by Wendy Davis
This is how it works: Someone who’s short on cash goes to a payday lender with a pay stub to prove employment and a checkbook to prove solvency. The borrower makes a postdated check out to the lender for the entire amount that he or she (let’s make our borrower in this example a man) wants to borrow. A fee—usually $15 to $20 per $100 that he’s borrowing—is charged up front. If the loan is $300, there’s a $60 fee, and when payday comes, the borrower is expected to pay back the entire $300.
Of course, usually he can’t pay back the entire loan, since it’s often the entire amount of his paycheck, or most of it, and he needs some money to live on. But when he goes to the lender and offers to make a partial payment on the loan, the lender refuses to accept it:
“Pay me nothing or all of it. And if you pay me nothing, I’ll charge you another sixty dollars and roll it over until your next paycheck.”
The following payday the borrower has now paid $120 in fees, so he’s underwater and way outside his budget, because he never had $60 extra in his budget to begin with. This continues, week after week, until the insidious truth of this form of pernicious lending becomes painfully clear: high-interest unregulated loans lock consumers into monthly payments that are usually more than their family’s monthly budget.
In Texas, a $400 payday loan with a 14-day term from a major payday lender means $121 in fees and interest.
That means that the total they will have paid by their first payday is $521.
That’s the equivalent of an annual interest rate of 792 percent.
There are so many heartbreaking and maddening stories that we heard during committee hearings about this kind of morally reprehensible predatory lending. One involved a woman from Midland who took out a $6,300 auto title loan (a payday loan where a car is used as collateral) for her stepson’s funeral and ended up paying more than $12,000 over eleven months. She was forced to declare bankruptcy and eventually called on a former employer for the last $4,000 to pay off the loan. Another involved a Houston woman who took out a payday loan of $1,400 for car repair and medical expenses. After making several monthly payments, she’d already paid more than the original $1,400 loan, but still owed $1,600.
And those are only two of thousands and thousands and thousands of examples that exist throughout the state.
If we instituted a single law requiring lenders to allow partial repayments, then people would have a chance at working their way out of their loans. But because payday lenders aren’t required to accept partial payment, they just continually roll the loans over, charging new fees each time.
Some states have limited the number of times a payday lender can roll a loan before having to freeze it and allow the borrower to try to pay it off bit by bit, and some have limited the amount that can be borrowed, making borrowers less likely to get so overwhelmingly upside down so quickly. But when previous efforts attempted to shut down the ability of payday lenders in our state to abuse consumers, they found a new way to do it. Using a third-party model, the lenders started operating in what they argued was a loophole in the law. Instead of operating under the lending statute, they would operate as “consumer-service organizations” (CSOs), sanctioned in our state statute as a means of helping people repair bad credit. But this statute was never intended to cover lending practices. And for that reason there’s nothing in it about limiting fees, nor are there requirements that partial repayments be allowed.
The attorney general of Texas, Greg Abbott, my 2014 opponent in the gubernatorial race, gave the green light to payday lenders to operate under that statute when he was asked to weigh in with an official opinion. Because the legislature didn’t specifically rule it out, Abbott argued, payday lenders could function under the statute’s cloak. And since he opened that door, there are now thousands of people who fall prey to these predatory loans—including many serving in the military.
The practice is so bad in the military that the Department of Defense conducted an in-depth study of its effects, concluding, “Predatory lending undermines military readiness, harms the morale of troops and their families, and adds to the cost of fielding an all-volunteer fighting force,” which resulted in Congress capping at 36 percent the rates that can be charged to military members and many elderly folks as well. But the loophole and Texas’ lax regulations had assured that this protection for the military had not been implemented. As our economy suffered a blow a few years ago, even many middle-income people, like teachers, have been trapped in one of these pernicious loans—Texans whose lives are being ruined every single month by loans they can’t repay. And what they wind up doing is borrowing from another payday lender to get their first loan paid off, compounding their debt in an unimaginably precarious way.
I’ve been fighting the payday-lending industry ever since I got into the senate, and I can say with pride that they hate me. So much. They gave my opponent in 2012 a great deal of money to try to defeat me, and they’ve given Greg Abbott a lot of money, too. But I’m bound and determined to reform this industry for the people of my state. The fact that predatory lending is allowed to continue astounds and infuriates me and is in fact the deepest disappointment of my years in the senate. City councils aren’t subject to the same lobbying efforts as state legislatures are, and because state legislative bodies are one step removed from their constituents, they’re usually not held accountable for their votes on these issues—most of the folks they represent back home aren’t even aware of their voting records and the critical ways they’re affected by them. In Texas, several large cities have stepped forward and passed ordinances to curtail these abuses to pick up some of the slack. It is my desire to see that all the people in my state have these protections. And I won’t stop fighting until they do.
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In the legislature I thought I knew what it would be like to be in an environment where there’s a really strong lobbyist/special-interest influence. I thought I knew what it would be like to be against the backdrop of partisanship. But I had no idea until I got into it the power that those factors can exert. On the partisan side of it, even good, well-meaning Republican members who are there trying to do constructive things for people they represent can successfully be bullied by some of these extreme conservative groups.
I call those groups the “scorecard groups.”
They keep scorecards on Republican members and tell them, “If you don’t line up with us on this, we will run someone against you.” And in the middle of a session, if they do not feel that a member is appropriately toeing the ideological line, they’ll send a mail piece out to that member’s district and tell voters, “Your member’s not conservative enough.” Because Texas has now had two decades of Republican redistricting, most districts are drawn so purely Republican and have been gerrymandered so badly that if you’re a Republican in one of these districts, the only election contest that really matters is the primary, and the people who most actively vote in the primaries tend to represent the extreme side of the party. And so Republican candidates vying against each other in these districts find themselves moving more and more to the right of each other in order to try to win election or reelection. And if their voters are told that their member isn’t being “conservative enough,” sadly, members working to do good things can often be beaten.
In my most idealistic moments, I believe that if legislators would all stand together, then these scorecard groups wouldn’t have that power. My perspective has always been that these people have power only to the extent that they’re given power. And once you demonstrate to them that they can’t influence you, that you’re not afraid, you take that power away from them. That said, I recently watched two of my Republican senate colleagues—John Carona from Dallas and Robert Deuell from Greenville, real leaders in the senate who were there fighting to do good things for the people they represented—get beaten. I didn’t think it was possible that senators so well loved and so respected could be pushed out, but t
hey were run against for not being “conservative enough.” And the strategy was successful.
In my six years in the Texas senate, I’ve had to get stronger all the time. Whenever I’ve been battle-tested, the strength of my convictions grows. It has not diminished me. And when others try to knock me down or silence me, it just intensifies my resolve to do and say what needs to be done.
But that kind of outspokenness doesn’t go unnoticed—or unscolded.
During my very first session, after I’d given a speech about the evils of payday lending during a committee hearing—how wrong and awful it is and how ashamed we ought to be that we hadn’t done anything about it—the chair of the committee followed me into the senate lounge afterward and barked at me, “You know, we don’t do that in the Texas senate. That’s not how we conduct ourselves. We’re a genteel body. We don’t have debates like that.”
I disagree. I think we ought to spend more time showing respect to the people who elect us than we do worrying about how we’ll appear as a body. Honest political debates are a good thing; they are a way to find middle ground and to make sure all perspectives are considered. But there is strong peer pressure in the senate to follow those rules of gentility. There have most definitely been moments when I’ve had to push myself out of my comfort zone and take a stand on something that doesn’t reflect the consensus of the body—especially in the 2013 session, when I voted against the senate’s first budget draft, because it restored only $1.5 billion of the $5.4 billion that had been cut from public education, in spite of the fact that we had started the session with an $8 billion unexpected surplus because the comptroller had badly underestimated what our revenue growth would be over the prior two-year period. I was one of just two members in our thirty-one-member body who voted against it. And eventually, on May 25, we passed a budget during that session that added back $3.4 billion to our schools. I was proud, after the push and pull and all the negotiations that we went through to get there, to ultimately vote in favor of the bill’s final passage.
When things like that happen, it restores my faith in the democratic process. We’d fought some along the way, but we were all proud that we had come together in the spirit of compromise to do better for the people of our state. We kidded one another that it had been the “Kumbaya” session, and we held our sine die party happy to be parting, until the next round, as friends.
On May 27, 2013, the same day that the eighty-third regular session ended, Governor Perry called us back to a special session to take up and consider redistricting maps. Fifteen days later, on June 11, he added another item to the special session call, an instruction to take up and consider legislation relating to the regulation of abortion procedures, providers, and facilities.
NINETEEN
It’s the price of leadership to do the thing that you believe has to be done at the time it must be done.
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
EARLY ON THE MORNING of Tuesday, June 25, 2013, I awoke to prepare for what I knew would be a difficult day. In a few hours, with the help of my Democratic colleagues, I would attempt to kill SB 5—a bill which, if passed, would impose on Texas women some of the most sweeping abortion restrictions in the country. If things went according to plan, I would have to be out on the senate floor by 11:11 a.m. to filibuster the bill, talking it to death for thirteen hours until midnight, when the clock would run out on the eighty-third session of the Texas senate, in order to prevent a vote. How we got that opportunity to try to stop the bill—and the strategy that went into preparing for a thirteen-hour legislative marathon—is the important beginning to the story of that incredible day.
SB 5 consisted of three provisions, each of which was clearly directed at limiting abortion access for women, creating particular hardships for low-income women. If it passed, Texas women would be forced to drive great distances in order to get their health care, since it was predicted that thirty-seven of the state’s forty-two clinics would be forced to close. Texas is 773 miles wide and 790 miles long: only five clinics would be left in more than 268,000 square miles of land. That’s a lot of mileage for women to cover to get health care. Having once faced the dilemma of whether I could use precious gas to go visit my mother when I was living in that trailer, I understand how the cost of gas can price women out of the ability to receive care, if they even have a means of transportation at all. For many women living on the financial edge, it makes their access to safe medical abortion care impossible. Moreover, the sonogram law that passed in the prior legislative session, requiring women to have a sonogram at least twenty-four hours before they are scheduled for an abortion, means that, for women who have had to travel a great distance for access to this medical care, an overnight stay and the expense of that stay are now also mandated.
The first provision of the bill would require that doctors who perform abortion services be provided admitting privileges at a hospital within thirty miles of the clinic where they practice. It’s unusual for doctors who practice in this particular medical arena to have admitting privileges at any hospital, for two reasons. One reason is that the need for emergency services at a hospital following an abortion is extremely rare, so it isn’t necessary that abortion providers ever practice in a hospital setting. In those rare instances where a woman needs follow-up care, doctors on staff at hospitals are equipped to meet those needs. The other reason is that most hospitals have some religious affiliation and many, as a rule, do not grant admitting privileges to abortion-care providers.
The second provision of the bill sought to make it much more difficult for a woman to utilize what has become a method of choice for terminating a pregnancy at its earliest stage—the drug RU-486, usually taken in two doses at home over a forty-eight-hour period. Instead, women choosing this method would now be required to make four separate visits to the clinic in order to meet new protocols.
The third provision of the bill would require that abortion clinics, already subject to very strict rules and oversight under Texas state law, would now be required to meet the same standards as “ambulatory surgical centers”—centers that serve as actual surgical facilities, requiring wide hallways for gurneys and backup generators for respiratory equipment, among other requirements. Abortion procedures are not surgical procedures. There is no administration of anesthesia or any of the other high-risk measures associated with surgery. Behind a disingenuous argument that this would somehow make women safer, this requirement would force most abortion clinics in Texas to close, because retrofitting them to meet these standards would either be impossible or cost-prohibitive. In our debate on this particular provision prior to its initial passage in the senate, the author of the bill could not offer a single reason to support the argument that these standards would in any way improve safety for women.
Had the house not amended the bill to include a ban on abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy, it would have headed straight to the governor’s desk for signature. It had been initiated in the senate. We’d already had a heated debate on its provisions. When it left the senate, the bill consisted of the three provisions I listed above, and had it passed the house exactly as it had been passed out of the senate, we would not have had the opportunity to fight it. It was that last-minute change that required the bill to return to the senate floor for layout in its newly amended form and gave us the opportunity to filibuster.
The roots of the word “filibuster” can be traced, in different forms, back to Dutch (vrijbuiter) and Spanish (filibustero), but the common meaning was the same—“piracy”—a fitting word for our modern intentions to tactically and relentlessly talk the bill into obstruction. Filibusters in the Texas senate are rare, not just because they can take place only on the last day of a senate session, but because they truly are a test of endurance. Unlike filibusters in the U.S. Senate, where people can take turns speaking, sit down, drink water, lean on the podium, and even leave the floor to go to the restroom while another senator fi
lls in for them—and where germaneness isn’t an issue (allowing U.S. Senator Ted Cruz to read from Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham during his twenty-one-hour filibuster of Obamacare in September of 2013)—the rules in Texas are very strict (and even a bit Seuss-ian): You may not touch your desk. You may not lean on your desk. You may not have a sip of water. You may not leave the floor for any reason, to eat or to go to the bathroom. You may not even have a stick of gum or a piece of candy during the day. On top of that, there’s the three-strike rule: If a senator is called for three points of order for not staying on topic and talking about things that are not germane to the bill that is being heard, then the filibuster can be ended. Considering the latitude that members of the Texas senate had typically been given in the past, this seemed the least of our concerns.
How wrong we would be.
The morning of the big day came all too soon. Needing moral support, I had spent the night with Will Wynn, my then boyfriend of three years, in his apartment in downtown Austin. I bathed while listening to Bruce Robison’s “What Would Willie Do,” as I often do on days that I know will be tough. Its lighthearted lyrics remind me that I can overcome any challenge with the right attitude.
At 6:30 a.m., a young female doctor arrived to fit me for a catheter. Knowing why she’d been summoned, she was warm and encouraging and worked quickly to finish her awkward task. Unfortunately, though, she had not brought a urine-collecting “leg bag” with her but instead had brought a large bag that hospital patients use. The length of tubing alone was close to six feet, and I knew that getting all of it wrapped around my leg and attaching the large bag in a way that could be disguised under my clothing was going to be a real challenge, but I was game. With Will’s help I did the best I could to secure it, and then, from the limited wardrobe I kept at the apartment, I picked out a dress and a long jacket to disguise it.