House Passes Election Bill after GOP Leaders
Capitulate in Floor Massacre Led by Democrats

Capitol Inside
May 7, 2021

Texas House Republicans united on Friday behind a sweeping plan to restrict voting in the state's largest cities with a vote on a bill that that the GOP leadership team had been woefully unprepared to defend before backing down with significant concessions to Democrats during the middle of the night.

The House approved the so-called election integrity measure in Senate Bill 7 on a 78-64 vote that was cast exclusively on party lines with the exception of GOP State Rep. Lyle Larson of San Antonio as the only Republican who sided with the Democrats on the controversial elections plan. The Republican-ruled House gave SB 7 the final boost almost 12 hours after a tentative show of support more than three hours after midnight with 81 ayes.

House Republicans had marched in lockstep on the restrictive elections measure without apparent concern that the bill could be political suicide based on warnings this week by a senior GOP leader in Washington. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said in a Fox News interview that corporate contributions to the GOP had been drying up fast since Georgia Republicans rammed a similar voter limitation plan through the legislature there.

The Texas measure has encountered vast opposition from major private companies that are based in the state and agree with the Democrats that SB 7 represents the worst attack on the rights of Black and Hispanic voters since the passage of civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

The House vote sent the legislation to a conference committee where five GOP representatives will attempt to negotiate a compromise with a handful of Senate counterparts. GOP State Rep. Briscoe Cain of Deer Park and Republican State Senator Bryan Hughes of Mineola will lead the quest for a compromise on SB 7 as the chief sponsors in their respective chambers.

Cain, the Elections Committee chairman in the Capitol's west wing, struggled mightily to sell the sweeping proposal in the face of a brutal inquisition by Democrats who branded SB 7 as a blatantly racist proposal designed to suppress the minority vote under the phony guise of proactive voter fraud prevention.

State Rep. Jessica González, a Dallas Democrat who's the election panel's vice-chair, summed up the minority party's members feelings on SB 7 as the leader of the charge against the measure along with Democratic State Rep. Rafael Anchia of Dallas.

"This is by far the worst piece of legislation Texas has seen," González declared. "This will silence thousands of potential eligible voters."

Cain claimed during an intense grilling by Anchia that he hadn't considered the potential effect that the measure could have on voters who aren't white like himself despite the dominant role that race had played in the battle on SB 7 and the measure that he'd drafted in House Bill 6.

Cain insisted that he hadn't intended for the bill to discriminate against minorities without anticipating the possibility that Latinos and Blacks in Texas would be disenfranchised by it. Cain acknowledged that it hadn't occurred to him to request a racial impact statement on SB 7 even though such an analysis had been a topic of discussion at a committee hearing that he conducted on his own bill.

Anchia had Cain on the ropes from the outset of an exchange on Thursday night when the House bill author said he didn't realize that the measure's official stated purpose of "purity at the ballot box" had been the battle cry for segregationists when the Democratic Party limited primary elections to white voters for more than 20 years until the 1940s.

Cain scrambled to correct the embarassing lapse by signing on to a Democratic amendment that erased the racist language that he'd incorporated into the bill in a move that showed a lack of understanding on Texas' dark history of racial discrimination.

The disconnect might have seemed surprising to colleagues on both sides of the aisle given Cain's role as a lawyer for Donald Trump in the baseless election challenge that ended with the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Cain had flown to Philadelphia to help his fellow Trump lawyers in a bid to overturn the disgraced ex-president's defeat in the democratic election in Pennsylvania.

GOP House Speaker Dade Phelan apparently had been impressed with Cain's showing at the courthouse in Philly in an effort that had no chance for success without evidence to support bogus voter fraud claims.

more to come ...