Texas Supreme Court declines to expel Houston Rep. Gene Wu over summer quorum break

Abbott and Paxton vowed to expel members who broke quorum, arguing that Democrats had “abandoned their official duties” and asking the Texas Supreme Court to intervene.

In an August lawsuit, Abbott and his lawyers said that Wu, who chairs the Texas House Democratic Caucus, violated his oath of office by leaving the state and seeking to run out the clock on a 30-day special legislative session.

“Most people who repeatedly fail to show up for work get fired. Public servants must be held to the same standard,” Abbott wrote. “Permitting [Wu] to continue occupying his office so that he can abdicate the duties of that office will only enable future legislators to grind state government to a halt.”

Wu’s lawyers responded that in breaking quorum, he was representing Texans’ interests by fighting a congressional map that he felt would negatively impact his constituents and “target voters based on race.”

“[Wu] has not died and has not been expelled from the House by the constitutionally prescribed means: a 2/3 vote of the House,” Wu’s lawyers wrote in August. “His presence in another state is not a voluntary resignation. ... Respondent is entitled to serve through the entire term to which he was elected.”

When Democrats returned to Austin at the beginning of a second special session, the Legislature quickly passed the new congressional map and more than a dozen other bills, Community Impact reported.

The latest

In the May 15 opinion, Blacklock highlighted the separation of powers, citing legal precedent from a case following a 2021 quorum break, when the state Supreme Court found that “it is not [the judicial branch’s] role to resolve disputes between the other two branches that those branches can resolve for themselves.”

Blacklock noted that when Democrats left the state last summer, “the present members of the House wielded their constitutional power to compel attendance” without judicial intervention.

“Whatever wrong may have been committed by the absent House members, the Texas Constitution’s internal political remedies, none of which involve the judicial branch, were sufficient to the task of restoring the House’s ability to do business,” he wrote. “Should those remedies unexpectedly prove inadequate in a future case, we might have occasion to consider whether any judicial remedy could ever be available.”

Wu celebrated the ruling in a May 15 statement.

“When Greg Abbott threatened to arrest and expel us for denying him a quorum, we told him he should ‘come and take it.’ He tried,” Wu said. “The Constitution does not let a governor erase voters’ choices when their choices are inconvenient to him.”

Abbott’s office argued that the governor’s lawsuit helped end the walkout and said the state was prepared to fight future quorum breaks.

“No elected official has the right to abandon their duties, flee the state, and shut down the people’s business,” Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for the governor, said in a May 15 statement. “If Democrats abandon their offices again, the governor will bring them right back to the Texas Supreme Court.”

Justice James Sullivan, whom Abbott appointed to the court last year, said in a separate concurring opinion that the court could likely get more involved in future legislative walkouts. He noted that last year’s two-week walkout “passed too quickly” for justices to dig into the case.

“We should be prepared to perform this grave task if legislators refuse to do their jobs again in the future. ... Were it to happen yet again, I believe the next set of quorumbreakers had better be ready to pay us a visit,” Sullivan wrote May 15.

No members of the all-Republican Supreme Court dissented, although Justice Kyle Hawkins, another Abbott appointee and former state solicitor general, did not participate in the May 15 decision.

One more thing

At the end of special legislative sessions last summer, House lawmakers voted to increase penalties for future quorum violations, including stripping committee leadership positions and reducing members’ legislative seniority. While Democrats who left the state in August were charged thousands of dollars in fines, the additional punishments were not applied retroactively.

Last month, a Republican-led House committee approved over $8,000 in fines for dozens of Democrats, levying lower penalties for some members who did not participate in the full two-week walkout. Wu said on social media that he paid the fines by personal check, while some members previously told Community Impact they did not intend to pay the fines or would fundraise to cover them.