violated another "point of order" rule. Dewhurst would not allow others to debate this, and quickly said he ruled she violated it, and gave her her second warning. Then at almost 11 hours of standing she tried to give context to the SB5 bill and its affects on hardship for women by briefly talking about the Sonagram bill that was recently passed, and another Republican Senator said she was being Germaine, and violated another "point of order rule". Dewhurst would not allow debate with anyone but his Republican colleagues on the matter and ruled she had her final warning. Sen. Watkins stood up to ask for an appeal on the process and was ignored, and then Sen. Ellis stood up to appeal the ruling that a motion by a Republican Senator was to table and move to a vote. Most of the Democratic Senators did actually delay the vote, as time went on and objections were raised and dismissed, and the clock ran out and it was midnight and people chanted and screamed that the time was up and by their own Senate rules they must delay the vote for another day. Yet they did not, they pushed a vote through well after midnight blaming the protestors for the delayed roll call and vote, and extended the time.
Here is my take on the whole thing as I watched last night, people went absolutely nuts in the Senate House upset at the Repbulicans completely making up their own rules and ignoring current Senate Rules to push this through:
"I think when there's such an outburst from the public, a bill that ignoring all the rules and regulations set forth by our founders, is breaching the constitution, should not be RUSHED through the system.
I don't know about you, but I was watching most of the proceedings, and there were several times when the republicans IGNORED protocol, skipped appeals, and tried to hastily bypass rules.
not to mention how 2 of the 3 strikes that removed Wendy from the floor was because she talked about Roe v. Wade, and the final one was the bill requiring a woman seeking an abortion to get a sonogram. apparently these do not relate to abortion?
And when Senator Watson tried to appeal the final ruling to end the filibuster, his appeal was BYPASSED by cheating the rules and giving the floor to another senator who wanted to table the motion to appeal when senator watson didn't even get a chance to speak yet. This was some of the DIRTIEST politics I have EVER SEEN. and the crowds reaction was just."
I can't believe we didn't have coverage of this last night, it was huge, and the State Troopers were called in to remove the thousands of protestors while they chanted and called the Republicans cheaters, and liers.. It was like watch some Monarchal rule of law and not an actual democracy. It was disgusting and a disgrace to the Texans who are 90% against this bill being passed.
Last edited:
Facebook
Twitter