Texas Gov. Greg Abbott will give the Texas Legislature a chance to restore funding that he eliminated through a veto after Democrats blocked a GOP plan to restrict voting access.
In a list of items for consideration in a special session beginning Thursday, Abbott included Article X funding, the budget for the entire Texas Legislature. Approved in the regular session, the funding for the fiscal year beginning Sept. 1 was eliminated by Abbott’s veto last month.
Abbott said he vetoed the legislature’s two-year budget to punish Democratic members of the House who walked out on the last day of the regular session, killing a measure to restrict voting in the state.
Texas Republicans, like lawmakers in many other GOP-controlled states, introduced measures to reduce voting hours, purge voter rolls, control local election officials and criminalize certain turnout practices in hopes of reducing the impact of Democratic voters. Georgia’s GOP-run legislature passed restrictions after voters in that state elected two Democratic U.S. senators.
Abbott called the new voting restrictions “legislation strengthening the integrity of elections in Texas.”
Texas was among the first states to require a driver’s license or state-issued photo identification or federal passport after the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The section required federal approval of any changes in voting laws in the states affecting black citizens, whose right to vote is protected by the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Abbott included the voting crackdown in his call for the session, along with the legislative funding and nine other items, ranging from restrictions on transgender children participating in sports to additional restrictions about teaching of how racism affected the state's and nation’s history.
Republicans who control both houses of the legislature will have a chance to further dilute Democratic voters through redistricting in a second special session expected in the fall.
Other issues identified in the upcoming session include border security, “social media censorship,” limits on abortion drugs, property tax relief, family violence prevention, enhanced cyber security and child protective services reform.
The call did not specify any funding for a border wall, which Abbott pledged to build through state funding and online donations. Abbott has adopted former President Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to build the wall and has echoed Trump’s rhetoric about “carnage” on the border.
Abbott’s call to outlaw “online censorship” would be “safeguarding the freedom of speech by protecting social media users from being censored by social media companies based on the user’s expressed viewpoints, including by providing a legal remedy for those wrongfully excluded from a platform.”
The new law would apply to Trump being banned from social media venues such as Facebook and Twitter after his White House rally for overturning the 2020 election results preceded rioting by his followers at the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6.
