Pro-Choice Mob Disrupts Texas Abortion Vote, Bill Left Invalid

Most recent update: After hours of contemplation, Dewhurst declared that the vote happened after midnight and is invalid. Dewhurst blamed the unruly occupy-acting mob and the Straus House leadership for the failure of the bill. From what I understand, what happened was that the pro-life bill was not able to be voted on in time because the mob was creating a disturbance. Straus comes in the picture because he killed it in the regular session and then he scheduled it for the very end of the Special Session. Dewhurst hinted that Governor Perry will call a second Special Session to pass the pro-life bill.

Update: There is still a dispute as to whether or not the midnight vote was valid because of the confusion of when the vote was taken due to the loud mobs that disrupted the vote. Even though the Special Session is technically over and the Texas Legislature website says the vote was taken and the bill was passed before midnight, the Senate is meeting here momentarily and will vote on whether to accept the pro-life vote as valid and before midnight or to strike it as invalid because it came too late.....

One of the most sweeping pro-life bills in the history of Texas has passed the 2013 Texas Legislature special session at the stroke of midnight without even a minute to spare. Democrats are arguing that the vote might not have finished being taken before the midnight deadline, but Republicans point out that the vote started before the midnight deadline and therefore the vote that started before the midnight deadline is valid.

The reason that there is uncertainty about the vote is due to the pro-death, I mean pro-choice, mob that was in the Texas State Senate Chamber screaming and banging on things to make noise to try to disrupt the procedures. This mob acted in a shameful, illegal manner and had to be kicked out by the police. There is absolutely NO RIGHT for someone, no matter what side they are on, to be able to disrupt a vote of the Texas Legislature. These people should have been removed much sooner when they first started to become disruptive instead of them being allowed to be in the chamber screaming until the stroke of midnight so that it was hard to even take the final vote. The situation was so crazy and tense that at one point the live stream of the Texas Senate Abortion Debate reached over 110,000 viewers at one time.

I am not sure what the Democrats and pro-abortion activists thought they were going to accomplish. Pro-life Texas Governor Rick Perry would have just called a second special session and the bill would have passed anyway.

State Senator Wendy Davis had tried to filibuster the pro-life bill by talking most of the day today without taking a break. The Texas Senate rules on filibuster are very strict though and Davis was not even allowed to stray from discussing the bill at hand and could not take any breaks or even sit down. She did stray though twice and was also helped once by a fellow State Senator and so her filibuster ended with only about 2 hours before the midnight deadline. That is when the Democrats tried to stall by asking points of information. Eventually the Republicans forced the question so that the bill could be voted on. During all of this debate, some of the Texas Democrat women even tried to make sexist remarks about how the Republican men were the ones who wanted to force this onto women. They of course were blatantly ignoring the several Republican women legislators who fought for this bill because it is for the best for women and innocent unborn babies.

This bill should have NEVER had to go to Special Session. It should have been passed in regular session but Speaker Joe Straus killed It in regular session and pushed it to the end of the Special Session.

The only reason that the pro-life bill even had to go down to the wire in a Special Session is because Texas Speaker Joe Straus KILLED all pro-life bills in the regular session. That is right, the Texas Senate was able to have time to debate and pass several pro-life bills in the regular session. These bills were sent to the Texas House where they would have EASILY passed the near super-majority Republican body. The problem is that the pro-choice Speaker Joe Straus did not allow his leadership to let the bills out of committee. They never even made it to the floor for a vote.

Texas pro-life LT Governor David Dewhurst asked for the bills to be added onto the Special Session because stopping unborn babies from suffering and increasing the health and protection of women is important to him. Joe Straus, like always, did not show any support for adding the pro-life bills to the Special Session and Straus even criticized Governor Perry for adding extra bills on the short 30 day Special Session (referring to the pro-life bills). Thankfully we have a pro-life Governor, Rick Perry, and he put the pro-life bills on the Special Session agenda.

Joe Straus cut the Special Session short a few days by sending the legislators home, even though Straus knew the Special Session was short and knew that these pro-life bills would be added by Perry. Straus then went on to schedule the pro-life bills at the very end of the Special Session knowing that the pro-life bills, when passed by the House, would still need to go back to the Senate to be approved with little time left and with a much stronger Democrat presence in the Senate.

What Was Passed in the Pro-Life Bill SB5?

Several important laws were passed in this pro-life bill. According to Texas Right to Life, Senate Bill 5 would affirm the state's interest in protecting the lives of preborn children who feel pain by banning abortion at 20 weeks post-fertilization. Senate Bill 5 also requires all abortion clinics to meet the same health and safety regulations as an ambulatory surgical center, requires a doctor providing abortions to secure admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, and lastly, requires a doctor to personally administer the abortion-inducing drugs to the patient.