This Session I was honored to be named the “Bull of the Brazos” by Texas Monthly magazine in their much-anticipated “Best and Worst of the Legislature” list.

While you will have to wait before you can read the entire story online, I was humbled to be recognized for the way I worked to defeat bad legislation through parliamentary procedure.

The full list of my colleagues that made the list can be found here.

When Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer strolled up to the microphone toward the back of Texas House chamber, Republican lawmakers knew a fight was coming.

Democrats, who were outnumbered 2-1 by Republicans in the Texas House, realized early on in the recently concluded session of the 82nd Legislature that they wouldn’t be major factors in policy-making.

But they weren’t about to roll over.

“We adopted a strategy that we were going to fight like hell and never look up at the scoreboard,” said Martinez Fischer, a Democrat from San Antonio.

Led in a large part by Martinez Fischer, the Democrats developed a strategy to slow the Republican train by trying to derail legislation they thought was unpalatable with dozens of trips to the back mike to pick apart bills with the only tool they had: parliamentary rules.

Martinez Fischer alone called 16 points of order over the course of the regular and special sessions. Eleven were successful.

The effect of calling a point of order, which is a parliamentary maneuver that identifies a potential rules violation, can be to delay debate on a bill for up to a day or more.

And for the outgunned Democrats, any wasted day gave Republicans fewer opportunities to pass bills abhorred by the Democrats.

“I felt the only way I could get engaged is to find my strength in the rule book,” Martinez Fischer said.

Early in the regular session, Rep. Patricia Harless, R-Spring , felt the force of the Democratic strategy.

As Harless stood at the House’s front mike to lay out her voter ID bill, which requires people to show a valid photo identification to vote in elections, Martinez Fischer meandered to the opposing lectern.

“He’s someone you feared going to the back mike,” Harless said. When “TMF,” as many people call him, has a folder in hand and a look of determination on his face, Harless said, Republicans could feel their stomachs drop to their feet.

In Harless’ case, Martinez Fischer pointed out a discrepancy in the analysis section of the bill that halted action on the bill.

And with other days came more points of order.

“I shot so many arrows that now I have carpal tunnel syndrome,” Martinez Fischer would later quip. “I shot every arrow I could find to kill that bill.”

But ultimately, voter ID made it through, passing along party lines, but it took longer than the Republican majority anticipated.

Martinez Fischer and other members, including Rep. Yvonne Davis, D-Dallas , became adept at the point of order, and they postponed debate on a variety of bills they hated.

“When there is legislation before us that, in my judgment, is negative and had an adverse effect on my district, it’s important to look at all alternatives and tools available to me to stop bad legislation,” Davis said.

Democrats slowed debate on some large pieces of legislation, including the sonogram bill, which would require a woman to undergo a sonogram before getting an abortion; the sanctuary cities bill, which would prohibit governments from adopting policies instructing police not to ask about immigration status; and an education bill that could have led to larger class sizes.

Martinez Fischer said Democrats were as successful as they could have been with the rules. As evidence, he said about 1,300 bills were passed and not vetoed in the regular session. There haven’t been that few passing since 2005, he said.

It might have had something to do with a lack of available money, but Martinez Fischer said he thinks Democratic strategy contributed, too.

Republicans and Democrats alike appreciate a good point of order, but some Republicans in the session thought the Democrats might have overdone it.

“I understand the Democratic members felt like they were getting rolled,” Harless said. But she added, “They kind of got carried away with points of order.”

The whole business has been riven with conflicts of interest for at least two centuries. This time around, though, Republicans are in charge in far more states than Democrats, so should be able to weight the political odds in their favour for the next decade. But that is proving trickier than normal, for a variety of reasons.

Take Texas. Republicans control the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature, so can draw new maps without interference from Democrats. That power is all the more coveted since Texas will receive four new seats in the House of Representatives at the next election, thanks to the rapid growth of its population over the past decade. Partisan Republicans would like all four districts drawn with Republican majorities. But as Sherri Greenberg of the University of Texas at Austin points out, even in Texas, there are not enough Republicans to create four secure new Republican districts.

That is partly because Republicans won almost every marginal seat in the state at the last election, leaving themselves already thinly spread. Democrats now hold just nine of Texas’s 32 House seats. “The elections accomplished what we were afraid they were going to try to accomplish by gerrymandering,” says Mike Villarreal, the most senior Democrat on the redistricting committee in the state House of Representatives. That outcome, in turn, was underpinned by a previous Republican gerrymander. In 2003, shortly after taking control of the state legislature for the first time in over a century, Republicans redrew the congressional map in a way that cost the Democrats six seats at the subsequent election, and more since. That leaves Republicans with few plausible targets in the Democratic congressional delegation.

To make matters trickier for the Republicans, some 90% of the growth in the state’s population over the past decade has come from minorities, who tend to vote Democratic. Indeed, minorities are now in the majority in Texas, with Hispanics alone accounting for about 38% of the population—although their share of legal residents of voting age is smaller. The racial divide in Texas politics is quite stark: there are only two state House seats with a white majority represented by Democrats, a legislator points out, and only three minority seats represented by Republicans.

A latter-day Governor Gerry might respond by distributing Hispanic voters across all seats to minimise their influence. But that is a risky tactic in two respects. First, the state’s demographics are changing fast enough that an overly ambitious partisan gerrymander is likely to come unstuck during its ten-year lifespan. The last map the Republicans drew secured them a comfortable majority of 88 of the 150 seats in the state House in 2002, but only 76 in 2008. Republicans involved in redistricting this time around say they cannot be too aggressive if their handiwork is to have any hope of surviving.

Moreover, the Voting Rights Act, originally intended to prevent the disenfranchisement of black voters in the South, makes it difficult to marginalise minority voters. It enjoins states to create districts dominated by minorities where feasible, and bars them from reducing minorities’ overall electoral clout. Trey Martinez Fischer, who heads the Mexican American Legislative Caucus in the Texas House, says his group will sue if the Republicans produce a congressional map with fewer than two new Hispanic districts. The fact that Republicans just pushed through a redistricting plan for the Texas House of Representatives that fell far short of the five new Hispanic seats he was demanding will also probably spark lawsuits. “Redistricting in Texas is a two-step,” he says, “first in the legislature, then in the courthouse.”

Read the rest of the story here.

Only three states have completed the redistricting process so far, but that hasn’t held back a flood of redistricting lawsuits — most filed against states with plans that haven’t even been finalized.

The decennial process of drawing new congressional districts is typically a magnet for lawsuits. This year, however, the litigation is off to a fast start — over a dozen states are already facing suits — and complainants are taking issue with nearly every imaginable aspect of the process.

In Maine, two residents have launched a complaint seeking to speed up the redistricting process.

In Mississippi, the NAACP has filed a federal suit asking state legislators not to finalize a redistricting plan that hasn’t first been approved by the Justice Department.

In Nevada, the redraw was not even under way in February when Democrats filed a suit raising concerns that the process won’t be completed in time for the 2012 elections.

Tea party activists, whose conservative grass-roots energy helped fuel widespread GOP gains in the midterm elections, now say they intend to play in the legal fight. Last month, a New Jersey tea party group filed a lawsuit alleging that the state’s newly finalized map disproportionately distributes the population among state legislative districts.

Together, the suits signal a messy and contentious process ahead, with both parties girding to spend millions on white-shoe lawyers in an effort to establish and protect political territory that will play an outsize role in determining control of Congress and state legislative chambers.

“At this stage, there are more lawsuits than last cycle,” said Mark Braden, a veteran GOP redistricting attorney. “We live in a litigious society.”

One of the forces driving the litigation is conflict over how lawmakers should accommodate on new maps an explosion in Hispanic growth. Texas, for example, is gaining four seats in the current round of reapportionment, and Hispanic population growth there has accounted for roughly two-thirds of the state’s population increase over the past decade.

The state is already the subject of several lawsuits. Last month, the Texas-based Mexican American Legislative Caucus filed a suit alleging that the 2010 census undercounted Hispanic voters in the state’s border region and that using the data in redistricting risks violating the Voting Rights Act. That suit followed a complaint from three North Texas voters disputing how the state counts undocumented immigrants in individual districts.

Latino groups are mobilizing to take their case for increased representation to court, if necessary. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a prominent Latino civil rights organization, is monitoring redistricting efforts in key states that saw large Hispanic population gains, including Texas, Arizona, Florida and Nevada. Latino groups say they’re eyeing as many as two new Hispanic-majority seats to be drawn in the Lone Star State.

Read the rest of the story here.

The chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus said late Monday afternoon that House members on the surface are acting nice but “everybody’s still on edge.”

Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, said House GOP leaders have proposed more subtle ways to shut off debate and “railroad” Democrats, such as proposing a complete floor substitute for the sanctuary cities bill, which could not be amended and would limit discussion.

“I’m starting to see a very aggressive movement to find ways to limit the debate and do it in a way that … escapes the eyes of [the news media] because it’s done under the cover of being done under legitimate rules — as opposed to ‘We’re going to repeal [or] suspend [or] ignore the rules,” said Martinez Fischer (in foreground in DMN January 2011 photo above). “But the net effect is … it stops debate.”

He said Republicans waited until the very last week to pass House bills to push hard on sanctuary cities, despite its being a high-priority “emergency” item declared by Gov. Rick Perry. But he said they want to blame Democrats for its being in trouble.

“They want Democrats to be here so we have a quorum, but once we’re here, they don’t expect us to do anything but to sit in our chair and push a light at the appointed time. And that’s what the Democrats are having trouble with. … Everyone says that they want to avoid another meltdown from Saturday. … Actions speak louder than words. We’re just not seeing any of those actions.”

Martinez Fischer, asked to respond to GOP caucus chief Larry Taylor’s comments in my earlier post about how it’s obvious when Democrats are stalling, said “it’s in the eye of the beholder.”

The bills that could cause teacher furloughs and “racial profiling” of Hispanics are serious stuff, Martinez Fischer said.

“Because the subject matter may not be appealing to him, it shouldn’t be construed as being a chub [or delay] when … these are issues and principles that Democrats and particularly minorities care passionately about,” he said. “Representing your districts is not chubbing.”

Mexican American Legislative Caucus Chairman Trey Martinez Fischer chided Republicans leaders for bringing a bill that he claims amounts to a full assault on Texas Hispanics – before taking the unusual step of moving away from the lectern and turning his attention to Speaker Joe Straus standing on the elevated speaker’s rostrum behind him.

“This is a man I can no longer recognize, and I wish it weren’t true,” Martinez Fischer, a Democrat, said of his San Antonio Republican colleague.

Martinez Fischer pulled out a speech made by Straus in January 2009 soon after he mounted a successful challenge against strong-armed Speaker Tom Craddick, R-Midland.

Read the rest of the story here.

AUSTIN — After taking the unusual and highly controversial strategy of cutting off debate, the Texas House voted 99-47 in favor of a ban on “sanctuary cities,” despite objections that the measure was unnecessary and will increase racial profiling against Hispanics.

House Republicans voted to end debate by calling for an immediate vote on the bill, shutting down debate on amendments after four hours of debate.

Democrats roundly criticized the tactic almost as emotionally as they did the underlying legislation, and faulted House Speaker Joe Strauss for allowing the maneuver.

Read the rest of the story here.

AUSTIN — Tempers flared in the Texas House on Saturday — one lawmaker even hurled the House rule book high into the air — as legislators struggled over controversial legislation with only three weeks remaining in the session.

About four hours into a series of contentious arguments that included an attempted lockdown, Speaker Joe Straus sent lawmakers home for Mother’s Day and a cooling-off period.

“Everybody realized the mood on the floor was pretty volatile, which is not conducive to good public policy,” said longtime legislator Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine. “Every session has a boiling point, and we just hit ours.”

Lawmakers have struggled with a massive budget shortfall this year and now face polarizing debate over such emotional issues as immigration, school funding and tort reform.

Read the rest of the story here.

Tempers got even testier moments ago when House Calendars Chairman Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi wanted to suspend all necessary rules for several controversial bills on Monday’s agenda.

Rep. Craig Eiland, D-Galveston, threw the House rule book high into the air to show his disgust.

Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, raised his voice from the back microphone – pointing out that Hunter’s extraordinarily unusual motion required one-hour notice.

“If you don’t want to enforce rules, that’s on you,” Fischer said in a loud voice to House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio. “That’s not on us.”

He also reminded Straus that House members took down former House Speaker Tom Craddick, R-Midland, and more than two years ago because of his strong-armed rule.

House and Senate leaders risk losing control because of the way they are trying to advance controversial legislation involving immigration, tort reform, school reform and massive budget cuts.

Hunter’s motion would have made it easier to pass some of those bills on Monday.

Emotions are pretty raw. So Rep. Yvonne Davis, D-Dallas, sought a motion to adjourn the House until Monday considering the “discord.”

But members overwhelmingly rejected the effort to adjourn.

The House is now working on routine bills not likely to trigger any outbursts.

But….we’ll see.

Rep. Lon Burnham, D-Fort Worth, is now making an issue over the vote to adjourn, which was 96-6 with one member present not voting. That means there are only 103 members in the chamber. Burnham asked for a verification to determine if 103 members are actually here. The House would have to adjourn if there are fewer than 100 members.

But Straus rejected Burnham’s request.

Expect more vote challenges.

A bill just got 101 votes.

The debate continues as there might not be a quorum.