Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir

by Wendy Davis

  I was just getting my sea legs, but because the voter-ID bill got fast-tracked through, we knew we’d have to have a big debate on it early in the session. I was one of the lawyers in the senate (the lawyers are usually relied upon to attack a bill that we are sure will pass in order to lay the appropriate predicate in court, where the law may ultimately be challenged), and because this bill was so important, the entire senate caucus agreed that we would hear it as a committee of the whole—meaning the full senate. This meant that every senator would hear witnesses testify in favor of and against the bill and would be able to ask questions as though each of us were a member of the committee the bill had been referred to. It was a long, laborious process that went on through the night—all of us dividing our roles and taking turns questioning the witnesses in an effort to get certain points into the record. We Democrats knew we were going to lose, but we needed to build a legal record of our case.

  I’d had to really muster my courage during the debate that night, since it was just weeks into my first session and I had not yet spoken a word through the microphone from my desk on the floor, but ultimately I pushed through my nerves and did my best. I was new, but my constituents back home were depending on me. I didn’t have the luxury of being quiet. They’d elected a senator to speak for them. And speak for them I did.

  As part of the proceedings that night, I asked the bill’s GOP author question after question about the bill as I tried to make points that I felt would help us build for the inevitable legal case. Every time I would ask him something really difficult, he would say, “I’m sorry. Could you repeat your question?”

  So I would repeat it.

  Sometimes he would ask me a third time: “Would you repeat your question?” And then, finally, at one point, he said, “I’m sorry, but I have trouble hearing women’s voices.”

  Because the bill was of great importance—a constitutional issue—people were gathered in the gallery above the senate floor to hear it, many staying until the wee hours of the morning. They hissed at him. Ironically, he was actually being sincere—he really did have hearing issues, and whatever the pitch of my voice was, he truly was having a hard time hearing me. Later it would become a big joke among all the senators, and even to this day, if I’m making a good point and someone wants to tease me, they’ll say, “I’m sorry, I have trouble hearing women’s voices.” The author of the bill caught all kinds of grief through social media and blogs, because people felt he was being sexist in his remarks. Though he and I would rarely see eye to eye on controversial bills, I knew he was not trying to show me disrespect. And to his credit, he takes my and other members’ teasing him about it in stride.

  The voter-ID bill ultimately passed the senate and was sent to the Texas house, where the Democrats managed to “chub” it—killing the bill by a procedural maneuver where each member basically talks a bill to death using the maximum time allowed each of them. This was successful because it was the deadline day for senate bills to be heard and passed on the house floor. But it also meant that many good pieces of legislation we’d sent over from the senate for passage in the house that were still awaiting consideration and were behind the voter-ID bill on their calendar were killed, too.

  Struggling to bring our bills back to life on the last day of the eighty-first legislative session, after we agreed to employ a parliamentary workaround, by attaching our senate bills to house bills as amendments, we stopped the hands of the clock on the senate floor at 11:59 p.m. to allow us more time. In the interest of getting things done, we worked feverishly—and civilly—until the early hours of the next morning to get them passed as amendments on house bills. Ending my first session on this note struck a deep chord in me. I was proud to be part of a group that could work together like this, both Republicans and Democrats. It was in that moment that I came to truly appreciate and respect the body that is the Texas senate.

  Every legislative session year, one of our statewide magazines, the Texas Monthly, writes a piece naming the ten best state legislators. Often, they also name a Rookie of the Year, choosing among the new house and senate members. I was thrilled to be awarded that honor in 2009. In awarding me the title, they said, “That old rule that freshmen are supposed to stay quiet? She proved it can be ignored if you’re smart, tough, and well prepared.”

  I was pleased, of course. But the best part was the fact that as a freshman senator I had managed to pass some significant bills: one to help our oil and gas industry transport natural gas more easily; one that helped electricity consumers have low-cost options by requiring providers to give thirty days’ notice before their contracts expire; one to help children who were aging out of foster care to more easily obtain their personal records so they could apply for college entrance and jobs; and one, the Jamie Schanbaum Act, named for a young woman who had contracted bacterial meningitis while at college and who barely survived and had been left with amputations of parts of her legs and hands, which would require every Texas college student to be vaccinated against bacterial meningitis. Among other bills that I also passed, these were the ones I was proudest to have worked with my constituents to achieve. I was a Texas senator now. I had my footing, and I anxiously looked forward to the next session, which would come a year and a half later, since our sessions occur only every two years and last only 140 days.

  —

  My second legislative session in 2011 was much more controversial: we had the voter-ID bill back, and this time it did pass because Governor Rick Perry placed it before us as an “emergency item,” meaning that it would be considered within the first sixty days of a session and that it couldn’t be chubbed in the house. Though it was signed into law, it’s been wrapped up in litigation ever since under the available protections of the federal Voting Rights Act. There was also an attempt to pass an anti-immigration bill similar to one that had passed in Arizona. Our Republican members tried to make it sound like a kinder, gentler version of the Arizona bill, but despite its euphemistic name—the Anti–Sanctuary Cities Bill—it was essentially the same bill as the Arizona law allowing law-enforcement officers to ask anyone, anytime, for his or her citizenship status, based solely on a suspicion that someone had violated or been witness to a violation of the law. This thinly veiled attempt to legalize racial profiling was fought not only by members of the minority community who feared they would fall victim to it but also by law enforcement and members of the clergy from all over the state, including every Catholic bishop in Texas. Law enforcement was already concerned about the people in our undocumented community who were afraid to report a crime because they feared that their immigration status would be called into question—now the concern was that this bill would force people even further into the shadows. Fear of reporting crimes means that assailants and other criminals go free. In committee hearings, several undocumented members of the Texas community shared such stories with us, including one involving a woman who was being badly battered by her husband but was afraid to come forward because she was undocumented. In time the local police had built a strong relationship with her community, giving her the comfort level to report her husband and help put him away for attempting to kill her. But under this new law, she told us, she wouldn’t have reported him, and she believed she would have eventually died by his hand.

  The sentiment behind the law was very much an anti-immigrant one. It’s the antithesis of where I hope the conversation will go at the federal level. We should be aspiring to create a path to citizenship, with appropriate conditions attached, for people who are law-abiding, hardworking, and an important part of the economy of our country already, and who desire to seek legal status. But the conservative side of the Republican party in Texas has displayed a harsh perspective about our immigrants, and they capitalize on the emotions of voters who have strong negative feelings about immigration. (The 2014 Republican primary in Texas drove that point home shamelessly.)

  I and others in my delegation
fought that piece of legislation very hard. But, in the end, it was not the Democrats who succeeded in killing it. Instead, it was Republican donors who stopped it by putting pressure on their own party members to kill the bill: they were afraid that the law would be used to round up and deport undocumented workers in Texas that form an important part of their economic bottom line, particularly in the home-building and agricultural arenas.

  From the moment I decided to run for the senate, I fought many battles to get there and stay there. Some would say—and this is certainly my perspective—that the story behind those battles is that I have fought attempts by the Republican majority to pass laws that I felt would harm my constituents. And I’ve not been shy about that. Alongside my caucus, I was pushing against the tide and fighting against what had once been easier for them to accomplish.

  For obvious reasons, education is one of the two arenas in which I’ve been most active. Education played such an important role in shaping the opportunities made available to me and in shaping who I am that paying it forward has become my passion. I feel it is my duty to make sure other children in Texas have the same opportunities I had. That’s why I filibustered the $5.4 billion in proposed cuts to public-school funding in 2011, a decision that was very unpopular—even among a few of my own Democratic colleagues, not because they supported the cuts but because they believed the filibuster was futile and they feared what a special session might bring.

  So there weren’t too many of my colleagues who were happy with me on that late spring day in 2011. It had been a brutal session, and we were exhausted on that very last day, May 29, bringing bills up and voting on them at a fairly rapid-fire pace because we still had a huge docket of bills that needed to be passed. Whenever we would get a break on the floor, my Democratic Caucus and I would gather and debate whether we should filibuster the education-funding bill. Some of them did not want to do it because they felt it was futile. But I kept saying, “You know, even if it ultimately passes, I think it’s important that we stand against this. And through a filibuster we can bring much greater attention to it, so people around the state will know what’s happening in this capitol.”

  Most people, living their busy lives, don’t have the time or luxury to notice what’s going on in a legislative session in Austin, which meant that most people at the time probably had no idea that huge cuts in education funding were looming. Filibustering would help bring the issue to light for the public, and if we went into a special session during the summer, we’d have an opportunity for teachers and parents to come to the capitol and actually weigh in on the issue and participate in trying to save our schools from this massive blow. I felt that from a principled position we had to try. Our house members were telling us they felt they could get some funding added back, but they couldn’t do it unless we could get them to a special session. I’d awakened that morning not having any clue I was going to filibuster a bill—I went to the capitol happy that the session was at an end and looking forward to the traditional adjournment sine die (“without day”) party. But by midmorning a few of us from the Democratic Caucus were called over to a meeting with our house Democratic colleagues. They begged us to filibuster the bill, a power that their legislative body does not possess.

  “We really think we can get some money added back,” they’d said. “We have a plan, but we can’t do it if you guys can’t get the bill killed and get us into a special session.”

  When we went back to our side of the capitol, we were divided. I argued passionately in favor of the filibuster, understanding that if it were to happen, I would likely be the one to do it, because I was leading the argument in favor, though several others in our caucus were strongly in support of the idea. When we took a private vote among us, it was decided that we would filibuster the bill and that I would be the one to do it. We left our final caucus debate unified as a result of the vote, even though some among us still felt strongly that it was not a good idea.

  We had such a long docket of bills—so many of them really important bills that members were trying to get passed—that as soon as I’d informed the lieutenant governor, as a courtesy, that I was going to filibuster the education-cuts bill, he made the correct decision to hear all the other bills and get them up on the floor first, before we brought up the education-cuts bill. Otherwise, if I’d filibustered the bill first, everything else behind it on the calendar would have died. Because there was such a full docket, the filibuster didn’t even start until 10:44 p.m.

  Up to the moment when I was about to rise and say, “I intend to speak for an extended period on this bill,” which is the polite way of saying, “I’m about to filibuster this bill,” I still had some of my Democratic and Republican colleagues coming up to me saying, “Please don’t do this.” The Democrats were worried about coming back into a special session; they worried that things would be put back on the call that we’d successfully killed in the regular session—which was a fair concern. But the fact of the matter was, we had not yet passed the congressional redistricting bill, which meant that we were going to be called into a special session no matter what. And the likelihood of having other matters added to the special-session call already existed, whether school funding was on the call or not. This was my only way to force the funding bill into the special session.

  It certainly wasn’t “the filibuster heard around the world”—there was no live streaming back then, and even if there had been, the filibuster lasted just a little over an hour—but it was definitely heard around the state. As punishment, and because he knew it would make me even more unpopular with my colleagues, Governor Perry called us back into special session at eight o’clock the following morning. So much for the late-night customary sine die parties that typically go on until the wee hours . . . Needless to say, I was not exactly the most popular person in the senate lounge when we gathered there the next day. Barely anyone there, or on the floor, spoke to me. And I was grateful when my Republican colleague Senator Deuell came up behind me as I sat at my desk, touched my shoulder, and said, “You look like you could use a friend.” Tears welled up in my eyes. It meant a great deal to me.

  On a more positive note, the filibuster did create a surge of people coming to Austin who rallied and spoke against the bill in the special session. And for a brief moment it looked as though the filibuster was going to pay off. We had ended the 2011 regular session with $5.1 billion in our Rainy Day Fund, and the comptroller’s estimate was that the fund would grow to $9.1 billion over the next two years. One of our house members, Representative Donna Howard, had proposed an amendment to capture that growth and put it toward making up the shortfalls in the funding of our schools. Despite bipartisan support of the amendment, within twenty-four hours extreme conservative groups (and one in particular), started hammering at Republican members who were in favor of it and threatened to run candidates against them in their primaries if they voted to keep the amendment on the bill. It’s hard to imagine people being hostile to education spending, but their perspective is that any shrinkage of government spending is a good shrinkage, even if it means dramatic cutbacks in basic and vital support of our children. And they successfully pressured enough Republican members to change their vote, killing the amendment in conference committee, and, with it, those resources that should have gone to deserving schools and students.

  We came so close to actually making an impact by staging that filibuster, but in the end the bill passed—just as it had been intended to pass in the regular session—the $5.4 billion in cuts went through, and twenty-five thousand educators in Texas lost their jobs, eleven thousand of them teachers who were handed pink slips and the remainder through open teaching positions that went unfilled.

  As a consequence the state received and granted an unprecedented number of classroom-size waiver requests—thousands and thousands of such requests to increase classroom sizes, because the state-mandated 22:1 student-to-teacher ratios could no longer be acc
ommodated in elementary-school classrooms. Also gone were teacher aides who were helping struggling students to get on track with their reading skills by grade three (studies have proved that children who aren’t on reading track by third grade will likely be lost forever in terms of educational success). And programs that were really working got cut:

  We’d been moving toward full-day pre-K—which got cut.

  We’d been moving toward a program called Student Success Initiative that was helping kids who were falling through the cracks in high school, getting more one-on-one attention to them, to help them get back on track in high school—and that got almost completely gutted.

  Money toward science and technology grants was zeroed out. So was money for reading, science, and math course improvements. And seat belts in school buses. Money for advanced-placement courses was cut in half.

  And those massive public-education cuts had a huge impact across the state on so many children. Texas was already ranked forty-sixth in per-pupil investment in the United States, and that $5.4 billion cut took us down to forty-ninth out of fifty-one (the District of Columbia is counted in the mix). For a state with one of the strongest economies in the entire country—Forbes magazine included Austin, Dallas, and Houston on its list of Best Big Cities for Jobs in 2014 and included four Texas cities (Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio) in its ranking of America’s Twenty Fastest-Growing Cities—this kind of disinvestment in our people and in our future labor force creates a tremendous discrepancy between potential and reality. In fact, Rice University sociology professor and former state demographer of Texas Steve Murdock has cautioned policy makers about the trend line we’re on: 18 percent of our adults don’t have a high-school diploma or equivalent, and his prediction is that by 2040 that percentage will rise to 30 if we don’t reverse course. What that says about the future workforce of Texas alarms me, and I agree with his strong recommendation to invest in full-day pre-kindergarten and other programs that keep students from falling through the cracks. And that advice comes from a former Republican appointee who served as director of the U.S. Census Bureau under President George W. Bush.