Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Tuesday that he plans to seek a court ruling declaring that state House Democrats who have broken quorum and left the state have "abandoned their offices." The move could open the door for Gov. Greg Abbott to appoint their replacements.
Abbott had no intention of waiting. He filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court of Texas later Tuesday seeking the removal from office of state Rep. Gene Wu (D-Houston), chair of the House Democratic Caucus, whom he styled the "ringleader" of the quorum break.
House Speaker Dustin Burrows has given Democratic lawmakers who broke quorum until Friday to return and present themselves to the House.
"Starting Friday," Paxton said in a statement, "any rogue lawmakers refusing to return to the House will be held accountable for vacating their office. The people of Texas elected lawmakers, not jet-setting runaways looking for headlines. If you don't show up for work, you get fired."
Abbott filed his petition a few hours after Paxton's statement.
"What is at stake here? Nothing less than the future of Texas," the petition argued. "If a small fraction of recalcitrant lawmakers choose to run out the clock today, they can do so for any, and every, Regular or Special Session, potentially bankrupting the State in an attempt to get their way."
Abbott signaled that he and Paxton would pursue this path late Sunday, a few hours after Democrats announced the quorum break. Abbott pointed to an opinion Paxton issued after Democrats last broke quorum during a special session in 2021. That ruling held that a court would have to determine if a legislator has forfeited his or her office by abandonment.
"That empowers me to swiftly fill vacancies under Article III, Section 13 of the Texas Constitution," Abbott said in his own statement.
Getting court approval for such declarations is not automatic and is likely to be time consuming. The current special session ends August 19, but the governor can call as many special sessions as he wishes under the state constitution.
Whether Abbott can in fact name the replacements for elected members of the state Legislature is open to dispute. Charles "Rocky" Rhodes, a constitutional law professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, said flatly that is not in Abbott's power.
"If you think about the idea of Separation of Powers, you would see why he doesn't have that authority," Rhodes said. "We don't want the governor to be able to handpick members of the Legislature. That sounds like something the King of England would have done, which would, of course, be contrary to any basic notion of Separation of Powers."
Political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston said that Texas courts have traditionally treated the question of abandonment of office with a very high level of scrutiny.
"The courts would have to reverse themselves and re-litigate some of those issues if they were to come down on the side that says being absent from office is tantamount to a legislative vacancy," Rottinghaus said.
Rhodes said it's also not a given that courts would rule in Abbott and Paxton's favor on the question of whether Democratic lawmakers have abandoned their offices.
"The Democratic lawmakers have made no indication at all that they're abandoning their office," Rhodes said. "They are just engaging in a technique to try to shut the Legislature down, a technique that is contemplated by the Texas Constitution and has been used by members of the Texas Legislature on several occasions during our history."
State Sen. Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston) and state Rep. Briscoe Cain (R-Deer Park) have filed legislation that would allow lawmakers to be removed from office in the event of "excessive vacancies."
The move comes as Abbott is also having House Democrats who have fled the state investigated by the Texas Rangers on charges of felony bribery, on the grounds that they allegedly solicited funds to pay $500-a-day fines they expected to incur as a result of their quorum break.
Similarly, speaking at Thursday's House session, state Rep. Mitch Little (R-Lewisville) raised the issue of whether those Democrats should be investigated for "political corruption."
Democrats announced Sunday they were fleeing the state in response to Republicans' efforts to pass a mid-decade congressional redistricting map that would allow them to pick up five seats in the 2026 midterm election. Abbott added redistricting to the special session call following intense pressure from President Donald Trump.
The Texas Newsroom's Lauren McGaughy contributed to this report.
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