With enough Democratic members
of the Texas House of Representatives staying in Illinois and New York as of
August 3, 2025 that the legislative chamber could not reach a quorum and thus
be able to hold a vote on a Congressional redistricting plan that could gain
the Republic Party five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, Greg
Abbott, who at the time was Texas’ head of state and head of the executive
branch, was considering various options to bring the lawmakers back. That only
one of those options was legal points to the importance of the rule of law being
applied to government officials.
The most egregious option,
legally speaking, had been proposed by the Attorney General, Ken Paxton, who
wrote, the “cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol
immediately.”[1] In
other words, police whose jurisdiction is limited to Texas would be able to
have the jurisdiction expanded by Abbot. “He has no legal mechanism,” Rep.
Jolando Jones, one of the departed Texas lawmakers said; “Subpoenas from Texas
don’t work in New York, so he can’t come and get us. Subpoenas in Texas don’t
work in [Illinois].”[2] The
Texas Supreme Court had ruled in 2021 that leaders of the House of
Representatives had the authority to “physically compel the attendance” of
missing representatives, but not even a decision by Texas’s Supreme Court can
reach into Illinois or New York; only the U.S. Supreme Court has jurisdiction
throughout the bloc.[3] Hyperextending
police-power in Texas beyond even the jurisdiction of the Texas Supreme Court would
set a bad precedent that could be used even to cover police brutality. That the
Attorney General of Texas suggested the blatantly illegal usurping of Illinois’s
retained sovereignty by extending that of Texas is itself troubling. In a
federal system, it is necessary that everyone colors within the lines.
Abbott was also considering
what was only “a nonbinding legal opinion issued by Republican Attorney
General Ken Paxton that suggested a court could determine that a legislator had
forfeited {one’s] office.”[4]
Based only on Paxton’s legal opinion, Abbott said he would “begin trying to
remove Democratic lawmakers from office.”[5]
Presumably he would make the request to a judge rather than remove the
lawmakers by his own authority, which again would be illegal even by Paxton’s
reasoning.
The only option backed up by
extant law that Abbott was considering is fining the absent lawmakers $500 a
day, though even that option was being twisted by Ken Paxton, who was running
for the U.S. Senate at the time. He “suggested that lawmakers may have
committed felonies by raising money to help pay for fines they could face.”[6]
So it was apparently illegal to have someone one pay one’s fine. Be careful in
Texas if a friend or relative, or even a charity organization, is willing to
pay your traffic ticket; you may be committing a felony, which, by the way, is a
type of federal law. Perhaps Paxton was actually positioning himself for, or
worse, already saw himself, as the U.S. Attorney General rather than a U.S. senator.
That the options that Greg
Abbott, the figure-head and chief executive of the Texas government, was considering
tended to push beyond what was legal at the time is itself worthy of noticing,
for such power-aggrandizement by a member-state in a federal system can, if it were
to spread, doom that system as state governments turn on each other and the
U.S. president takes sides, thus undercutting that presiding role.
2. Ibid.
3. I am using a word that is popular in the E.U. for a federal system in which governmental sovereignty is split between a union and states. In truth rather than ideology, “bloc” applies neither to the E.U. or U.S.
4. Joey Cappelletti and Andrew DeMillo, “Texas Governor Threatens to Remove Democrats Who Left State over Trump-backed Redistricting,” italics added for emphasis.
5. Ibid.
