When the sun broke on Tuesday morning over the Texas Capitol, State Representative Nicole Collier was inside the chambers, having spent a rumpled night there in a one-woman standoff against state Republicans.
Even veterans of Texas’s often wild political theater said they had never seen anything like it.
Then again, no one could recall hearing of state legislators prevented from leaving the Capitol building unless they signed a permission slip promising to return — it looked a lot like a middle-school hall pass — and agreed to have a state police officer follow them until they did.
Ms. Collier refused. “I just felt like it was wrong,” she said in an interview on Tuesday morning. When she heard that she would be trailed by an officer, she said, “I couldn’t move. I felt like, ‘I don’t like it. I disagree, and this is the way that I am resisting.’ ”
The imposition of police surveillance by Republican state house leaders on their Democratic colleagues marked the latest front in Texas’s redistricting battle. It came as dozens of House Democrats had just returned to the capitol on Monday, after a two-week walkout.
Texas Republicans had been furious at the Democratic members over the walkout, which prevented them from passing an aggressively redrawn congressional map designed to flip five Democratic-held seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2026. Republican state leaders tried various tactics to bring the absent Democrats back, including civil arrest warrants issued by the state’s House speaker, Dustin Burrows.
On Monday, the House speaker invoked rules that allow him, after a majority vote, to lock the chamber doors and prohibit members from leaving without his written permission. The rules also allow “by order of a majority of those present” for the attendance of members to be “secured and retained.”
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The post Night at the Capitol: One Democrat’s Unexpected Protest Grips Texas appeared first on New York Times.
