Texas Legislature ends second special session marked by new political maps, slew of conservative wins

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The Texas Legislature gaveled out its second overtime session with a fresh inventory of GOP victories, including a new congressional map gerrymandered to maximize Republican representation, a host of socially conservative priorities that had long failed to reach the governor’s desk, and unprecedented retribution leveled against the minority party.

The final adjournment, coming late Wednesday in the House and shortly after midnight in the Senate, closed out a tense six and a half weeks of overtime legislating, punctuated by a two-week walkout by Democratic lawmakers over GOP redistricting that prompted Republicans to end the first special session early and launch right into a second. After the Legislature resumed business, GOP lawmakers quickly pushed through much of Gov. Greg Abbott’s agenda, sparking fiery debates over abortion, bathrooms and ivermectin that underscored the bitter partisan divisions taking root at the Capitol.

"I don't think in the history of the state any Senate body has accomplished so much,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said before adjourning, joking that the passage of a landmark school voucher bill earlier this year had become almost an afterthought with the heap of major legislation passed in the months since.

The final days of the session were partially marred for Republicans by their failure to strike deals on legislation reining in property taxes and Texas’ booming hemp market, which was the initial impetus for returning to the Capitol following this year’s regular legislative session.

By Wednesday, the last full day of the overtime session, many lawmakers were seemingly at the end of their ropes and eager to get home to their loved ones, with debates on the House floor frequently devolving into shouting matches — often about race and the voices of marginalized Texans.

“The effect is not discipline for a member. It's disenfranchisement for the people who send them here,” Rep. Vince Perez, an El Paso Democrat, said during a heated floor debate over new GOP-backed penalties aimed at deterring future quorum breaks. “This is what happens after 30 years of a one-party rule.”

Still, GOP lawmakers left town having checked off nearly every major item on the governor’s to-do list, including their biggest trophy: a new congressional map demanded by President Donald Trump designed to hand the GOP up to five additional seats in the U.S. House in next year’s midterms.

Republicans pushed the new lines through over intense opposition from Democrats, who fled the state to deny the House the headcount necessary to pass legislation. Upon their return, they vowed to try and kill the plan in court by pressing their argument that the map would unconstitutionally suppress the vote of Texans of color.

The Republican-led Legislature also passed several socially conservative priorities that had previously stalled in the House, including a bill once allegedly opposed by Abbott restricting which restrooms transgender people can use in government buildings and schools, and a measure cracking down on the manufacturing and distribution of abortion pills.

Other conservative priorities that cleared the Legislature this session included bills granting the attorney general’s office authority to independently prosecute election-related crimes, and making ivermectin — a drug mostly used in the US to treat livestock for parasites that became popular as an unproven treatment for COVID-19 — available to Texans without a prescription.

Amid the flurry of partisan GOP-backed measures, the Legislature passed a series of bipartisan bills meant to bolster the state’s flood infrastructure and disaster response and improve the safety of camps located in or near floodplains. Those came after the devastating July 4 Hill Country floods, which killed over 130 people, including dozens of children and counselors at Camp Mystic along the Guadalupe River.

A proposal scrapping STAAR, the end-of-year state standardized test, also made it to the governor’s desk after negotiations previously broke down between the House and Senate during the regular session. House Bill 8 will swap out STAAR for three shorter tests to be administered throughout the school year.

Despite an action-packed summer, lawmakers left several items on Abbott’s agenda unfinished, including legislation to tighten regulations around consumable hemp products. The issue first drove headlines around the first special session, after Abbott vetoed a ban on THC the Legislature passed earlier this year and that Patrick had vociferously pursued.

The governor instead called for lawmakers to more strictly regulate the hemp industry with age limits, new enforcement mechanisms and a prohibition of synthetically modified hemp compounds. Though the state’s top Republicans worked in the final moments of the special session to reach a compromise on THC, the effort fell flat, leaving the state’s hemp market in place for now.

“After long discussions last night between the Governor, Speaker, and me on THC, and continued hours of discussion today, we were not able to come to a resolution,” Patrick said in a statement Wednesday evening. “My position remains unchanged; the Senate and I are for a total THC ban.”

A split between the House and Senate in the session’s final days also spiked a bill to trim property taxes by limiting local government spending. House lawmakers shot down a version hashed out in negotiations between the two chambers, with several hardline conservatives in the lower chamber railing against the bill for not going further to rein in local spending — drawing fervent pushback from GOP senators across the rotunda.

Blemishes aside, Republicans walked out of the second special session with scores of legislative wins to tout in next year’s fast-approaching primaries. The map’s passage, and Democrats’ walkout, helped unify typically divided House Republicans, who, after taking unprecedented steps to punish Democrats and get rid of quorum-breaking as a constitutionally protected tool of the minority party, emerged largely in support of a House speaker most of them had once opposed.

Democrats denounced the new punishments as silencing political dissent and further marginalizing the already outnumbered minority in state government.

"Texans should be alarmed by a party that changes the rules whenever they lose," Houston Rep. Gene Wu, the House Democratic Caucus leader, said in a statement that labeled the penalties as “vindictive.”

Also among the last-minute casualties was a bill enabling law enforcement agencies across the state to keep numerous records confidential, including complaints against officers that did not result in disciplinary actions. The proposal fell by the wayside after the Senate removed a House carveout to allow the parents of victims of the 2022 Uvalde school shooting to see records related to the fumbled response by law enforcement.

And lawmakers once again declined to bar local governments from using taxpayer dollars to hire lobbyists in Austin — a long-sought conservative priority that opponents said would have kneecapped local governments advocating for their jurisdiction’s issues at the Legislature.

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