Several local residents were in attendance at the filibuster last week and sent these comments.
The video doesn’t do it justice. The stand in the Senate was the loudest event of any kind I’ve ever been in the middle of: concert, football game, rally. I’m not kidding when I say I think I may have ear damage, at least temporary.
Every species of the genus human had been packed together by the hundreds, then the thousands, in the hallways outside the Chamber for hours, until the air was thick with Texas sweat. For a time, people sat, then it became too crowded. The circus was multi-dimensional, with cheerleaders leaning out from the upper balconies to whip comrades below into a frenzy. A young man with glistening dark skin pulled off his “Rick Perry Sucks” shirt and waved it at the crowd, inciting the bulls and energizing the metal-studded emissaries of the Socialist Workers. More and more and more state troopers arrived.
Word leaked from inside the Senate chamber that a little old lady had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat when the lieutenant governor ordered the galleries cleared, but in pauses between chants, the crowd could sometimes hear defiance still shouted from those same galleries inside the now locked-down Chamber. A small knot of leaders urged patience and relative calm, overriding the occasional call to storm the barricades from young back-benchers. Then, at something like 11:45 p.m., Democratic senators texted aides to Cecile Richards and the state party chair, who were standing next to us, that the Rs were forcing a vote. Passions were high because the Pharisees had just rammed through bogus points of order that ended the Wendy Davis filibuster on the flimsiest of pretexts. From inside the chamber someone asked supporters to turn up the noise, to be so loud that it would make it hard to vote – and the roar became a deafening howl that rose to an impossible pitch, then rose again, louder and still louder, echoing off the walls of the rotunda from four stories of packed partisans. I believe Orwell or Hemingway would have translated it as “No se pasaran [They shall not pass],” though it’s possible that not everyone there was ruminating on the vagaries of the Spanish Civil War.
In front of me, two teenagers shook fists in the air and chanted, “Whose house? OUR house.” Directly behind us hung an oil painting of Ann Richards. Then the vote came down, two minutes after the session legally ended at midnight, and those less informed of parliamentary procedure were introduced to the power of the chair. But even now the argument continued, since among the woes of the modern age are computer date stamps on electronic voting machines, which marked the bill passed as of the next day, mocking the lieutenant governor’s physical stopping of the clock and his ruling that the bill had made the deadline. “Hell no, we won’t go,” chanted the crowd. The Senate argued on. A chief protagonist for the bill, an aspiring Jesse Helms in the making, complained loudly that it was unfair to have to conduct business “with so much ruckus.” And back against the wall, the image of Ann Richards smiled, ever so faintly.
