What the Hell Is Going On at the Texas Legislature Now?

It doesn’t sound like the toughest gig for an officer with the Texas state Department of Public Safety, though one wonders if it’s what they signed up for. Per one PBS story about the still-tense situation in Austin:

Lawmakers had officers posted outside their Capitol offices, and suburban Dallas Rep. Mihaela Plesa said one tailed her on her Monday evening drive back to her apartment in Austin after spending much of the day on a couch in her office. She said he went with her for a staff lunch and even down the hallway with her for restroom breaks.

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Yes, the dozens of Democrats who fled Texas early this month in order to try and block a vote on a blatant power grab spurred on by the President have returned to the state capital, acknowledging their likely defeat but welcomed with some absurd theater. Republicans controlling the state House required the Democrats sign what they said amounted to “permission slips” that allowed state officers to follow them around and make sure they didn’t escape again. Again, the reps came back willingly, and publicly, and showed up to work.

That theater, though, doesn’t end with the permission slips, because one representative has refused the heavy-handed oversight. “At the moment that the directive was issued, I felt like it was wrong,” said Nicole Collier, in an interview with MSNBC. “It’s just wrong to require grown people to get a permission slip to roam about freely. So I resisted.”

The location of that interview was notable: Collier spoke from the floor of the State House, where she remains as of this writing on Tuesday afternoon. Because she refused to sign, she is theoretically subject to arrest if she leaves; and so she hasn’t. Collier slept on the floor of the chamber on Monday night, and on Tuesday filed an application for a writ of habeas corpus. “Representative Collier is not absent,” the complaint reads, referring . “So the restraint on her liberty is illegal.”

The Democrats argue that while Texas now will likely be able to complete its gerrymandering madness with the members returned, they got their point across. Other states’ willingness to tit-for-tat redraw their own maps — California most notably, though Governor Gavin Newsom’s Trump-mocking plan has already drawn its own response lawsuit from Republicans. It all seems sordid and ugly and a little unsettling given the now 15-months-away midterm elections, clearly under assault from a party that not just wants to maintain its tripartite death grip on the federal government but begin a process of ensuring to never let go. The Texas Democrats’ fight is, obviously, a worthy one.

“Typically they say, take that high road,” Collier said from her legislative prison cell on Tuesday. “Well, you know, that high road has crumbled. We’re on a dirt road, and we’re going to meet them on that dirt road and get down and dirty, just like they are.”