AUSTIN — The Senate gallery was peppered Tuesday with people in red T-shirts exuding a certain energy, as if awaiting a carnival. Or a hanging.

Those hoping to testify on a voter-ID bill lined up at a table outside the chamber. Expert witnesses gathered in Capitol offices. All 31 senators showed up on time.

Everybody was there except the one person Democrats really wanted — Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott, the GOP go-to guy on matters of vote fraud.
Wayne Slater

Abbott was a no-show Tuesday. An aide said it would be inappropriate because he might represent the state someday in court defending the Republican-backed bill requiring voters to have a photo ID.

“The attorney general is our top lawyer,” said Democratic leader Leticia van de Putte of San Antonio. “Don’t you think it would be important that he appear?”

The Republican senator chairing the hearing didn’t think so.

Sen. Royce West of Dallas suggested a subpoena.

No.

And so as lawmakers Tuesday opened their hearing on the session’s most contentious bill, the state’s legal counsel was nowhere to be seen.

Democrats believe Abbott will help underscore their claim the voter-ID issue is about partisanship, not law enforcement.

A couple of years ago, Abbott announced there was an “epidemic” of voter fraud in Texas and launched an investigation.

A review found that he prosecuted 26 cases — all against Democrats, mostly blacks or Hispanics. Of those, two-thirds were technical violations in which voters were eligible, votes were properly cast and no vote was changed.

Democrats say that’s not exactly an epidemic, but Republicans say the cases where Abbott did win guilty pleas are evidence vote-fraud is real.

Two years ago, Democrats in the Senate killed the photo-ID bill in a fractious, partisan showdown. Republicans changed the rules this year in order to take up the issue again this year, and with a 19-12 majority, theyy are certain to win.

Van de Putte was wearing a black corsage as if in an anticipation of a bad outcome.

Outside in the rotunda, it was high school arts appreciation day. There was a xylophone corps, a troop of mimes, a choir from Marble Falls High School in T-shirts that said, “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

There was no music inside the chamber, nothing to wash away the debate, which droned on from Tuesday until well into the evening.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, described his bill. He framed the measure in the context of history’s great vote-frauds, including the ballot-stuffing of Box 13 in Duval County that gave Lyndon Johnson his Senate seat in 1948.

Fraser was right about Duval County, but it didn’t start with Johnson.

Fifty years earlier, a sheep rancher named John Buckley — the grandfather of William F. Buckley Jr. — ran for sheriff of Duval County, but lost in a fiercely partisan fight.

Buckley accused his opponents of vote fraud, went to court and won. He was a Democrat. His opponents, who had imported illegal voters from Mexico, were Republicans.