Texas House Speaker Dade Phalan has signed arrest warrants for the 52 absent Democrats.
“The House voted 80-12 Tuesday to force the fugitives to return, just hours after the Texas Supreme Court cleared the way for the House to order them back to the chamber to secure a quorum,” Dallas News reported Wednesday. “The warrants will be delivered to the House sergeant-at-arms on Wednesday morning, according to Phelan spokesman Enrique Marquez.”
“At least two dozen House Democrats have stayed in Washington, D.C., where 57 of them camped out for all or most of a month to run out the clock on Abbott’s first special session,” the report continued.
While it is unknown if the arrest of the fugitives in Texas will establish a quorum to proceed with the election integrity legislation, “especially since Texas police would have no jurisdiction to retrieve the members still in Washington.”
The “warrants come hours after the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court overturned an earlier ruling that said Abbott and Phelan did not have the authority to arrest the missing legislators,” as reported by Breitbart News.
A Texas judge had blocked the “detaining, confining or otherwise restricting” the Democrats who broke quorum by fleeing to Washington as the state on Monday.
Many of the Texas House Democrats contracted coronavirus after meeting the Biden administration in Washington DC.