I used to be really torn about this, but a person is elected to do their job, and I think enough is enough. You don’t like what the majority is doing, fine, I get that but sticking your hand in the sand and abdicating your responsibility to the legislature is just wrong. I think the legislators should be given a chance to come back, and if they don’t, expel them.
I would like to think that the legislators have a responsibility to the people who elected them, which is more important than their responsibility to the legislature.
Is this news? This is one of the functions of the sergeant-at-arms in legislative bodies, and it happens (as far as I can tell) at times in legislative bodies where one party has a majority, but not a quorum, by themselves. It's another one of those "Oh, those wacky legislators" stories that circulates on a regular basis. It turns out that when we put a bunch of legislators in a room, give them rules to follow, and reward them for advancing their political agenda, they'll manipulate the rules in order to advance their political agenda. Who knew?
Here is a story from Oregon in 2019, with some examples from earlier in history...
> The tactic by the minority Republicans is rare in Oregon, but has been used throughout history, sometimes creating comical scenes. Abraham Lincoln once leapt out of a window in an attempt to deny a quorum when he was a lawmaker in Illinois. In Washington three decades ago, U.S. Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Oregon) was carried feet first into the Senate chamber after Democrats ordered the arrest of Republican senators who were denying a quorum.
"Arrest warrant" sounds extreme, but the arrest comes with no consequences other than the arrest itself, and is a public spectacle which both parties engage in. They willingly play both parts. It's not the absentee Democrats are going to be charged with a crime! They're just getting arrested to force them to come to the legislature. Both parties play this farce as the majority party, sending the sergeant-at-arms, and both parties play this farce as the minority party, hiding out at home or even other states to deny quorum to the majority party.
Missing from the article is any discussion over the reasons that Democrats are trying to stop progress in the Texas house. Usually, there is some issue... maybe it's the mask mandate ban in Texas, maybe it's something else.
No, it's really not news. You are right in that arrest warrant does sound extreme. I have heard it called a "Civil Arrest" which doesn't really sound any better but was explained as basically the legal ability to escort these individuals to their place of work. From my understanding it is voting legislation that they oppose which is why they left.
The consequences of breaking a rule are just that you have to... deal with the consequences of breaking that rule. To the extent that that rule has consequences, and the consequences are enforced. Like, if you stop showing up at your job because you disagree with the labor conditions, you get fired. But if everyone in the factory stops showing up at their job, it's suddenly called a "strike" and the apparatus for punishment doesn't work any more... maybe this time, the consequences for the same action are "you get a raise and better healthcare".
The rules for legislative bodies generally allow legislators to take more and more extreme actions to influence which laws get passed. As legislators take more extreme actions, the consequences get correspondingly more severe.
This seems like "functioning as intended" to me. The absentee legislators have skin in the game... it's not like they can freely walk away from the legislature whenever they disagree with a law. Just like a striking factory worker can freely walk away from their job at the factory and go on strike. These more extreme actions fizzle out, force the other side to reach a compromise, or backfire.
The idea that people "should" just sit down and talk things out doesn't scan, IMO. These people are accountable to the people who elected them first, and the legislative body second.
I also don't think the system is broken. Yes, absolutely they should be voting against it. That is their prerogative, even duty, as elected members of a representative republic. However, for every vote there are going to be people who agree and people who disagree and both sides are accountable to the people who voted them in. The system is not broken when everyone does their job, regardless of the yay/nay count on a vote. The system breaks when those elected refuse to do the job that they were elected to do.
They are doing their job. You just aren't looking at the big picture enough. If they show up so the procedural quorum is met, then they haven't done anything to keep what they are against from happening.
If anything, this should demonstrate that the winner takes all model of elections has driven us to a polarization where nuclear options are being deployed. This means packing either sides ball and going home is a better, more likely option than achieving any compromise.
This is the danger of diametrically opposed political tmrhetoric. If the majority of legislators are heavily polarized rather than swingable centrists, nothing will ever get done.
Two things I disagree with... this isn't the "nuclear option", and I'm not sure that this is connected with modern polarization.
The reason that these quorum rules are so old is because people have been evading quorum for decades or centuries. Just take Bob Packwood (D-OR) as an example... in February 1988, he was forcibly carried into the US Senate chamber by capitol police. Or look at Abraham Lincoln, who tried and failed to evade quorum in the Illinois senate in December 1840.
The nuclear option, IMO, is civil war. Which has happened and continues to happen across the world, at great cost to life. Absentee legislators... IMO, just bureaucracy in action. I will accept an inefficient or wasteful bureaucracy any day, if the alternatives are worse--and there are many plausible worse alternatives.
I use nuclear option in the sense that in a functioning legislature, strategic denial of quorum should be an unneeded arcanity. We are not in those times. I'd actually be curious to research how frequent the act is. Intuitively, one would hope it only happens in exceptional circumstances; but it's definitely something that with increasing frequency, we should be taking as an indicator of disunity and severe divisiveness. As a hypothetical legislator (on the majority side), this should be a signal to deescalate. Instead? All speed ahead is the traditional response.
You can argue it's normal; and preferable to actual blades and bombs violence. I argue that if you have a group shoving a stick in the spokes of Government that hard, the violence is well under way.
