According to Bertie Simmons, the legendary principal who was sent home from Furr High School in October 2017 by Houston ISD officials, when it came time to work out the last details of her settlement with HISD she was asked to sign a statement promising that she wouldn’t say anything bad about the district.

No, she said, she wouldn’t do that. If you don’t, she says they warned her, we won’t issue a statement to the public thanking you for your years of service. That was OK with her, she says. Because she had a few things she wanted to say.

Those few things are in the last chapter of her memoir Whispers of Hope: The Story of My Life, due to be launched on November 2. Which will give its readers one more chance to review her side of the story, a perspective that maintains that all the accusations against her – using a bat to threaten students, allowing manipulation of grades, fixing the books for students who had too many absences, mismanagement of money – were disproved. After her dismissal, she had sued HISD alleging age and racial discrimination as well as retaliation against her.

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“I’ve been writing the book for years,” the 85-year-old Simmons said in a recent interview with the Houston Press. “I wrote the last part of the book when I settled with HISD in September 2018.” She says the only reason she took the $100,000 settlement instead of continuing to pursue it in court, was that she didn’t want the legal fighting to continue to be drawn out for her family. "I settled because I'm 85 years old and I have children and grandchildren and they didn't want me to spend the rest of my life fighting HISD."

We contacted HISD to see if they wanted to make any official statement and were told since they hadn’t seen the book, any comment would be premature at best, but they might want to comment after it comes out.

According to Simmons, she didn’t write her memoir in order to settle a score with HISD, but to say to readers that they should always have hope and keep working. Using her own life story as template, she writes about challenges, triumphs and setbacks with a focus on the evils of racism.

An early part of her story concerns growing up in Louisiana during the Jim Crow era complete with separate water fountains and entrances to businesses for whites and minorities. At age 10, during World War II, her best friend was Dorothy McGuire who was African American. They had been gathering scrap iron one summer's day to help the war and make some money and then decided to get some ice cream in town. That went sideways almost immediately when Dorothy told the young Bertie that because she was black, she wasn’t allowed to go in the front door.

“No, I can't. I'd be arrested. I have to go in the back,” Simmons says her friend told her. So Simmons decided to join her friend at the back door, a maneuver that enraged the shop owner. “Get back up front where you belong,” he told Simmons. He also told Simmons she was “going to pay for this. He meant for being back there.”

Months later in November,  Dorothy came over to say they were moving that day. Later that night, Simmons saw flashes of light through her window. “They were burning her house down. It was the Ku Klux Klan.  I thought I caused this by going to the back and I did. I did cause it. Because of that I was determined that I was going to change the world. At 10 years old I decided I was going to be fighting for social justice the rest of my life,” Simmons says.

Simmons’ home life wasn’t prosaic either. She says her father was abusive so she ran away at age 16 – she says he pointed a shotgun at her although she found out later he never meant to actually fire it. Eventually she went to live with an aunt and uncle so she could finish high school and then went on to Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana where she started out in dance but ended up in education.

After two years teaching math, English and a creative dance class in Kinder, LA., she moved to Houston when her husband got a job here. She went to the HISD administration building, then on Capitol Street and to her surprise was immediately hired to teach at an elementary school. Houston schools were all white or all black back then and integration came very slowly, she says.

She would go on to work as an educator in HISD for 58 years, receiving teaching honors and being promoted to principal and area superintendent positions under a number of superintendents including Billy Reagan, Joan Raymond, Abe Saavedra, Rod Paige. Terry Grier and Richard Carranza.

It wasn’t all a smooth ride, though. She was the District 8 superintendent when one of the school board members called her and told her to put a certain person in as principal at a certain elementary school. Simmons says she declined. “I said 'I can’t do that.' She said 'What? Don’t you know who I am? I'm a board member.' And I said 'Yes, but I know that’s not part of your job.' I said 'She doesn’t like kids and she doesn’t like teachers and I have to sleep at night. I can't make her a principal.'" The conversation continued for 30 minutes and was in the middle of Simmons' staff meeting. "I had her on speaker phone and everybody heard it. She told me 'You'd better do this or you're going to be in trouble.'

"That was on a Friday. On a Sunday I was called in and told I was being demoted. I was moved to the south area and my salary was frozen for three years."

After the passage of time and the arrival of Superintendent Rod Paige, Simmons was promoted again. The Texas Education Agency suggested there was cheating going on at two schools in the district and Simmons was assigned to investigate it. “We found clear evidence of cheating.” She turned in evidence to assistants in the superintendent’s office, she says. A short time later, though, both principals were lauded at a school board meeting for their accomplishments.

“I walked over to the retired center and retired,” she says. That was in 1995. She started working with Barbara Bush in a program called Kids Now for underprivileged children. 

Five years later, it was Superintendent Paige who persuaded her (it took him three tries) to come out of retirement at age 67 in 2000 to take on the principal job at Furr a predominantly Hispanic high school in the East End which at the time was beset with gang violence. They couldn’t have after-school activities; too many gang fights broke out. She wasn’t going to do it – the year before she had lost her 16-year-old granddaughter in a skiing accident – but she finally decided that Ashly, who she was very close to, would have wanted her to do that.

As the new principal, Simmons found out the school had gotten a special waiver from the state that even if students couldn’t pass the standardized test they had to take in the tenth grade, that if they had enough credits they could still move on to the 11th grade. As a result, a large number of kids were being held in ninth grade an extra year, getting enough credits to jump to their junior year without having to take a test that many of them couldn’t pass, she says. "Our enrollment was around 1,450 and about half of them were in ninth grade and they were 19 and 20 years old." Furr was tagged as a dropout factory, a high school with a direct pipeline to prison, she says. "The graduation rate was less than 50 percent."

A lot of the teachers and administrators didn’t like the changes she wanted to make, but she fared better with the students, she says. So much so, she says, that a group of them warned her that some of the teachers were trying to get them to key her car.

Two years after she started at Furr, she drove up to the school to find a full-scale fight was going on. An outside gang had come onto the campus. As has been told many times over, instead of sending all the miscreants to alternative school, in 2002 she made a deal with gang leaders that if there wouldn’t be any fights for the rest of the school year she would take them to New York City. Most of them didn’t believe 9/11 happened and none had been on a plane before. The district's Office of Strategic Management wouldn’t give her any money for the trip. "So I went back to the East End where there is no money. It's hard to raise funds in a poverty-stricken area." 

Simmons had previously  brought in the mother of Jon Stewart (in his Comedy Central days) as a educational consultant. "She heard about what I was trying to do and I started getting money from everywhere." Simmons not only took 32 gang members but the nine members of the National Honor Society the school had. In addition to their trip to the 9/11 site, they saw a Broadway show: 42nd Street.

She continued to occasionally butt heads with administrators. Her desire to do things her way which from time to time put her at odds with the equally determined Superintendent Terry Grier. He even put Simmons on a performance improvement plan, saying she sometimes was defending faculty she shouldn’t have defended. He called her into a meeting one day – probably tired of all the questions she was asking of him at principals meetings – and told her that if she needed information about anything to come to him, straight to the horse’s mouth. She replied that so many times she felt in her discussions with him she was talking to the other end. To his credit, Grier broke out in a laugh. In 2015 Grier presented her with an Excellence in Leadership award.

She says she loved Carranza and the things he was trying to do with the district. It was during his brief tenure that she accelerated her efforts to keep students in school rather than suspending them. In the process the school installed a “thinkery room,” the place where troubled and warring students could go to talk out their differences with a mediator and calm down. She says the graduation rate improved from below 50 percent to 90.  The thinkery room was a large part of why Furr became only one of ten schools across the country in 2016 to win a $10 million grant from the XQ Institute led by Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs.

But with the massive award came more problems for Simmons. The district wanted the money to go to its general coffers, not to just Furr High. But that was not how the program was designed and the XQ Institute said no; this was a grant that should go in total to the school.

About this time, the new East Area Superintendent Jorge Arredondo began coming to Furr not checking in with Simmons, she says, but talking to some of the teachers there that he knew.

HISD had decided to relax its stance on uniforms in schools after Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. But Simmons and some of her administrators felt they were necessary at Furr because they started to see increased gang activity with incoming ninth graders throwing gang signs, Simmons says. "We'd been down that gang road." She had bought uniforms for the ninth graders but Arredondo insisted she was operating counter to the district’s expressed directives. (She says she has a copy of a memo from Lamar High School at the same time indicating it was maintaining its uniform requirement.)

In any event it all came to a head as she was leaving work one day. She’d gotten in her car when “This lady showed up and tapped on my window. She said she was sorry—‘I have the greatest respect for you but I was told to deliver this letter to you’ – and handed her a piece of paper telling her that Arredondo was relieving her of duty, sending her home for threatening students which a bat (which Simmons says she'd done for years as a joke and never hit anyone.")

Sent home on a Friday, Simmons says by the next Monday Arredondo had called the Greater Houston Community Foundation which was overseeing the dispersal of the funds asking about Simmons' use of the grant money. This was followed by another call from someone at HISD asking that the $10 million be delivered to the district as a whole, Simmons says. "They wouldn't let them do it. The whole point was to keep it away from HISD so we could do the innovations that we had put in our grant."

What followed was a year in which an increasing number of accusations were made against Simmons and a number of people who worked with her – 11 employees were removed from Furr and sent to a warehouse to sit for the year while HISD investigated and Simmons countered.

In all these months, Simmons says, the internal auditors brought in by HISD, never talked with her. “I never had due process,” she says. Accused of doctoring grades, Simmons says when the district finally came up with a document purportedly signed by her allowing grade changes, "it was dated after I'd left."

According to Sharon Koonce, who was to have been the project manager over the $10 million grant, who was also accused in the HISD investigation and who received a $10,000 settlement, “We had folders that literally proved that each one of their allegations were not true. We went back and forth and the mediator took it back to the district and they ended up paying a bunch of money."

The ending to this bit of Simmons’ story is bittersweet. After she was removed from the school, the innovations described in the grant application, the ones that attracted the attention of the people handing out $10 million, were discarded.

Under the tenure of a new principal who was brought in (and lasted one year) a planned community center was scrapped, Simmons says. The Thinkery room was reassigned for other purposes. Suspensions rose again, mostly of African American students, she says. She is sad that the students didn’t get to benefit from what the $10 million was supposed to bring them.

She took her settlement money and gave it to others. And she is happy about the new book, hoping that its message about resilience and the evils of racism will resonate with readers recognizing the merits of the first and the destructive nature of the second.

"Most of my career has been working with underserved kids," she says.  "I thought I could not only educate the underserved but I could also educate the whites about how wrong [racism] is. Since I am white I thought they would listen to me."

She still hopes for the best for all the students in HISD. She's proud of what she accomplished, the kind of work she was able to do for the district, its students, parents and teachers. But clearly not all her memories are fond ones.

On November 2 from 5-7 p.m., the Houston Museum of African American Culture, 4807 Caroline, will host a book launch event for Dr. Bertie Simmons’s new book Whispers of Hope: The Story of My Life.

Ending weeks of speculation, Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday morning finally unveiled the full list of items Texas lawmakers will be allowed to focus on during the upcoming special legislative session set to begin Thursday morning.

“The 87th Legislative Session was a monumental success for the people of Texas, but we have unfinished business to ensure that Texas remains the most exceptional state in America,” Abbott said in a statement Wednesday accompanying his list of priorities.

Included in Abbott’s to-do list are passing the “election integrity” and bail reform bills he was furious that Democrats blocked in the previous session’s waning moments. He also threw in a few favors to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick by including his pet topics of forcing transgender Texan kids to only play for the school sports teams that match their biological sex at birth and stopping the alleged scourge of social media censorship of conservatives, two measures that failed to pass in the regular session.

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There’s nary a mention of the coronavirus pandemic in any of Abbott’s priority items. There’s also not a word about the state’s electric grid even though it ran the risk of buckling all over again two weeks ago when an unexplained series of power generator failures led the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to ask Texans to crank up their thermostats into the upper 70's lest their air conditioners lose power altogether in the June heat.

While Republicans were mostly mum about Abbott’s agenda Wednesday morning, Texas House Democratic Caucus chair state Rep. Chris Turner of Grand Prairie quickly blasted Abbott’s list of priorities.

“The governor’s agenda for the special session shows he is more concerned with pandering to die-hard Trump supporters and right-wing extremists than he is with serving everyday Texans,” Turner wrote in a statement. “Abbott’s agenda proves one thing: he is clearly panicked about his upcoming primary election.”

"We have real crises in this state — hundreds of Texans died because the governor couldn’t keep the heat on last February, millions of Texans are still unable to access basic medical care and our COVID-19 vaccination rates have plummeted,” Turner continued. “That’s what a real leader would focus on.”

Abbott declared he would call the Texas Legislature back into town to work overtime as soon as the regular session concluded at the end of May with a dramatic late-night walkout from Texas House Democrats that killed the Republican-back slate of election reforms critics have called unjust voting restrictions, but which conservatives swore were all necessary reforms to prevent voter fraud.

He waited until June 22 to let lawmakers know they’d need to report to Austin’s pink granite Capitol building on July 8 to get back to work, and Wednesday's agenda announcement came just over 24 hours before the session is set to begin at 10 a.m. sharp Thursday.

After facing criticism from both parties for vetoing all the Legislature’s funding starting September 1, an unprecedented move Abbott made in a fit of rage after Democrats killed the Republican election bill, Abbott included re-funding the Texas Legislature as one of his special session agenda items.

While lawmakers’ salaries were never actually in jeopardy (their $600 a month paychecks are enshrined in the state constitution), they’ll now have the opportunity to make sure the hundreds of staffers who work within the Legislature will be paid after all, as long as lawmakers make progress on Abbott’s other priorities first, that is.

Some viewed Abbott’s Legislature funding veto as a bit of blackmail to convince state Democrats to show up for the special session in the first place, and to prevent a situation like during the 2003 redistricting saga when state Democrats fled to Oklahoma for weeks on end to try and delay the Legislature's Republican majority from drawing new political maps to their party’s benefit.

Bail reform got top-billing in Abbott’s agenda announcement, referencing the failed bill that would have made it harder for those accused of violent crimes to get released on cash bail ahead of trial. Next was “election integrity” legislation, the last version of which included provisions like banning Harris County innovations like 24-hour voting and drive-thru voting designed to make casting a ballot easier during the pandemic.

The controversial Republican bill also would have lowered the threshold for Texas judges to throw out election results in the future by allowing them to base the decision on simply the total number of votes suspected to be fraudulent with no requirement that the votes actually be counted to figure out which were cast for each candidate.

Abbott made sure to throw in an item on border security, requesting that legislators work on “providing funding to support law-enforcement agencies, counties, and other strategies as part of Texas’ comprehensive border security plan.” The charge to fork over more cash for protecting the border coincides with Abbott’s recent declaration that Texas will begin to build its own border wall, as long as the state can get enough funding from the legislature and from concerned residents from whom Abbott’s begged for donations.

In addition to Patrick’s “social media censorship” bill and his legislation targeting transgender youth sports participants all in the supposed name of “protecting girls sports," Abbott included a vague agenda item calling for more laws to ban so-called “critical race theory” from Texas schools, an academic philosophy conservatives are fearful is infiltrating classrooms across the state and is leading teachers to talk about things like systemic racism and the idea that some level of white supremacy is ingrained in certain United States institutions. Even though Abbott acknowledged the Legislature already passed a law targeting critical race theory in the classroom, clearly he thinks more needs to be done on the topic.

Speaking of the classroom, Abbott responded to backlash over his veto of a bill that would have required Texas kids to be taught about dating violence by including it in his list of special session topics to focus on, explaining that he’d support a new bill on the topic as long as the new law “recognizes the right of parents to opt their children out of the instruction.”

Rounding out the special session agenda are calls to put more limits in place for so-called “abortion-inducing drugs” to get into the hands of Texans, a request that legislators continue to tweak the Teacher Retirement System of Texas payout process by including supplemental one-time benefit checks to affected teachers, and a line-item about appropriating more state dollars to property-tax relief, the state foster-care system and state cybersecurity.

Abbott clearly doesn’t want the Legislature spending any more time on addressing issues with Texas’ power grid despite its deadly failures during February’s winter storm and the recent worries that early-June heat would be enough to cause power outages.

While he didn’t include anything about the grid in the special session agenda, Abbott did sent a letter to the Public Utility Commission on Tuesday ordering the advisory group to “take immediate action to improve electric reliability across the state” to “build upon the reforms passed” in the last Lege session that Abbott swore at the time fixed everything wrong with the grid.

In his Tuesday letter, Abbott asked the PUC to in turn ask ERCOT “to establish a maintenance schedule” for power generators, and requested that the PUC give added financial incentives to developing natural gas, coal and nuclear power while at the same time adding more financial penalties for renewable energy sources wind and solar power if they have trouble pumping out electricity during a crisis.

Past special sessions haven’t ended up addressing every single item the governor has laid out, so it’s likely not every one of Abbott’s priorities will be addressed during the 30-day session beginning Thursday. That said, there’s going to be at least one additional special session in the fall to start the redistricting process once the pandemic-delayed U.S. Census data gets delivered.

Along with redistricting, Abbott could always use the upcoming fall session as another opportunity to force state lawmakers to legislate on his demands, so he’ll have plenty more chances to twist the arms of legislators to get what he wants even if this soon-to-begin session doesn’t go according to plan.

Patrick, leader of the Texas Senate, didn’t immediately chime-in about Abbott’s agenda Wednesday. But Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan took to social media Wednesday morning to tell his colleagues they better be ready to get to work.

Abbott's full special session agenda proclamation is embedded below:

An explosive federal lawsuit against Harris County Precinct One Constable Alan Rosen and two other department officials alleges that Rosen’s office routinely held undercover “bachelor party” stings between 2019 and 2020 during which female deputies “were molested and traumatized by their intoxicated male commanding officers for their own sexual gratification.”

Now even the FBI has gotten involved, as the female deputies’ attorney Cordt Akers confirmed Thursday that federal investigators have issued subpoenas to his clients, indicating their investigation is underway.

"Our clients have been in full cooperation with the federal authorities into their investigation into the horrible misconduct in the Precinct One Human Trafficking Unit," Akers said in a statement. "The serious nature of these crimes deserves serious attention, and we are happy that this conduct will no longer go unchecked."

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These young female deputies, the lawsuit claims, were subjected to extremely inappropriate behavior from their drunken, handsy superiors posing as partygoers during undercover operations at local hotel rooms intended to entice sex workers to offer their services to the incognito officers so they could be promptly arrested, the lawsuit claims.

One human trafficking advocate within Rosen’s office who was disgusted when she learned of the “bachelor party” sting operations finally told her story to the Internal Affairs division within Rosen’s office after he and other county law enforcement leaders supposedly ignored her claims.

“On the very next day, she was fired,” the lawsuit reads.

The federal civil rights lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Southern District Court May 24 on behalf of four plaintiffs: Liz Gomez, Marissa Sanchez and Felicia McKinney, all deputies within Rosen’s office subjected to the humiliating undercover operations; and Jacquelyn Aluotto, the office’s human trafficking advocate who was fired after vocing her concerns about the inappropriate activity.

The suit was filed against Harris County, Rosen and Rosen’s direct deputies Chris Gore and Shane Rigdon. Gore was the mastermind behind the bachelor party sting efforts, and Rosen gave his blessing to go forward with them. During the undercover stings organized by Gore and Rigdon, hotel rooms would be rigged with hidden cameras and plainclothes deputies would have a fake party, rife with alcohol and all sorts of lewd behavior.

The lawsuit alleges female deputies recruited to assist in these stings like Gomez, Sanchez and McKinney were told they had to wear revealing clothing and were pressured to simulate sex with their male superiors. At times, the female deputies were forced to get naked in front of everyone in the room and their bosses, including Gore and Rigdon.

“Female deputies were ordered to purchase and wear revealing clothing for these operations,” the lawsuit reads. “Each of them was ordered that during these operations ‘to maintain cover’ Chief Gore would be lying down on top of them, fondling their breasts and bodied.”

“They were never warned, however, that during this conduct Chief Gore would be wearing only boxer shorts, fully aroused, drunk, kissing and licking their bodies, and giddy after every sting,” the lawsuit continued.

Akers alleged in a press conference that Rosen hadn’t just approved the stings. “Constable Rosen appeared at one of these operations personally,” Akers claimed.

In a statement, Rosen claimed that he “proactively instructed our Internal Affairs Division to conduct an investigation,” into the bachelor party stings once deputies started to complain, and that as a result, “We have suspended these types of operations as a result of our investigation.”

“While self-describing as a ‘second-chance guy,’ Constable Rosen and The County have shown that they are deliberately indifferent to the abuse suffered by these brave women and others,” the lawsuit read. “As such, this lawsuit has become necessary to bring accountability for the horrific ordeal of these young law enforcement deputies and ensure that their experience is never repeated.”

The full 40-page lawsuit is embedded below.

It was a dumb internet rumor that, like so many conspiracies these days, mushroomed into opinions and investigations and QAnon-worthy online discussions. It wasn't enough the Astros had been caught stealing signs assisted by the banging of trash can lids. It had to be worse. Thus began the theory that Jose Altuve, the leauge MVP in 2017, had worn some kind of electronic device or buzzer affixed to his chest to aid his hitting.

The conspiracy grew when he hit a series-winning walk-off home run against the Yankees in 2019. When mobbed at home plate, Altuve prevented his teammates from tearing off his jersey. He said he had been getting a tattoo and that he was worried he might embarrass his wife.

Fast forward to this weekend. The Astros, who struggled mightily against the Yanks at Minute Maid Park in this most recent series, watched Aaron Judge hit a walk-off homer in game two. As he rounded the bases, he trolled the Astros by opening his jersey to reveal his chest and, ostensibly, no buzzer.

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All that did was fuel more speculation online, but the Astros managed to get the last laugh in spectacular fashion. Down 7-2 in the ninth inning Sunday, the Astros scored three and put two on before Altuve came to the plate. The Astros second baseman proceeded to send a hanging slider into the Crawford boxes for another walk-off win.

When he reached home plate, his teammates ripped his jersey off leaving him bare chested as he celebrated with fans and the team.

Rarely does this kind of perfect symmetry happen in any part of life. The day before, Altuve was mocked by the Yankees' most recognizable player. The next day, he got his revenge.

Given the Astros recent struggles and the criticism they have taken for not sending any players to the All-Star game (all those selected as backups have chosen not to attend for injury and family reasons), a win like this takes them into the All-Star break with positive vibes and some legitimate momentum.

That clearly is more important than giving a metaphorical middle finger at the Astros haters out there in the form of a half-naked Jose Altuve parading around the infield after walking off the Yankees, but that doesn't mean it wasn't fun to watch.

To begin their first full-day of self-imposed exile in Washington, D.C., the Texas House Democrats who fled the state Monday afternoon spoke in front of the U.S. Capitol Tuesday to explain why they felt they had no choice but to skip town to prevent Texas Republicans from forcing through new election restrictions.

According to House Democratic Caucus Chairman Chris Turner of Grand Prairie, 57 House Democrats informed House leadership Tuesday morning they were out of state and requested that their voting machines be locked until their return, making it official that the 150-member House didn’t have the constitutionally required 100 members present to pass legislation.

Turner and his fellow Texas Dems say they plan to spend their time in D.C. to push President Joe Biden and Democrats in the U.S. Senate to move more aggressively to pass nationwide voting rights legislation that’s been held up for weeks due to opposition from Republicans and moderate Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Krysten Sinema of Arizona.

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“Our intent is to stay out and kill this bill this session,” Turner said, “and use the intervening time — I think 24 or 25 days now — before the end of the session to implore the folks in this building behind us to pass federal voting rights legislation to protect voters in Texas and across the country."

The House Democrats moved quickly to flee the state after Republican leaders in the state House and Senate moved quickly over the weekend in the early days of the recently begun special legislative session to force through their versions of “election integrity” bills, which increase penalties for voter fraud, add new hurdles for those wanting to vote by mail and outlaw Harris County innovations like drive-thru voting and 24-hour voting heavily used by minority voters.

Republicans swear those new rules are all in the name of making Texas elections fairer, but critics point out that Texas is just the latest conservative-led state to attempt to add voting restrictions after former President Donald Trump refused to concede defeat to Biden, and who has convinced a majority of Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to alleged voter fraud.

House Democrats similarly walked out to block what they viewed as civil rights-infringing voting restrictions at the end of the last legislative session in May, which prompted a furious Gov. Greg Abbott to immediately call for a special session of legislative overtime and to take the drastic step of vetoing all funding for the state’s legislative branch effective September 1.

Dallas state Rep. Rafael Anchía, leader of the House Mexican American Legislative Caucus, claimed Gov. Greg Abbott was to blame for the Democrats’ latest walkout effort.

“When you start the process in such a coercive way, when you say ‘I am going to be the absolute ruler of the state of Texas and defund the legislative branch,’ you have poisoned the entire process,” Anchía said. “We as Democrats, we were united. We said we are going to kill any undemocratic efforts in the state legislatures, and if that meant leaving the state, we were going to do it.”

“We are happy to work on bipartisan proposals that expand the right to vote, that make it easier to vote and harder to cheat in the state of Texas,” Anchia said, “but that is not what we saw even at the outset of this process." He swore that Texas Democrats wouldn’t allow the “Big Lie” that Trump didn’t really lose the 2020 election to allow Texas to join the ranks of other conservative states that restricted voting following Trump’s defeat.

Houston’s own state Rep. Senfronia Thompson put it even more bluntly. “The Republicans in this Legislature may have changed the Messiah from Jesus to Trump, but I haven’t,” she said.

“I’m gonna make sure that I do everything I can do so that my constituents’ rights will not be stripped from them because what [Republicans] believe in is a lie,” Thompson continued. “Trump lost the election, and they need to tell the people of this country the truth. And if they don’t, I’m going to.”

In a Monday night interview with Austin’s KVUE, Abbott urged House Speaker Dade Phelan to order that all the Democrats who fled the state be arrested by state law enforcement (which can’t happen until they’re back in Texas).

“In addition to that, however,” Abbott continued, “I can and I will continue to call a special session after special session after special session all the way up until the election next year.”

“As soon as they come back in the state of Texas, they will be arrested,” Abbott threatened. “They will be cabined inside the Texas Capitol until they get their job done.”

Dallas-area State Rep. Rhetta Bowers admitted she and her colleagues know “we are living on borrowed time in Texas, and [know that] we can’t stay here indefinitely to run out the clock to stop Republican anti-voter bills."

“That’s why we need Congress to act now,” she said.

When asked about what if any compromise from Republicans might convince the House Democrats to return to the Lone Star State to get back to work legislating, Turner said Abbott’s veto of legislative funding was the first hurdle to returning to the negotiating table in their view. Texas Democrats have asked the Texas Supreme Court to declare Abbott’s veto unconstitutional, and are still awaiting a decision on the matter from the state’s highest court.

“The first place to start would be for the governor to stand down on that, and then we can start talking,” Turner said.