Original story in AustinChronicle.com here:
See Part 1 of Dan Solomon’s three-part series on SB5, “‘Let Her Speak!’”
See Part 2 of Dan Solomon’s three-part series on SB5, “A Sunday at the Capitol.”
See Part 3 of Dan Solomon’s three-part series on SB5, “A Victory By the People.”

Austin Chronicle newsdesk

'Let Her Speak!'

Abortion hearing erupts into an emotional match

By Dan Solomon, 3:35PM, Fri. Jun. 21

photo by Courtesy of Tanene Allison The words "End the War on Women" projected onto the side of the Reagan Building Thursday night

It's 12:25 in the morning in the House State Affairs committee room at the John H. Reagan building in the Capitol complex when all hell breaks loose.

There are maybe 100 people in the chamber, with several hundred others in two designated rooms at the other end of the building, watching the public testimony for House Bill 60 on two projection monitors, waiting for their names to be called.

They've driven in from all over the state – from Houston, from Dallas, from San Antonio, the Valley. There's an older gentleman there from El Paso. They've come to Austin for a "citizen's filibuster," each demanding their three minutes of time to testify about the devastating effects that HB 60 would have on abortion access in Texas. Seven hundred people have signed up to speak, though many of them don't appear in the chamber when their name is called. The goal, as much as it is to be heard, is to run out the clock on the special session, which ends at midnight on Tuesday. If 700 people each take three minutes to speak, it'll be awfully hard to get to that floor vote. But then things take an angry turn, because Rep. Byron Cook – the committee chair – suddenly declares that the testimony will be ending regardless of how many people are still waiting to speak. Because he's bored.

"The testimony has been impassioned, but it has become repetitive, so I am going to only allow another hour of testimony on this bill," Cook declares. People in the "overflow" rooms pack up their laptops and phone chargers and rush to the chamber, which has become a shouting match. For much of the night, the committee room had been a venue of reasonable decorum, at least by the terms of a heated debate on a bill that would close 37 of the 42 clinics that perform abortions in the state of Texas, criminalize the procedure if a woman is 20 weeks or more into her pregnancy, and require thousand-mile round-trip travel for women in some parts of the state if they wanted to take the RU486 abortion pill. By the standards of that debate, the fact that the cheers and applause have been replaced with American Sign Language hand waving is a mark of great restraint.

That's how it had been in the chamber, anyway. In other parts of the building, the atmosphere was different. In the larger of the two overflow rooms, the whole evening had felt kind of like a high school lock-in. The people who offered testimony were almost exclusively opponents of the bill – though there were maybe a dozen supporters who unwittingly lent their voices to the filibuster effort as well, in order to speak out about how if a worm bitten by fire ants could feel pain, there's just no way a fetus can't; or to complain about a culture coarsened by repeated viewings of CSI and Criminal Minds; or to explain that, because they didn't regret the decision to carry their non-viable fetus to term, no one in the state should legally be allowed to make a different choice. In the overflow room, when those people would speak on the projection screen, people would heckle them. Austin Eater.com editor Andrea Grimes and her husband, Texas Observer reporter Patrick Michels, brought a big box of Doritos Locos tacos from Taco Bell to pass around. Some people (okay, me) had iPads out to watch Game 7 of the Spurs/Heat series while they waited for their names to be called. Someone would come around the room to talk about the amount of support that the people waiting to testify had from around the world.

"People on the internet have ordered pizzas," a blonde woman with some clear organizational and leadership skills would announce, leading people outside to an area where a dozen or more boxes from East Side Pies awaited. (Later in the night, it'd be Tiff's Treats, or a giant Gatorade cooler full of coffee from Bennu.) Pizza, TV, jokes about the uncool kids who want to restrict abortion rights - it was fun.

Then the yelling starts. After Cook's announcement, everything changes. Some people are immediately discouraged. Local feminist blogger Jessica Luther rushes over to the chamber to observe firsthand what's going on – this isn't something she wants to watch on a projector screen. "I wasn't sure what was going to happen, and I wanted to physically be in that room, so that if he chose to end it, I could protest with my body," she'll say when she recalls packing up to enter the room. "I wanted to take up valuable space and document other people doing the same."

Not long earlier, she'd been eating cookies and watching basketball. Now, she's texting her husband, trying to make bail arrangements in the event that she's arrested. Democratic Houston Rep. Jessica Farrar is trying to politely argue with her committee's chair, but it's not going well. "I just don't understand how this testimony can be repetitive when it's so personal," she says. Cook doesn't have an answer for her. Bored is bored.

The next speaker, a fiery woman with curly hair, steps up to the microphone and begins talking. The groans from the room subside as she does – people quiet down to hear her. She doesn't disappoint them: her testimony is every bit as "impassioned" as Cook indicated, but she's obviously going off-the-cuff here, talking about the chair's decision to end testimony with so many hundreds of people from around the state, many of whom had been there for hours, waiting for their turn to speak. She doesn't say any swear words, but it's that sort of speech – she's angry, like everyone else in the room.

Apparently it hurts Cook's feelings, because he declares that, at that point, he's had enough. He may have promised an hour, but he's done. He walks out of the chamber. The sound in the overflow room and on the livestream on the internet is cut, but in the room, people are yelling at him. The word "coward" is heard more than once. Outside the meeting room, people keep asking the only relevant question they can think of: "Can he do that?" The answer isn't coming inside that building, not at that minute.

Meanwhile, back in the room, the woman who was to be the next speaker has approached the microphone, and Department of Public Safety officers have blocked her access. The situation deteriorates as a chant of "Let her speak! Let her speak!" begins, and more officers enter the room. Finally, an impromptu decision is made by the people in the room - they'll listen to each other speak, if that's all they can do. People tell their stories, read their testimony, unplugged. There's a sense of powerlessness, hopelessness, in the room. It's hard not to draw parallels between the way the hearing is shaping up and the experience that the bill itself is intended to create for Texas women – taking the power to control your own life out of your hands.

There are maybe five or six speakers who talk this way before Cook reenters the room, agreeing to give speakers their hour. People are suddenly grateful to him – it's hard not to marvel at how quickly the room has gone from having rights to being allowed to speak.

And ultimately, nothing changes. People give their testimony. Much of it is very compelling, but nobody's really listening. That was the whole point of the filibuster. Yeah, get up and speak and tell your story, but we're really just here to run out the clock. Now that that's not an option, the whole exercise feels a bit hollow. That doesn't stop anyone from having their say, though. The crowd's dwindled by 4am, when things have wrapped up, but it's no less impassioned.

Cook, for his part, still seems bored.

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The committee reconvened today and passed HB 60 and related abortion regulation bills SB 5 and HB 16.

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See Part 1 of Dan Solomon's three-part series on SB5, "Let Her Speak!"
See Part 2 of Dan Solomon's three-part series on SB5, "A Sunday at the Capitol."
See Part 3 of Dan Solomon's three-part series on SB5, "A Victory By the People."

(Video by Dan Solomon)

A Sunday at the Capitol

Orange-clad abortion bill opponents witness House floor folly

By Dan Solomon, 11:53AM, Mon. Jun. 24

After a House committee on Friday quietly approved three bills that would further demolish a woman’s right to an abortion, the Texas Legislature convened Sunday with the emphasis on Senate Bill 5 (which ultimately passed Monday morning, with the House addition of a “fetal pain” amendment).

photo by Shelley Hiam Protesters and pro-choice advocates filled the Capitol rotunda.

The omnibus legislation, which would restrict access to abortion care for women throughout Texas in ways that are frankly unprecedented, has already been the subject of much discussion (and the Legislature’s GOP lawmakers’ avoidance of that discussion has also been the subject of national attention), and that discussion was back on Sunday: The House met to vote on the bill.

Hundreds of demonstrators were back, too. On Thursday, the opposition’s objective was a so-called citizen’s filibuster, in which hundreds of Texans would exercise their right to give personal testimony in opposition to the legislation. On Sunday, the objective was less participatory: just to witness what was happening, to crowd the House spectator gallery with opponents of the bill, and to “literally stare them down” when the Republican lawmakers entered the chamber, as an organizer from Planned Parenthood put it. Chanting and cheering were discouraged; silent displays of support – American Sign Language applause – were encouraged, as were just physically placing your orange-clad body in a seat in the Gallery.

The bill’s supporters, meanwhile, wore blue. Many of them had red duct tape somewhere on their persons, on their lapels or over their mouths (because apparently having every one of your wildest legislative fantasies handed to you by your representatives in a special session is somehow being silenced) or, for a few young men who oppose abortion rights, waiting outside the spectator gallery before the start of the hearing, around their hands, which they’d hold up in a frankly Nazi-like fashion.

The doors opened at 1:45. Some in line had been there for hours already at that point. Elaine Adkison and Tamara Crail-Walters had driven in from Lufkin at 7 o’clock in the morning, but they were second in line. “The church people were here when we got here,” Adkison said, gesturing to a crowd of six in front of her. Still, any equivalence between the number of the bill’s orange-clad opponents and its blue-clad supporters would have been demonstrably false; the rotunda, on all four floors, was packed with orange and only occasionally dotted with blue. Inside the gallery, the orange sections similarly outnumbered the blue at least 10 to one.

All of which might sound encouraging for those who wanted to see the bill defeated, except that this is still the Texas Legislature and that sort of “majority rules” is not the way things are done.

If Thursday was a version of The Hangover, then Sunday was The Hangover Part 2: The same jokes, just not funny anymore, because we’ve heard them all before, and the surprise is gone. On Thursday, when House Committee Chair Byron Cook called for an end to public testimony with hundreds yet to speak because he was beginning to find it “repetitive,” it was shocking and unprecedented. By late Sunday night, when the House Democrats found themselves unable to get so much as a “I decline questions, and move to table” from SB 5’s House sponsor, Rep. Jodie Laubenberg, in response to their amendments (Speaker Joe Straus spoke for her, instead), it was merely disappointing. When Straus called for an end to amendments at one o’clock in the morning, with 10 to 15 amendments left to be debated – once more circumventing the process by which bills are typically heard in Texas – the boos and hisses from the gallery lacked the bite of a “can they really do that?” We’d already seen how this movie ended; they could, they would, and they did.

It wasn’t always so bleak at the Capitol on Sunday.

In the early part of the day, hope sprang. A parliamentary point of order was raised immediately after the House convened; restless people packed into the Capitol in their orange t-shirts were assured by organizers that “the less that’s happening right now, the better for us that is.” About 500 people packed the House gallery to capacity, most of them opponents of the bill; hundreds more filled the Legislative Conference Center as an overflow room, or watched the proceedings from the auditorium via closed-circuit television. Once more, the internet and people from around the country rallied to keep people fed and caffeinated, with dozens of pizzas, coffee containers, and boxes of Tiff’s Treats delivered. Eventually, people got creative: East Side Pies started converting pizza orders to salads; Royal Blue Grocery sent over boxes of fresh fruit; East Village Market brought vegan pastries. The Legislative Conference Center served as a de facto staging area, while the auditorium and gallery were occupied by people who were ready to observe the arcane parliamentary game being played by the two sides of the debate. It was possible to spend a good portion of the evening just running from the Legislative Conference Center to the Capitol doors, retrieving pizzas from a delivery driver’s car, and back again.

All of it made for an energized day at the Capitol. Liberals in Texas have become accustomed to frustration in political activism. There just haven’t been a lot of victories. But throughout the day, there was an honest belief – “We could win this!” – that kept the spirits high and people coming in throughout the night. It wasn’t uncommon for people to run into their neighbors, or friends who had never been particularly active politically, or, like, their dental hygienist or something. If you were a follower of Austin’s improv community, you might run into Kaci Beeler and Kelli Bland and Curtis Luciani and Amy Gentry as you scarfed down your salad. If you followed local theater, you could bump into playwrights Sarah Saltwick and Lydia Nelson. This wasn’t a day for jaded activists to moan about the process, and to recycle the tired chants of “Hey, ho, hey, ho (whatever we don’t like) has got to go!” By the time your side starts chanting in protest, you’ve probably already lost, and this was something different.

Which, of course, made the eventual end to the day even more cruel. There were parliamentary games played all day long, with points of order called so often that people eventually stopped giggling when they saw a tweet announcing that a given representative had “brought up new POO.” After an initial victory, in which House Republicans spent nearly two hours debating a point of order that would require them to take a two-hour adjournment, before eventually agreeing to take that adjournment, Democratic points of order were often overruled. Supporters in the gallery were silenced, and then threatened with arrest if they so much as twinkled their fingers in a silent ASL applause motion of support.

At one point Houston Rep. Jessica Farrar – who had become something of a hero to the bill’s opponents – addressed the crowd in the overflow room to keep spirits high, explaining that they had a whole bag of tricks. “If you see some things tonight that look weird, trust me,” she said. “We have really smart people on our side who are really good at parliamentary procedure.” Motions to table the bill based on an obscure point of order – which would effectively kill it – were raised by a Democratic rep, then struck down as a given point of order was determined by the parliamentarians insufficient to stop the process, after all.

And then, once the bill came to the floor for debate, it came down to the amendments. House Democrats introduced nearly 30 amendments to the bill, each of which required its own debate and question period, and each of which typically included a period to ask questions of Rep. Laubenberg, as the bill’s sponsor. These amendments weren’t particularly radical – allowing more time for clinics to meet guidelines outlined in the bill, for example – but after one ostensibly reasonable amendment, the tone of the evening changed.

Rep. Senfronia Thompson introduced an amendment that would require the 20-week-ban – the so-called “fetal pain” restriction – to include an exception in the case of rape or incest. To illustrate her point, Thompson brought out a wire coat hanger, and held it in view of Laubenberg and the rest of the House during the entire debate on her amendment. And, finally, when it was Laubenberg’s turn to speak, she added another doozy to the “Republicans-say-something-outrageous-about-rape” list. This time, Laubenberg spoke of emergency room “rape kits,” despite apparently being unclear about what these kits actually do.

“In an emergency room, they have what’s called a rape kit,” Laubenberg explained, “Where a woman can get cleaned out,” apparently indicating that a rape kit contained some sort of abortifacient (like, perhaps, the RU486 pill that her bill would make more difficult to administer) that would shut that whole thing down in the event of a rape. Laubenberg added that a rape kit is "equivalent to a D&C" –- that is, an abortion.

A rape kit, of course, is actually an evidence-collection tool. It does no "cleaning out." But after Laubenberg’s statement – which, if it’s a slow weekend, might well land the representative on a Daily Show reel – House Republicans began restricting access to the bill’s sponsor during the debate.

The result, perhaps ironically, actually was rather redundant: Laubenberg would not make herself available for questions despite requests from each amendment’s author, and Speaker Straus would declare that she had moved to table the amendment for her, bringing up a vote to table the amendment that would pass among strict party lines. During each amendment’s debate, Democratic lawmakers would interrogate each other ostensibly about the purpose of the amendment, but mostly they would remark to one another how the refusal of the bill’s sponsor to make herself available to questions was unheard of, and perhaps a violation of House rules.

Ultimately, though, a point of order on whether Laubenberg was allowed to avoid questions and therefore allowed to avoid the possibility of saying something else outrageous enough to land her on the late-night shows was overruled. Whether it was against the rules or not became a redundant question. At that point, all that was left was for Representative Bryan Hughes to make a motion for an end to debate, and for the House Republicans to approve that motion.

By two o’clock in the morning – over 12 hours from the start of the day – there was little reason left to hang around. The entire spectacle had devolved into a depressing sort of kabuki theater, as the final arguments were made: a Democratic firebrand like Sylvester Turner, Dawnna Dukes, or Senfronia Thompson would make an impassioned statement excoriating the Republicans for rushing the bill through a special session for reasons that are still unclear or for endangering the health of women throughout the state, and it would be roundly ignored by Republican lawmakers who would talk over them, or fiddle with their phones while they spoke. In the end, all of the arguments being made over the abortion omnibus bills are meaningless, which made even the several hundred orange-wearers still at the Capitol by 3am unlikely to risk arrest with their ASL applause. If the arguments have been heard, they’ve been rejected along strictly party lines.

Sunday was a day with ups and downs for opponents of the abortion, but those ups and downs ultimately have very little to do with the actual debate, which is just a shadow play cover for the actual battle being fought, which is parliamentary – and the rules of that game are so arcane that it’s really hard to know who to cheer for or when. In fact, while the House did vote to pass the bill to its third reading (yet another step in this inscrutable process), the fact that it happened at three o’clock in the morning on Monday, instead of at 11:59 on Sunday, may turn out to be an important factor. The third reading itself did not occur until 10:08am Monday -- which means the Senate cannot take it up again until the same time Tuesday, with a midnight deadline for final passage.

See Part 1 of Dan Solomon's three-part series on SB5, "Let Her Speak!"
See Part 2 of Dan Solomon's three-part series on SB5, "A Sunday at the Capitol."
See Part 3 of Dan Solomon's three-part series on SB5, "A Victory By the People."

Senate Bill 5 – the omnibus abortion bill that would have massively restricted access to reproductive services in Texas – died at midnight, though its death wasn’t reported until hours later. The Chron Newsdesk managed a late post confirming the defeat of the bill, but by then very few people were still awake to read it.

That’s a somber statement for an event that was full of the sort of excitement and high drama that Hollywood can’t script, that sports commissioners ruin their pants imagining for the conclusions to their biggest games. But robbing the people who killed SB 5 of their victory celebration was maybe the last twist of the knife for a Party that did everything they could to derail the efforts of thousands of Texans from around the state who came to the Capitol to stop the bill.

by Jana Birchum Sen. Wendy Davis' filibuster shoes

The Opening Acts

Tuesday at the Capitol started early, with a rally featuring Cecile Richards – president of Planned Parenthood and daughter of former Gov. Ann Richards – and continued with some live theatre with a filibuster of the bill by Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, starting at 11:20am, intending to continue until the special session ended at midnight. Davis wore bright orange sneakers and a back brace, and she must have peed into something. She read testimony from Thursday night’s nullified "citizens' filibuster.” She got compared to Tami Taylor from Friday Night Lights a lot. Supporters from Lena Dunham to Barack Obama tweeted on the #standwithwendy hashtag. And, eventually, she was silenced.

The crowds at the Capitol were the biggest that had come to Austin to oppose SB 5. People dressed in orange to show their solidarity with Davis were spread out throughout the building, but an estimate of 2,000 wouldn’t be unrealistic. They got there early – the Senate gallery’s 500 seats were completely full by the time she began her filibuster – and they stayed late. They ate the pizzas and cookies from around the world that had become a hallmark of the SB 5 opposition, and they watched from the Capitol Auditorium and the Legislative Conference Center once more. They brought their kids. Some came from as far away as Oklahoma, a reminder that Texas’ abortion services serve more than just Texans. They called Davis “Governor Davis,” or maybe just “Khaleesi.” Between all the orange and all the cheering, and the very distinct “us and them” feeling among the spectators, the atmosphere felt a lot like a football game.

And they watched – along with, by the end, close to 200,000 viewers on the Texas Tribune’s livestream of the floor – as the Senate Republicans did everything they could to shut her up and sit her down. Everybody got a lesson not just in civics but in parliamentary rules of the Texas Senate, some of which are downright bizarre: For instance, did you know that there’s a “three strikes and you’re out” rule on filibusters? Most people at the Capitol did not, which made the attempts by Sens. Robert Nichols and Tommy Williams to issue points of order in an effort to derail her testimony confusing. The word “germane” got used a lot, as in “is this topic germane to the discussion of SB 5?” In the Texas Senate, filibusters aren’t just talking exercises where the member on the floor can read the phone book – or a Chronicle report by Jordan Smith, as Davis learned after she was issued her first warning on a point of order.

At 6:40, she was issued her second warning: This time, because fellow Sen. Rodney Ellis helped her adjust her back brace during questions from another member. This was around the time that the proceeding started to feel like something of a farce. Did the reproductive health care of millions of Texans really come down to whether or not somebody touched the Senator’s back brace?

But that’s the parliamentary game, which shouldn’t be confused at all with the debate of what’s right or fair. Those things weren’t of any interest to anyone on this bill – where even votes about things like #BackBraceGate went along strict party lines – and the result was a very tense evening. It was hard not to notice that there was a group of men (specifically, Dewhurst and Williams) trying to tell a woman what she could do with her body while trying to stop an abortion bill, but the creeping irony of that was lost on the Republicans on that floor – or they just didn’t give a shit about it.

What they did give a shit about was “decorum” and what’s “germane.” Davis, aware that she had two strikes against her and five hours of filibustering to get through, stopped taking questions from the other senators, seemingly having made the decision that the best way for her to get through the evening would be to just keep reading analysis of the bill, with a stack of unheard “citizens' filibuster” constituent testimony in her back pocket, if it came to that.

Meanwhile, her myth continued to grow. The number of viewers on the livestream only went up, and the crowd of supporters throughout the Capitol turned into Beatlemaniacs – the cheer in the auditorium after someone asked if they could take a video of the hundreds of people crammed into the room and standing in the aisles shouting, “We love you, Wendy!” stretched on for well over a minute. It all made a certain kind of sense. The hopes of the people who had come to the Capitol to defeat the omnibus abortion bill during the special session had initially been pinned on a “citizens’ filibuster,” in which people would participate directly in the legislative process by using their bodies and their voices to directly shut down legislation they opposed so strongly. When the opportunity to do that was yanked away by Rep. Byron Cook at a House committee hearing last Thursday night, it became a matter of simply showing support for lawmakers – and, eventually, for Sen. Davis, who became the avatar for all of the citizens who were denied their chance to filibuster.

by Jana Birchum Senators cast a vote with an eye on supporters in the Gallery.

The Crisis

It was, frankly, a kind of magical thing to watch. Davis smartly spent a good deal of her performance simply reading the testimony of the people who didn’t get to speak, and, while she often blazed through it with a good deal of emotional distance, some of it was pretty powerful stuff: When she read the testimony of a woman whose wanted pregnancy turned out to be nonviable, and who was denied the opportunity to abort it by a Catholic hospital, she was in tears. The line between “participatory” and “democracy” seemed especially thin, at least for a while.

And then, ultimately, it came time for the third strike. Shortly after 9:30pm – eight hours into Sen. Davis’ filibuster – a point of order was raised again. Davis was discussing the effect that SB 5 would have on low-income Texas women, and began discussing the current restrictions in place because of the requirements that all abortions be preceded by an ultrasound. Freshman Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, and a fiercely religious opponent of abortion, called for a point of order – was it germane to the discussion of abortion legislation to discuss current abortion law?

Every time one of these points of order came up – or even whenever another senator spoke, even if just to ask if she’d be taking questions – the air sucked out of whatever room in the Capitol people were watching from. There were already two warnings, and a third would kill the filibuster. If it was like watching a football game, it was a game where your team was constantly having to kick a 50-yard field goal with seconds on the clock while down by two. Still, people initially seemed confident in this one: How could a discussion of current abortion law not be germane to a discussion of possible abortion legislation?

If you asked yourself that question, you’re not Lt. Gov. Dewhurst. Presiding over the Senate, Dewhurst sustained the point of order after half an hour of discussion.

by Jana Birchum Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst

Things threatened to turn ugly quickly: The previously silent Senate gallery exploded into boos and jeers, and people rushed from the downstairs overflow room to the rotunda. But the parliamentary game is a long one, and it was already after 10pm at this point. Sens. Watson, Zaffirini, Ellis, and Van de Putte all began a flurry of points of order, motions, and sub-filibusters. 200,000 people watched on the livestream. The gallery quieted back down as Watson motioned to appeal Dewhurst’s decision to sustain the point of order, and then led a 30-plus minute filibuster within the filibuster to attempt to slow down the process once more. When he was interrupted, another colleague would step in with a motion or point of order, and so on.

But ultimately, those parliamentary tricks weren’t enough. And that’s when things got very strange. That’s when you saw people on Twitter – like former Texas Monthly editor and current Texas Tribune boss Evan Smith – say things like, “Have seen nothing like this in #txlege in 22 years. Not even close.” That’s when the citizens' filibuster returned.

The People Speak

You can’t script this shit. Not really. If you tried, you’d get accused of a pandering Hollywood ending. But the Senate Democrats used up their parliamentary tricks by 11:45 on Tuesday night – fifteen minutes before the end of the special session – and the Senate gallery went apeshit. Dewhurst had stepped down as chair after Sen. Watson’s appeal and had been replaced by Sen. Robert Duncan, who didn't see or ignored an attempt at a motion to adjourn by Sen. Van de Putte. Duncan pled for “order in the chamber, so we can properly cast our vote.” Good luck with that one, buddy. Sen. Van de Putte, who had returned that day from her father's funeral, and was visibly distraught but stoic, finally asked Duncan, "At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room?"* In a single sentence, Van de Putte had boiled down both the politics and the tactics of the GOP majority. The gallery exploded, and it was absolutely deafening in the chamber; sitting in the E2 basement level of the Capitol Extension, you’d swear you could hear faint shouts.

And it went on. For 15 minutes – through the midnight deadline - the room was full of hollering citizens. Mostly, they just cheered, like they were trying to drown out an opposing quarterback’s signals while their team was on defense – which is almost exactly what they were doing. Wendy Davis, still standing, watched. And with every passing minute, SB 5 grew closer to defeat, and the room just got louder. It was the sort of moment that can make even the biggest cynic about what an absolute disingenuous farce politics in Texas and the rest of the country can be get chills: What had started as citizens trying to use their voices to be heard in opposition to these restrictions had, with minutes left, reached its end as citizens used their voices to be heard. So what if it stopped being about storytelling and started being about the shouting?

People counted down in the Capitol Extension as the clock ticked to midnight. The special session ended.

And then, of course, the Senate called for its vote at 12:02am on Wednesday.

The scene turned ugly again. Little old ladies were arrested. DPS officers marched ominously to the doors of the Capitol. (Republican State Rep. Bill Zedler of Arlington tweeted that “we had terrorist [sic] in the Texas State Senate opposing SB5” – although his earlier timing suggests he may have been referring to Davis and the Dem opposition.) The rotunda filled with too many Texans to count, cheering and crying and chanting.

Won or Lost?

Chanting is not a thing that the winning side of a political action tends to waste much time with, and as Democratic Senators came out to address the crowd, their speeches sounded remarkably like consolation. The Associated Press reported that the bill had passed. Dewhurst, Sen. Dan Patrick, and other Republicans started giving out numbers on how the vote passed.

Democratic senators like Ellis and Whitmire, meanwhile, argued that the bill hadn’t passed, that it had happened too late. Most people in the building were forced to question if they would believe Dewhurst or their own lying eyes, as confusion reigned. What started with the atmosphere of a football game had turned into something more like a soccer match: no winner, lots of chanting, and the specter of inexplicable extra time added to the clock. It stayed that way for hours. People trickled away from the Capitol. The livestream numbers dwindled as the action moved outside the Senate floor.

Then, at 2:20, the Senate reconvened to figure out what the hell had happened. Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa had posed for a photo that indicated that the date had been changed on the official record. The question became whether the vote occurring at 12:02am meant that it happened on Tuesday or Wednesday. The answer, mercifully, was settled as a matter of objective fact.

And thus the anticlimax. That Hollywood moment – where, all other options exhausted, hundreds of ordinary Texans shouted down legislation that would have severely regulated their bodies – occurred, but the celebration never did. There was never a “We beat 'em!” moment to cap everything off with the catharsis that we’re conditioned to expect after weeks of struggle, culminating in a victory. By the time the announcement was made – by Sen. Davis and Cecile Richards, in the rotunda – there were hundreds, not thousands, at the Capitol. The livestream was showing the inactivity of the Senate floor. Twitter was mostly quiet. A battle that was supported, fought, and won by people throughout the state and around the world was celebrated late, and by far fewer than who participated in the victory itself.

by Shelley Hiam Sen. Wendy Davis joins supporters in the Capitol Rotunda after SB 5 is officially declared dead.

And that, ultimately, may be appropriate when discussing SB 5, because the victory – while real, and extremely impressive for Texas progressives and liberals who, until now, have spent many years tasting mostly defeat in their political battles – will probably remain in question, too. The special session has ended, and SB 5 failed. But so did two important bills dealing with transportation and juvenile justice, and a second special session could be called by Gov. Perry at any point to address all three bills. If and when it is, the abortion question could quickly return to the forefront.

There’s this part at the very end of the series finale to Buffy the Vampire Slayer – a show that more than a few people at the Capitol would cite as a major inspiration in their lives, it’s safe to say – where, after closing the “Hellmouth” that had threatened to rain down apocalypse on the world, one character cautions the others to restrain the celebration. “There’s another one in Cleveland,” he says.

That line was stuck in my head as I watched the measured celebration in response to the defeat of SB 5 early in the morning on Wednesday. Yeah, this one’s been beaten, but there are still monsters lurking in Texas.

See Part 1 of Dan Solomon's three-part series on SB5, "Let Her Speak!"
See Part 2 of Dan Solomon's three-part series on SB5, "A Sunday at the Capitol."
See Part 3 of Dan Solomon's three-part series on SB5, "A Victory By the People."