UPDATED - It's Done: Voter ID Passes Senate

The victorious Dewhurst and Fraser talk to the press after this morning's vote. (photo by Lee Nichols)

It’s finally over.

After a ridiculous 24-hour session, the Senate passed SB 362, Troy Fraser’s voter ID bill on a 20-12 vote this morning (Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst took the unusual step of casting a vote, and of course, the Republican voted yes.) The vote was strictly on party lines, with the GOP favoring.

(I’ll assume if you’re enough of a Lege junkie to be reading this blog, you already understand what the term “voter ID” means; if you don’t, read this post.)

The “committee of the whole,” an unusual process in which the entire Senate hears testimony instead of a normal committee, began yesterday morning. The Democrats immediately began delaying tactics.

First, Houston Democrat Mario Gallegos tried to "tag" the bill, a procedure that would delay debate for 48 hours. After committee chair Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, rejected the tag, Democrats hammered Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, with two hours of questions regarding rules of how the committee would work. And once it convened, they kept invited witnesses on ice for five hours as they hounded him some more to explain his legislation.

After committee chair Robert Duncan rejected Democrats’ requests to let everyone go home and continue in the morning, the Dems then spent the entire night thoroughly questioning the invited witnesses. Of the members of the general public who signed up testify, a hardy few stuck it out the entire night and finally got their turn at the mic around 7am.

Dewhurst at least partly attributed the marathon to the Democrats. “One of the two sides was very, very thorough, wanted to ask a lot of questions,” he said. Asked if the process could have been managed better, he more charitably said, “The only thing that could have happened differently … is if some of the members hadn’t asked as many questions of the witnesses, or if both sides hadn’t had as many resource witnesses. Both sides, quite frankly, wanting to make sure that the record was established for their individual side, it took a long time.”

Once Duncan established that the issue would be settled in one session, the Democrats decided they had no choice to but to forge on. “This vote was a foregone conclusion,” San Antonio’s Leticia van de Putte admitted. “Someone asked why it took so long, [because] the vote was there.

"When something of this magnitude changes the procedures of voting, since Texas has had a discriminatory past, we are under sections 2 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act," she said. "Even though everything about the vote was a foregone conclusion, the Democrats had to put into the record those things that would be required and looked at, because this has to go through the Voting Rights Section for pre-clearance in the Department of Justice. And inevitably, it will be litigated at the federal level. There will be a legal challenge. Our job was to make sure that the record was set, that the facts were there.”

The bill now moves to the House, possibly as early as Monday.