U.S. Sen. John Cornyn announced that the FBI has granted his request to investigate and locate the Texas Democratic lawmakers who left the state in an attempt to stop the passage of new GOP-favored congressional maps.
A spokesperson for Cornyn declined to provide additional details about the FBI’s involvement, and the bureau declined to comment.
Cornyn, a Republican who is facing a tough primary challenge, previously sent a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel asking for the agency’s help in tracking down the House Democrats, who decamped to Illinois and are known to be staying at a hotel in the Chicago suburbs. Cornyn also asked Patel to investigate the legislators for alleged bribery by accepting funds to cover costs associated with their trip.
In response to the letter, Cornyn said on a local radio show that Patel “had assigned agents in both the San Antonio and Austin office,” but he did not specify what role those agents would play.
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The FBI’s involvement, with its federal law enforcement powers, raises the prospect for the first time of agents getting involved to apprehend the Democrats. The Texas House Democratic Caucus did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump previously floated the possibility of FBI involvement, saying Tuesday the agency “may have to” get involved.
The largest contingent of Democrats is seeking refuge in Illinois, but the state’s governor, JB Pritzker, said on a podcast Wednesday that the FBI would be “unwelcome” in any operation seeking to apprehend the lawmakers. He previously vowed to “do everything we can to protect every single one of them.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries brushed off the threat, accusing the Trump administration of continuing to “weaponize law enforcement to target political adversaries.”
The reason Cornyn didn’t give any answer to the question of what exactly these agents would be doing is because it’s hard to even imagine what they could reasonably do. This isn’t a manhunt – the location of the legislators is known, as proven by the person who knew what hotel to call in a bomb threat for. If they were going to be arrested and dragged back to Texas, Cornyn would have said on what charge. This is playing to the cheap seats. That could change – I did use the word “reasonable” in there and we are talking about Trump’s FBI – but for now at least, this is sound and fury.
Texas Democrats had been out of state for less than 48 hours when Gov. Greg Abbott moved to have their seats declared vacant.
The emergency legal filing represents an unprecedented escalation of Abbott’s effort to pass a new congressional map that adds additional GOP seats, as demanded by President Donald Trump. It flies in the face of Texas’ own founding documents, centuries of legal precedent and a recent Supreme Court of Texas ruling, legal experts say.
Even Attorney General Ken Paxton, a fellow Republican, threw cold water on Abbott’s strategy, filing his own brief saying that while he “appreciates the Governor’s passion,” he does not have the authority to bring this type of case.
But just because legal precedent is not on his side doesn’t mean Abbott’s case is doomed. The long-shot filing is before the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, where Abbott has appointed six of nine justices. Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock was Abbott’s former general counsel, as was Justice James Sullivan.
“They have their own independent authority, of course, but it does put them in a tough political position,” said Andrew Cates, an Austin-based attorney and expert on Texas ethics law. “They don’t want to be in the position of potentially biting the hand that initially fed them.”
Abbott’s petition specifically targets Rep. Gene Wu, the House Democratic leader, serving as a test case that could eventually allow him to remove every member who left the state. Abbott asked the court to rule by Thursday; the justices gave Wu until the end of the day Friday to respond.
It is hard to argue that leaving the state to deny the Legislature a quorum is equivalent to abandoning an office, legal experts say. Texas’ constitution sets an intentionally high threshold for quorum — two-thirds of the chamber, compared to half in most other states — in an effort to limit the majority’s complete authority. And centuries of quorum breaks, both in Texas and other states, have resulted in expulsion only once, during the colonial era, when members of the New Jersey assembly, upon regaining quorum, voted to remove their peers who stayed away.
“The law allows for consequences, like arrests and fines, to entice the members back,” said Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, a constitutional law expert at the University of Missouri law school. “If they wanted to say you lose your office, they could have put that in there, but they didn’t.”
The rest of the story is about all the ways that this is without precedent and on basically nonexistent legal grounds. If the news peg up front is that Abbott’s best chance is that some of the Supremes may decide they owe him one for having appointed them in the first place, well, that tells you a lot about the strength of the argument. And also about how degraded the legal system could be if they go that way. Per the Chron, Rep. Wu is to file a response today.
We shouldn’t talk about that attack on Rep. Wu without talking about all the other attacks on him.
Rep. Gene Wu
In late May, House lawmakers were hours into a debate over a proposal to teach Texas school children about the dangers of communism.
Rep. Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat, stepped up to the podium of the House floor. He shared a story about when his family had its land confiscated by the communist Chinese government. During the Cultural Revolution, his father, 13 years old at the time, was dispatched alone to fields and “and basically told to either farm or die,” Wu said.
His father survived. Many others did not.
“When I hear people call me a communist spy, or when members of this body say those things, I get a little offended,” Wu said, clasping his hands atop of a podium and looking across the room at his fellow lawmakers. “Because our family has been the victims of communism for a very long time, and we fled to this country as fast as we possibly could.” Wu was opposing the bill which he said could lead to the stigmatizing and stereotyping of people who fled communist countries.
For years, Wu — the leader of the Texas House Democrats — has been the recipient of such remarks from Republicans inside the Capitol and out. His GOP critics, which include party officials, have accused him on social media of being an operative of the Chinese Communist Party doing China’s bidding in the Legislature while baselessly questioning his loyalty to Texas and the U.S.
I don’t want to amplify the specifics, so I’ll leave it to you to read the rest. There are some truly shitty people out there, and they no longer feel like they need to hide that. I’m not a proponent in general of shame, but some folks really could use a bit of it.
Beyond that, not much else to say. Trump sent in some henchmen to lean on Indiana, with seemingly limited results. We wait and see what SCOTx does and how Ken Paxton tries to do the same abandonment thing his own way. I won’t be surprised if there’s an answer for the former by the end of the day. Daily Kos has more.