WASHINGTON (Talk1370.com/NewsRadio 1080 KRLD) -- As the Texas House Democratic Caucus continues its quorum-breaking sojourn to the nation's capital, many of their Senate colleagues have joined them - including Austin's own state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt.
Since the 2020 election, Republican-backed voting bills have been enacted in a total of 17 states. Eckhardt hopes the move by the Texas delegation will pave the way for federal action.
"I think it is a poetic irony, I suppose, that in 1965 it was a Texan, LBJ who signed the Voting Rights Act into law," said Eckhardt. "And here was nearly 60 years later, crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge again."
The Voting Rights Act outlawed states from making it more difficult for African Americans to vote, a practice that had been ongoing in the south since the end of the Civil War, doing away with the poll tax and literacy tests.
Eckhardt says she is advocating at the nation's capital partly on behalf of those who came to testify against the bill in Austin. She says she and the other state senators plan taking a few more meetings and then leaving Washington. "Because of the heroic position the house members are taking, it makes it possible for us to return to the state and continue fighting this battle on Texas ground, without the threat of arrest."
She's hoping they will be able to overcome the blockade in DC. "We would love to meet with Republicans on this issue. We would love to bridge this divide. We should be removing barriers to vote and not increasing barriers to vote."
Eckhardt says they've had productive meetings and are doing good work. "Not only are we doing good work in meeting with people, just the fact of being here is having an empowering effect, that the Democrats from Texas... who would have thought that it was the state of Texas that would be leading the charge."
One of the provisions of the Texas voting bill would allow for partisan poll watchers. "It' not just offensive, it's frightening. As you know, elections are contentious. One person is pitted against another in a campaign. When you have partisan poll watchers who are untrained and they are agents of candidates and you invite them to occupy the polls, you will be inviting conflict. This bill also creates civil and criminal penalties for the hard-working, long-suffering public servants who try to create a neutral environment between those competing factions. It says if they hold a partisan poll watcher at bay and that person believes they are being unjustly kept out of earshot and eyesight of important election matters, that they can bring civil and criminal prosecution against that local elections worker."