Look Who's Running for Congress in Texas

Wendy Davis got nationally well known for double-digit hours in 2013 spent filibustering a Texas abortion bill. Texans know how to do extreme, and Wendy Davis was up for fighting them. She was a member of the Texas Senate representing District 10 (Tarrant County, i.e., Fort Worth), in her second term, and she was what Texas men traditionally label "a handful." She became an instant media star in her pink running shoes.

She opted not to run for her Senate seat again in 2014 and instead went after the governorship against Republican Greg Abbott (who's currently still in that office), and that project turned out to have been unwise, because she did very poorly, losing to Abbott by 960,952 votes. Plus she earned much criticism for running a desperation TV ad that made politics out of the wheelchair to which Abbott is permanently confined. Ouch.

She lives now in Austin where she started a non-profit, Deeds Not Words, and she's just announced a bid for Congress in the 21st House District. The 21st is a fantastic extrusion of fine-grained gerrymandering. It begins in Austin, takes in neighborhoods on the south and southwest sides of town, then runs south along the western side of Interstate 35 into San Antonio's northern neighborhoods and into Alamo Heights. It then juts out west into the Hill Country, taking in Fredericksburg and Kerrville. The district includes Bandera, Blanco, Gillespie, Kendall, Kerr, and Real counties as well as areas of Bexar, Comal, Hays, and Travis counties. The most recent updated Cook Political Report rates it "lean Republican." It used to be Lyndon Baines Johnson's seat of power.

Davis is high-profile, and she can raise money the way a dust devil raises dust. She's going up against a first-term Republican in Chip Roy, who's made himself a Washington pariah in just a year-and-a-half. In May Roy single-handedly blocked $19 billion in disaster aid (much of which would have come to Texas). He was carrying water for Twitterman who was mad because the disaster aid bill didn't include money to build more wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. "The spending bill ultimately passed, but not before Roy's delay frustrated lawmakers on both sides" (Paul J. Weber).

The grotesquely gerrymandered 21st Congressional District of Texas 

If she's going to win this district, Davis is going to have to do at least passably well in those hill-country counties where the population is sparser and the opinions run strongly to the right. Don't know if this cosmopolitan star is going to shine as brightly out there to the west. That's ranching country.

Wendy Davis and William Barber

I light a candle for my native state, Texas, where hope for sanity after a few eons of Rick "Oops" Perry and the dominance of a Republican legislature looks actually possible. You don't piss off Texas women without getting a two-by-four upside the head. From the Texas Monthly:

...on the morning of June 25, the petite fifty-year-old Democratic state senator [Wendy Davis] from Fort Worth fixed herself a single boiled egg for breakfast. It would be her only meal of the day. She slipped on a pair of pink tennis shoes, headed over to the Capitol, and stepped up. As Davis began what would become her internationally memorialized eleven-hour filibuster of a Republican bill that would severely restrict a Texas woman’s ability to obtain an abortion, she calmed her jittery nerves by thinking of the assurances made to her the previous afternoon by former Democratic state senator Gonzalo Barrientos, himself an old hand at filibusters: It’ll be fine. You can lean on your desk, keep some candies in your pocket, read anything remotely related to the topic—no one will call you on any of that.
Once it became clear that the opposite was true—that in fact the Republicans intended to challenge every syllable and muscle twitch—she started getting mad. As the day wore on, her lower back began to hurt. “It was probably because of stress,” she told me two days later. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, what if I collapse during hour six?’ ” Her fellow Democrat Rodney Ellis helped her put on a back brace, but this led to the second point of order of the afternoon against her (after three points of order are sustained, a filibuster can be stopped). From then on, Davis knew she had to be error-free. She began to draw both strength and focus from the legion of supporters who had packed the Senate gallery. She was unaware that outside the chamber, the halls of the Capitol were filled with even more people rooting her on or that, by the end of the evening, more than 180,000 people around the world were watching a livestream of the proceedings, with many more following along on social media. Davis learned all this only later, after midnight, upon the defeat of the bill, when the evening’s takeaway seemed best expressed in a tweet by another emerging Texas Democrat, San Antonio mayor Julián Castro: “When Texas turns Blue, tonight may well be looked upon as the beginning.”

No one knows for sure, of course, but we can imagine that the first Moral Monday back on April 27th, and those first 17 arrests for civil disobedience, was the beginning in North Carolina of throwing off the oppression of Teapublican rule, the skewed values and mean-spirited attacks on the poor and the unemployed, the micro-managing punishment of our cities, the triumphalism of fundamentalist religion hell-bent on destroying the social contract.

We can certainly thank the Rev. William Barber for his leadership in rallying the opposition. Without him, nothing would have happened. He's our Wendy Davis.