Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst is speaking out against lawmakers in the Texas House he says failed to get an abortion bill back to the Senate outside the range of a filibuster. However, some senators say it’s the Republican leadership that is to blame.
Just a day after Lt. Governor David Dewhurst stated that the House should’ve done more to quickly pass a set of abortion measures, a lawmaker in the Senate is now finding fault with the Republican leadership’s plan to carry out abortion legislation. Houston Republican Sen. Dan Patrick said during an interview, “We shouldn’t be in this position of waiting this late. We shouldn’t be here. I would just suggest that you need to have a plan of how to accomplish your goals, if you don’t have a plan sometimes you don’t achieve what you’d like to achieve."
Patrick says he’s not naming which individual senators and leadership are to blame for a filibuster of the abortion bills. Sen. Patrick says if the bill fails he will petition Republican Governor Rick Perry to call lawmakers back for a second special session.
Patrick said, “I think we should keep coming back until we pass this package of pro-life bills, the transportation bill and address this constitutional issue that we apparently have with the Supreme Court on this one particular criminal justice issue. But on transportation and pro-life I think we come back, and if we don’t get it done we come back again, we’re the majority."
Patrick continued, “We should have taken up this issue sooner. We shouldn’t be in this position, but we are, and if the bills are filibustered then I would encourage the governor to call us back. It is important that we pass this package of pro-life bills, one of which is mine."
The first bill the senate took up on the last day of the special session was the senate’s abortion package, which if Republican leaders allow a filibuster to run out the clock, would not only kill this legislation, but would also kill a bill that brings the Texas Juvenile Justice code for 17-year olds in compliance with the Supreme Court ruling in Miller v. Alabama, and a bill that would provide some extra transportation funding.
