Wendy Davis

Okay, as you all know, I'm from Texas, a fact that I'm almost continually ashamed of. Over the last couple of weeks, Rick Perry has been pushing through a virulent anti-abortion bill in a special session of the TX State legislature. The other day, the bill passed the Texas House of Representatives, and today, it went before the TX Senate.

Senator Wendy Davis, pictured right, started a filibuster at 11 am yesterday, and continued well into the night, speaking nonstop on how idiotic this bill is, how much it hurts Texas women, and how necessary abortion often is. The whole thing has been streamed on several webcams, and other sites have extensively reported on the procedural shenanigans the Republican senators have used to shut down Davis' filibuster. Now, nobody's really sure what the end result of all this is. The bill, entitled SB5, went up for a vote shortly before midnight today, after Republican senators held a party-line vote to state that Sen. Davis went off topic. She, by the way, was talking about a previous year's anti-abortion bill, which I think is more than  a little on-topic when considering this years anti-abortion bill. The crowd at the Capitol went batshit insane,and the vote was held up until well after midnight, after the special session had officially ended. The Repubs went ahead and voted in SB5, of course, and even changed the Senate's minutes to reflect the vote too place on 6-25, when the initial report had the vote taking place at 6-26, and thus, being completely invalid.

Now our Lt. Governor, David Dewhurst, claims the vote is valid and the bill passed. He's a Republican and lies like a fucking rug though, and is not to be trusted. Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood's senior TX spokeswoman says the bill is dead, but she's pro-choice and therefore optimistic and hopeful and there for is not to be trusted, at least on this issue, because optimistic and hopeful liberals always tend to underestimate how fucking EVIL Texas conservatives can be. Seriously, this whole filibuster has been like a master class in Texas politics. Texas conservatives are insanely competent at using procedural rules to disenfranchise and screw over liberal voters, politicos and activists. "Redistricting" is a term that has a special meaning in Texas, and the rest of America just got a live look at how our Repubs like to operate. Changing the time stamp on the official minutes sounds right up there alley.

Now, every media outlet I've read has a different take on what actually happened. Some are saying SB5 passed, others are saying it didn't pass. Okay, wait, I just saw another tweet saying that Dewhurst has conceded SB5 is dead. So who the fuck knows at this point?

Anyway, upshot of all this is: Davis kicks ass, there are a few good people in Texas, and they were all crammed into the Capitol rotunda, screaming tonight. Now, I figure that sooner or later, Gov. Perry will call another special session to pass SB5 or a variant of it, and we'll have to go through all this again, but I've got one small hope. Texas' Republican politicians have just had to sit through 12-13 hours of nonstop testimony about what it means to be pro-choice. And they couldn't just tune it out, no, they had to listen to Davis' every word, waiting for a chance to pounce on her for straying off topic. They had to listen. For 13 hours, they had to fucking listen to her, and to us.

Thirteen hours of talk. Do you think maybe, just maybe, one of them learned something?
CHRIS