Gov. Greg Abbott was clearly still furious Memorial Day afternoon following the death of Texas Republicans’ “election integrity” bill at the hands of Texas House Democrats late Sunday night.

Abbott was so angry that House Dems were able to block the passage of Senate Bill 7 — the controversial election reforms Republicans tried to push through following former President Donald Trump’s unfounded voter fraud claims — that he vowed Monday afternoon to use his line-item veto power over the recently-passed state budget to cut all funding for the Texas Legislature.

“No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities,” Abbott tweeted.

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In his tweet, Abbott referred to Article 10 of the new state budget, which funds not only the pay for all state lawmakers of both parties, but the salaries of thousands of support staffers — many of them who work for non-partisan offices like the Legislative Budget Board and the Legislative Reference Library — for two years starting September 1, 2021.

Abbott’s promise to cut off funding for an entire branch of the state government followed a late-night Sunday walkout from Texas House Democrats in opposition to SB 7. The Democrats' walkout prevented the House from passing both SB 7 and a bail reform bill that would have made it harder for Texans accused of violent crimes to get out of jail before going to trial, both of which Abbott had named emergency items leading up to the legislative session.

After Democrats prevented those items from passing through the House ahead of the session’s end, Abbott promised Sunday night he would summon legislators back to work for a special session to revive both measures. Abbott hasn’t announced a timeline for a special session, although lawmakers are already set to return to Austin later in the year for at least one special session to handle redistricting once the delayed U.S. Census results arrive in the fall.

Democratic state Rep. Gene Wu of Houston tweeted Monday to remind folks that since Texas’ part-time lawmakers don’t make much money to begin with, the real brunt of Abbott’s retaliatory veto would fall on the families of all the workers behind the scenes who keep the legislature running.

“This is petty and tone-deaf even for Texas," Wu wrote.

Update 6:37 a.m.:

Texas House Democrats pulled off a major upset late Sunday night when they walked out of the Capitol just before 11 p.m. to prevent a final vote on Senate Bill 7, the controversial Republican-authored election bill.

Enough Democrats left the building that there were fewer than 100 representatives present, the minimum required to hold a vote. The walkout effort doomed SB 7’s chances of passing before the end of the legislative session Monday night, as the House needed to approve the bill’s final language by midnight Sunday.

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In response, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement vowing that he would call a special session of the legislature to push for “election integrity” legislation and to revive a bail reform measure that would make it harder for people accused of violent crimes to get out of jail before trial.

“Ensuring the integrity of our elections and reforming a broken bail system remain emergencies in Texas,” Abbott wrote. “They will be added to the special session agenda. Legislators will be expected to have worked out the details when they arrive at the Capitol for the special session.”

While the Texas House Republican Caucus in a statement said Democratic state representatives “quit on their constituents” and “quit on Texas,” progressives and voting rights advocates celebrated the walkout effort for killing what they considered an attack on Texans’ civil rights inspired by unfounded Republican claims of widespread fraud after former President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid last year.

“One of the ugliest anti-voter bills in the country died today in the 2021 Texas Legislature,” said Sarah Labowitz, policy and advocacy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. “Democratic lawmakers broke quorum in a courageous move that shows just how hard Texans will fight to protect their constitutional right to vote.”

Democratic state Rep. Chris Turner (Grand Prairie), the House Democratic Caucus Chair who engineered the walkout, said Sunday night that the Dems originally planned to try and block SB 7 with lengthy speeches and procedural moves, but changed course when Republicans attempted to prematurely end the debate on the House floor to force a vote.

“At that point, we had no choice but to take extraordinary measures to protect our constituents and their right to vote,” Turner said. “Republicans have only themselves to blame for the way this Session is ending.”

Earlier Sunday night before state House Democrats left the building, the House signed off on the major electric grid reform bill Senate Bill 3, the final step needed to send it to Abbott’s desk for his approval. If signed into law by Abbott as expected, the bill would create a new statewide emergency alert system for weather-related disasters, and would require power generators and electric line operators to weatherize their equipment and facilities to prevent them from failing in ultra-cold weather.

The House’s version of SB 3 would have placed stricter weatherization requirements on natural gas producers, but the final compromise version of the bill softened those rules to only apply to gas producers state regulators consider critical infrastructure. The bill’s final form also doesn’t include any new state funding source to help energy producers and electricity transmission utilities to pay for the changes needed to prepare for extreme weather.

Original Story:

Instead of enjoying Memorial Day weekend, Texas lawmakers have been working through the night in a sprint to push forward several big-ticket bills before the legally-mandated closing time of the 2021 legislative session at 11:59 p.m. Monday.

Most notably, the Republican-majority Legislature is still on track to send a sweeping set of election reforms to Gov. Greg Abbott for his signature, new limits conservatives argue are needed to ensure the integrity of voting in Texas but that Democrats —- including President Joe Biden — claim are a thinly-veiled attempt to make it harder for people to vote to boost Republicans’ own chances in future elections.

While lawmakers on Sunday were still discussing the final versions of bills to reform the state’s electricity system in case of future winter storms and to limit the Texas governor’s powers in a future pandemic, state Republicans managed before the weekend to muscle-through a bill that would limit what Texas educators can teach public school students about race and racism, which Democrats claim would amount to a state-mandated whitewashing of American history.

These frenzied final days of the legislative calendar have capped off one of the most conservative Texas Legislature sessions in recent memory, as indignant Democrats have been unable to stop their Republican counterparts from passing right-wing legislation to get rid of permit requirements for carrying handguns and to effectively ban abortions after six weeks.

Republican lawmakers on Saturday began debating the final language of Senate Bill 7 — the controversial slate of changes to Texas election law Democrats have blasted as unwarranted voting restrictions — after days of negotiation among the bill’s conference committee, a small group of state senators and representatives who worked in private to settle on a compromise after the House and Senate initially passed different versions of the bill.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s Texas Senate voted to approve the final version of SB 7 early Sunday morning, after an all-night debate and outrage from Democrats that followed a move from Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes — the bill’s author — to disregard a Senate rule that would have delayed a vote until Sunday afternoon. The irony of how Republicans pushed for a late-night debate wasn’t lost on many SB 7 critics on social media given how the bill would force all state polling places to close by 9 p.m. if passed into law.

The Texas House is expected to vote on the bill late Sunday, the last hurdle it faces before it can head to Abbott’s desk. While House Democrats will likely try to stall that process through procedural wrangling, the chamber’s healthy Republican majority means an eventual rubber-stamp from the House is extremely likely.

Texas’ so-called “election integrity” bill follows similar legislation limiting voting passed this year in GOP-led states Florida and Georgia. All of those new restrictions were enacted in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s repeated, unfounded claims that fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election. Even though there was no significant voter fraud in Texas during 2020’s election, Abbott named reforming the state’s election laws one of his top priorities ahead of the session.

The final version of SB 7 includes bans on drive-thru voting and 24-hour voting, two innovations implemented by Harris County Democrats last year that had been stripped out of the version of the bill passed in the House. The revised bill would make it a felony for election officials to send out unsolicited mail-in ballot applications (as former Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins attempted to do), and would ban mail-in ballot drop boxes altogether. It also includes new voting hours restrictions and drastic changes to state rules on when elections can be overturned that weren’t originally included in either the Senate or the House’s original language on the bills.

The conference committee added language to SB 7 that says early voting on Sundays can’t begin until 1 p.m., which Hughes said was meant to give poll workers time to go to church. But enraged Democrats like state Sen. Royce West, who is Black, claimed it would unfairly impact the “Souls to the Polls” tradition of rallying Black parishioners to vote after Sunday service.

Other last-minute changes added language that would lower the bar for overturning a future election in Texas, including downgrading the burden of proof for demonstrating voter fraud from “clear and convincing evidence” down to a “preponderance of evidence.”

If approved, SB 7 would also allow a court to overturn an election if the number of votes illegally cast in the election is equal to or greater than the number of votes necessary to change the election’s outcome, but wouldn’t even require the court to figure out who those fraudulent votes had been cast for to nullify the results.

Biden joined Texas Democrats in decrying SB 7 over the weekend, calling the bill an attack on “the sacred right to vote” that’s “part of an assault on democracy that we’ve seen far too often this year — and often disproportionately targeting Black and brown Americans.”

“It’s wrong and un-American,” Biden said of SB 7 in a statement. “In the 21st century, we should be making it easier, not harder, for every eligible voter to vote.’

The conference committee did nix two provisions that Democrats railed against in previous versions of SB 7 that would have allowed partisan poll-watchers to videotape voters they worried were committing fraud, and that would have redistributed the locations of polling places to take voting centers away from highly-populated urban areas with lots of Democratic-leaning minority voters in the state’s largest counties.

Still, Houston area officials remained outraged about the bill’s final form Saturday. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo tweeted that the newly-constructed SB 7 is “gut wrenching” and is “worse than the original bills.” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner agreed in a tweet of his own, writing that the bill was “Undemocratic and should be roundly denounced.”

Moving less quickly is Senate Bill 3, the last big-ticket bill on reforming the state’s electricity system after February’s deadly winter storm that could still get passed before session’s end.

SB 3 would make it mandatory for companies that generate electricity and those that operate the state’s power lines to weatherize their equipment and facilities so they wouldn’t be crippled by a future winter storm. It would also create a statewide emergency alert system that could zap a message to every cell phone in Texas like an Amber Alert.

Just like with SB 7, there were some key differences in the versions of the winter storm response bill passed by the Senate and House. For starters, the Senate’s version would add fees for wind and solar energy companies on account of how they aren’t able to produce as much power when there’s extremely cold weather, a move pushed for by fossil fuel advocates frustrated about what they consider unfair federal subsidies for renewable energy.

The House version of SB 3 wouldn’t penalize renewable energy providers, and unlike the Senate’s version, would place stricter requirements on natural gas facilities, many of which failed during the winter storm. It would also require natural gas facilities to register ahead of time to be considered critical infrastructure to make sure their own electricity doesn’t go out during a disaster, similar to how essential services like hospitals are protected.

Thanks to those differences, another conference committee is currently working on negotiating a final version of SB 3 and hadn’t revealed its finished product to lawmakers as of Sunday afternoon.

Another major bill yet to be passed is House Bill 3, which would change the rules for how the state responds to future pandemics. Written in response to criticism of how Abbott dictated Texas’ pandemic policies through executive orders since COVID-19 hit during a legislative off-year, HB 3 would give state lawmakers more power during disease outbreaks and would limit local officials from issuing sweeping public health mandates.

Under HB 3, the governor would still be allowed to declare a statewide emergency, close businesses and issue mask-wearing requirements in the event of another pandemic, but would need to get the approval of a new 12-member committee of state senators and representatives led by the lieutenant governor and the Speaker of the Texas House to extend those orders longer than 30 days.

If a disaster declaration has been in place for 90 days, HB 3 would then require the governor to immediately call for a special session of the Legislature. State lawmakers would then have the power to pull-back or extend any pandemic-related disaster orders. The bill would also prevent local officials like mayors and county judges from shutting down businesses or issuing any orders that conflict with state guidelines.

While Abbot had signaled his openness to sign a law limiting his own powers, it looks like he might not get the chance; The pandemic response powers bill was sent to a conference committee for final deliberations on Friday, but according to Dallas Morning News’ Allie Morris, the committee “could not come to agreement” on a compromise. “There is no conference committee report filed, meaning it is effectively dead,” she wrote Sunday afternoon.

Before all the hoopla over the weekend, state Senate Republicans on Friday successfully pushed through House Bill 3979, which would effectively ban teachers from discussing what conservatives call “critical race theory,” or the idea that racism isn’t just the actions of bigoted individuals but is embedded in modern society and can be unconsciously perpetuated by people and governments.

The measure appeared dead Friday evening after Democratic state Rep. James Talarico scuttled the Senate’s amended version on technical grounds. But hours later, Patrick’s Senate brought the bill back up for discussion, stripped off all of the Senate amendments that made the bill differ from the House’s original legislation, and approved the pared-down version of the bill to match what the House originally voted on.

The critical race theory bill’s Republican supporters argued it was headed to Abbott’s desk since the Senate did ultimately approve the version of the bill that the House had approved before all of Friday’s procedural shenanigans, but as of Sunday afternoon it was unclear whether or not the House would end up voting again on the bill thanks to the strange way it was passed.

There’s always the chance for any of these bills that end up getting derailed last-second before Monday night’s deadline to be revived in a follow-up special legislative session if Abbott uses his executive powers to force lawmakers to stay in town overtime. Patrick already requested last week that Abbott call a June special session to take up conservative Senate bills killed by the House over transgender athletes and alleged social media censorship of Republicans, but Abbott called that request “pretty goofy” on Thursday.

Abbott clearly didn’t want to submit to Patrick’s request while this session’s clock was still ticking. But if state House Democrats pull off some procedural magic and somehow block the election integrity bill from advancing before the deadline, or if the electric grid reform package doesn’t make it through in time, Abbott may be more inclined to call for an immediate special session.

Even if Abbott doesn’t call for legislative overtime in the summer, there’s all but guaranteed to be a special session in the fall to cover legislative redistricting thanks to the fact that the 2020 U.S. Census results needed to draw new electoral maps won’t be in until September due to the pandemic. So while the legislative calendar technically ends tonight, we could still be in for plenty of bombshells from Austin in the months ahead.

All the commotion over Texas Republicans’ failed attempt to push through new voting restrictions in the dying days of the 2021 state legislative session was all most Austin-watchers could talk about through Memorial Day weekend. But the high-profile scuttling of Senate Bill 7 at the hands of Texas Democrats who walked off the job in protest overshadowed plenty of bills the Legislature did actually manage to get approved in the final week of Austin lawmaking (ahead of an impending special session, that is).

Joining the conservative bills banning abortions after six weeks and allowing permitless carry of handguns that passed in weeks prior, Republican lawmakers in the state House and Senate approved several other bills on red-meat, right-wing priorities during the last week of the session.

Two of those bills will make it tougher for Texas cities to cut local law enforcement budgets or reallocate funding away from police to other city services. One of them, House Bill 1900, freezes the property tax revenues for cities with more than 250,000 people that defund their police forces. It also blocks those cities from annexing nearby areas for ten years post-defunding, and allows the state to withhold those cities’ sales taxes for a special Texas Department of Public Safety fund “to pay for the cost of state resources used to protect residents of a defunded municipality.”

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The other police funding bill, Senate Bill 23, would freeze the property tax revenues of counties with more than one million residents if those county governments reduce law enforcement budgets without getting approval from county voters.

Gov. Greg Abbott signed those two bills into law Tuesday, thanking the state lawmakers who supported them “for making sure Texas remains a law-and-order state.”

“Efforts to defund the police are downright dangerous, and these laws will prevent cities from making this reckless decision,” Abbott said during the bill signing ceremony.

Abbott announced back in February that preventing Texas cities from defunding police was one of his “emergency items” for the session. While the Austin City Council’s decision to shift some police funding to other agencies in late 2020 sent blue-backing Republicans into a frenzy, other major Texas cities like Houston and Dallas never planned to follow Austin’s lead, and state Democrats denied that their party was pushing for any sort of mass police defunding.

Other bits of right-wing legislation whose recent passage got lost in the shuffle include a bill banning any government official from closing places of worship during future disasters (including deadly pandemics), and a “trigger-law” that would immediately ban abortion outright in Texas in if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

And while several conservative bills Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick named as his top priorities ultimately died in the House — like the one targeting transgender girls who want to play girls sports and another that would have banned social media companies from blocking Texans for right-wing views — he did succeed in pushing through Senate Bill 4, which requires any pro sports team in Texas that gets funding from the state to play the national anthem before games.

A handful of other bills passed by the Legislature’s Republican majorities in the House and Senate cut some antiquated booze regulations and extended health benefits for poor moms and would-be medical marijuana patients, just not to the extent many folks had hoped for.

Take House Bill 1518, which will get rid of Texas’ ban on buying beer and wine before noon on Sundays. On its face, that’s sure to thrill any Texan who’s forgetfully tried to throw in a six-pack or a bottle of chardonnay with their Sunday morning grocery haul. But ultra-early birds would still be barred from making those purchases, as the bill would still prohibit booze sales before 10 a.m. on the Lord’s Day.

Then there’s House Bill 133, the bipartisan-backed legislation to expand post-birth health coverage for low-income Texas moms through Medicaid. Currently, Texas moms on Medicaid have their pregnancy-related medical costs covered for two months after delivering a child, but the final version of HB 133 expands that coverage to last a full six months post-pregnancy.

It’s a significant extension, but the House’s original version of the bill — which was supported by several Republicans including Speaker Dade Phelan — would have extended the Medicaid benefit to last 12 months after birth. The state Senate thought an extension that long would potentially be too expensive, so six months was the compromise the two chambers reached.

The Legislature also expanded the state’s medical marijuana program, albeit not as significantly as marijuana advocates wanted. Passed by both the House and Senate last week, House Bill 1535 will let Texans with post-traumatic stress disorder and cancer access legal marijuana prescribed by a doctor if signed into law.

Jax Finkel, executive director of Texas’ branch of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, was glad to see the legislature allow those two groups to use marijuana to treat their conditions, but was frustrated that the Senate refused to accept the House bill’s inclusion of chronic pain sufferers who might otherwise need opiates for their conditions as another group who could access legal weed.

She was also less than thrilled that instead of bumping up the legally allowed concentration of THC (the psychoactive chemical in marijuana) in Texan medical pot from 0.5 percent to 5 percent as the House originally advocated, the Senate only approved increasing the allowed THC concentration to 1 percent.

“While these are extremely important changes, Texas NORML is saddened to see such integral elements removed from the legislation by the Senate,” Finkel said in a statement, “such as the addition of chronic pain as a qualifying condition, the ability for a review board to approve new qualifying conditions, as well as a new THC cap of 5 percent.”

The Lege also passed two largely unheralded bills covering rural internet service and Gulf Coast hurricane preparedness that both got widespread bipartisan support just before the session’s end. House Bill 5 will create a new state office to increase access to broadband internet in underserved corners of Texas and to entice companies to build out broadband infrastructure with low-interest loans and grants.

Senate Bill 1160 will create the Gulf Coast Protection District, a new government entity covering coastal counties that will be able to raise money for the “Ike Dike” storm surge barrier through bonds, taxes and other fees (with voter approval). That new entity would also be able to manage any federal funds Congress might provide for the project in a future infrastructure spending bill, which should hopefully help speed that hurricane defense effort along once the Army Corps of Engineers publishes a report on the project in a few months.

Abbott has already vowed to call the Legislature back into town at an unspecified future date. The governor gets to call the shots about what lawmakers can work on in an overtime special session, and he’s already named “election integrity” and bail bond reform as his two top priorities.

He could also throw in more common sense initiatives that could garner bipartisan support such as the broadband access and the Ike Dike management bills, but given how furious Abbott is that Democrats killed the GOP voting bill, progressives and moderates probably shouldn’t get their hopes up.

As nasty weather kept blowing in over Houston and surrounding areas, thousands of local residents had lost power to their homes as of Thursday afternoon.

According to CenterPoint Energy’s local outage tracker, 10,426 electricity customers were powerless across the greater Houston region as of 2:33 p.m. Thursday.

By 2:53 p.m. the number of local outages had dropped down to 7,614, but those residents who still have their lights on should be aware that local weather forecasts predict more potentially troublesome thunderstorms will be descending on our region throughout Thursday evening and over the next several days.

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Customers who called the CenterPoint customer support and outage report hotline Thursday afternoon were greeted with a message that high call volumes meant they might not be able to get through to support staff.

CenterPoint spokeswoman Alejandra Diaz told the Houston Press that “the greater Houston area continues to be impacted by storms,” and that “CenterPoint Energy employees and contractors are working to assess storm damage to our electric grid and restore electricity to affected customers as safely and quickly as possible.”

Heavy showers and extremely loud thunderstorms struck Houston and surrounding regions overnight Wednesday. On Thursday morning, Space City Weather’s Eric Berger wrote that the threat of rain in the Houston area would dip temporarily after sunset that night, but warned Friday will likely bring more widespread bad weather.

“Friday begins the period of biggest concern for us with these rains,” Berger wrote, “and it will run through about Monday.”

“As is typical with this kind of system, it can be difficult to predict exactly when and where the heaviest rains are going to fall even a few hours beforehand,” Berger warned, which is why Berger and his fellow Space City forecaster Matt Lanza have put greater Houston under a Stage 1 flood warning through the weekend.

No general manager in the NFL this offseason has produced more transactions than Texans general manager Nick Caserio, and it's not even close. At last count, the number was approaching nearly 100 moves of various types since taking over the GM role back in January, so he is on pace to set some sort of record. The current result is a roster littered with unfamiliar names and reclamation projects, with a scant few 2020 Texans still remaining, like football refugees.

Until this past week, it was all just a game being played on paper, but eventually, we knew we would see these new faces in action. On Thursday afternoon, we did just that, with about a dozen or so media members getting an opportunity to attend OTAs in person, and go through the mental gymnastics of trying to piece together what exactly this team will look like this coming season.

Here are a few observations from an OTA session where the unit that performed within view of the assembled media was the offensive side of the football:

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The overall vibe is just plain weird
I thought I was mentally prepared for a Texans practice without Deshaun Watson or J.J. Watt. I was wrong. Words can't really express how utterly strange it was to be at a Texans practice that was completely void of the names that have been synonymous with this team, and it's not just the ones who have been released, traded, or being sued by 22 women. Laremy Tunsil, Justin Reid, Zach Cunningham, Tytus Howard, all of them were absent on Thursday (although all of them are in the building and around the team, just not practicing on Thursday). Making it even stranger is that presumptive starting QB Tyrod Taylor dresses for practice EXACTLY the same as Watson (complete with tight shorts and hoodie underneath the red jersey), with a similar body type and build. It's like when they replace a soap opera character with an actor who is KIND OF similar to the original actor, but you can palpably feel the difference. Which brings me to....

The countdown to Davis Mills is likely on
Look, I've been driving the train of "Hey, let's support Tyrod Taylor and show some optimism, people!", as evidenced by my post earlier this week about QB matchups. However, watching practice on Thursday in person was a stark reminder that there are very few human beings alive who can make the throws Deshaun Watson does. Tyrod Taylor is certainly not one of them. So all of those plays the last few seasons that were saved by Watson's elite ability to rifle the ball accurately down the field, sometimes on the run? Yeah, I wouldn't count on nearly as many of those. The truth of the matter is that there is a better chance rookie Davis Mills' audition to be the starting quarterback next season begins around the bye week in Week 10.

Attendance at THIS practice wasn't perfect, but attendance overall for offseason stuff has been nearly perfect
As I mentioned earlier, there were several key players who were not in uniform at Thursday's practice, and some of them weren't even on the practice field in street clothes (which likely means they were in the Methodist practice bubble doing drills, getting treatment, or working out at the stadium). However, other than Deshaun Watson, every prominent name on the roster (along with, presumably, all of the not-so-prominent ones who want a job) has been around the team, in the facility, and/or practicing on days not open to the media. This flies in the face of the seemingly league wide attempt by many veteran players to push forward with a boycott from voluntary activities. What seems to be happening instead is that some teams are telling their players that if they show up for voluntary activities, they will modify or eliminate some of the mandatory parts of the offseason, like minicamp, beginning on June 15 for the Texans. So stay tuned on that.

If you want to get stuff done, ask John McClain
Finally, there have been some major glitches with the media during this early part of the practice portion of the offseason, namely the distribution of a roster document with NO JERSEY NUMBERS (a classic New England Patriot style flex, it would seem, by management) and the withholding of Taylor from media availability, for whatever reason (probably somehow tied to Deshaun Watson and the organization's lack of an appetite for any Watson-related quotes or drama). John McClain, the Hall of Fame NFL writer for the Houston Chronicle, went off about both of these things on his video blog on the Chron website. Here is the audio:

Well, don't mess with a Hall of Fame, people! At this practice yesterday, the roster had the jersey numbers of every player, and guess who was made available via Zoom after practice —- you guessed it, TYROD TAYLOR. John McClain for President!

Listen to Sean Pendergast on SportsRadio 610 from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. weekdays. Also, follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/SeanTPendergast and like him on Facebook at facebook.com/SeanTPendergast.