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AUSTIN, Tex. — A Fort Worth Democrat, Senator Wendy Davis, 50, stood in her running shoes on the green carpeted floor of the Senate chamber and spoke about a bill with some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country from 11:18 a.m. until about 10 p.m. She abided for most of that time by filibuster rules that prohibited her from leaning on her desk, sitting on her chair or straying off topic.
AUSTIN, Tex. — She was a state senator Tuesday morning. By Wednesday morning, she was a political celebrity known across the nation. But also hoarse, hungry and thirsty.
Her feat of stamina and conviction on Tuesday — designed by Democrats to block passage of a bill supported by some of the state’s top Republicans — made her an instant celebrity across the country, a hero to some, a villain to others. Republicans monitored virtually her every move and word, waiting to catch her violating the rules, and at one point objecting when a fellow Democrat tried to help put a back-brace around Ms. Davis, who at that point had been standing for about seven hours straight.
The leg-numbing filibuster by Wendy Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat — in which she stood and talked for more than 11 hours at the Capitol here, never sitting, eating, drinking or even using the bathroom to help block passage of an anti-abortion bill supported by the state’s top Republicans — was not the longest such marathon, by Texas standards.
Ms. Davis gained thousands of Twitter followers in a matter of hours. Close-up pictures of her pink sneakers zoomed across computer and television screens. Hundreds of men, women and children waited for hours in line at the Capitol to sit in an upstairs gallery and watch her in action, standing in lines that snaked around the rotunda and down staircases.
But it didn’t matter.
“I’m tired, but really happy,” Ms. Davis told reporters in the Senate chamber at 3:20 a.m. Wednesday as she finally made her way out of the building. “I’m pleased to know that a spotlight is shining on Texas, a spotlight is shining on the failure of our current leadership.” Hours after claiming that they successfully passed the abortion measures, Republican lawmakers reversed course on Wednesday and said a disputed late-night vote did not follow legislative procedures, rendering the vote moot and giving Democrats a bitterly fought if probably short-lived victory.
Her feat of stamina and conviction gained thousands of Twitter followers in a matter of hours. Pictures of the sneakers she wore beneath her dress zoomed across computer and television screens. The press corps demanded to know her shoe brand. (Mizuno, it turned out.) Taiwanese animators posted a YouTube clip showing Ms. Davis in a Superman outfit. Hundreds of men, women and children waited for hours at the Capitol to sit in an upstairs gallery and watch her in action, standing in lines that snaked around the rotunda. Even President Obama noticed, posting a tweet on Tuesday that read, “Something special is happening in Austin tonight.”
The Republicans, who control the State Senate and House, will have a second chance. Gov. Rick Perry, who has made the bill a priority, said Wednesday that he would call a second special session of the Texas Legislature on July 1, with abortion and other bills on the agenda.
Ms. Davis, 50, has known long odds and, for Democrats, was the perfect symbol in a fight over what a woman can do. She was a teenager when her first child was born, but managed as a single mother to pull herself from a trailer park to Harvard Law School to a hard-fought seat in the Texas Senate, a rare liberal representing conservative Tarrant County. According to Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston, she had the second-most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2011.
The reversal after midnight Tuesday capped a remarkable day in the Texas Legislature here. As Ms. Davis staged her filibuster marathon, abortion rights activists succeeded in disrupting Republican senators, and the fate of the bill, which Gov. Rick Perry had made a priority, devolved into a legislative mess so thick that even senators who had voted on the bill could not say for certain whether they had indeed voted on the bill.
“We have a State Capitol that is made up of people, for the most part, who are elected by Anglo communities, suburban and rural, and they are the majority voice in the Capitol, although they aren’t reflective of the majority of the state of Texas,” she said in a previous interview.
The State Senate’s vote came right at a midnight Tuesday deadline, amid widespread confusion and the noise of a chanting crowd of the bill’s opponents in an upstairs gallery. Senate Democrats said the vote took place past the deadline at 12:02 a.m. or 12:03 a.m., while Republicans disputed those claims, saying the vote was legitimate.
On Tuesday night, as she stood in her salmon-colored running shoes on the green carpeted floor of the Senate chamber and spoke about the bill from 11:18 a.m. to about 10 p.m., Republicans monitored virtually her every move and word, waiting to catch her violating Texas’s obscure filibuster rules, which prohibited her from leaning on her desk or straying off topic. At one point they objected when a fellow Democrat tried to help put a back brace around Ms. Davis, who at that point had been standing for about seven hours straight.
But at 3 a.m., Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the presiding officer of the Senate and a Republican supporter of the bill, told lawmakers and reporters that although the bill passed on a 19-to-10 vote, the bill could not be signed in the presence of the Senate and was therefore dead, blaming “an unruly mob using Occupy Wall Street tactics” as the primary cause.
“I’m tired, but really happy,” Ms. Davis told reporters in the Senate chamber at 3:20 a.m. Wednesday as she finally made her way out of the building. “I’m pleased to know that a spotlight is shining on Texas, a spotlight is shining on the failure of our current leadership.” She was congratulated by lawmakers, staffers and women’s rights advocates. But the celebration was short-lived. Hours later, Gov. Rick Perry, who put the abortion bill on the agenda of a legislative special session, announced a second special session would begin Monday so lawmakers could take up the abortion bill once more. Analysts said the bill would likely pass this time because Democrats in the Republican-controlled Senate will be unable to delay for the entirety of a 30-day session.
“With all the ruckus and noise going on,” Mr. Dewhurst said, he could not complete administrative duties to make the vote official and sign the bill. Senate Democrats and women’s right’s advocates said the real reason the vote could not be made official was a time stamp on official documents that showed the bill passed after midnight. The reversal served as an embarrassing episode for Mr. Dewhurst and Republican senators on a divisive bill that was closely watched around the nation by anti-abortion activists and supporters of abortion rights.
As a lawmaker elected to the Senate in 2008, Ms. Davis has shown charisma and guts, and her life story has moved voters and even some of her critics. At the age of 14, she worked after-school jobs to help support her mother and three siblings.
“The G.O.P. Senate leadership comes out of this whole process looking somewhat disingenuous, deceptive and disorganized,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.
“My mother only had a sixth-grade education, and it was really a struggle for us,” she said in a 2011 video for Generation TX. She said she fell through the cracks in high school, and shortly after she graduated, she got married and divorced, and was a single mother by age 19.
The bill sought to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, require abortion clinics to meet the same standards as hospital-style surgical centers and mandate that a doctor who performs abortions have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
“I was living in a mobile home in southeast Fort Worth, and I was destined to live the life that I watched my mother live,” she said in the video. A co-worker showed her a brochure for Tarrant County College, and she took classes to become a paralegal, working two jobs at the same time. From there she received a scholarship to attend Texas Christian University in Fort Worth — the first person in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree — and then went on to Harvard. “When I was accepted into Harvard Law School, I remember thinking about who I am, and where I came from, and where I had been only a few years before,” she said.
Supporters of the bill said the measures would protect women’s health and hold clinics to safe standards, but women’s right’s advocates said the legislation amounted to an unconstitutional, politically motivated effort to shut legal abortion clinics. The bill’s opponents said it will likely cause all but five of the 42 abortion clinics in the state to close, because the building renovations and equipment upgrades necessary to meet the surgical-center standards would be too costly.
Twice-divorced, Ms. Davis is the mother of two daughters. She has been dating a former mayor of Austin, Will Wynn, who put his arm around her shoulder early Wednesday as they walked out of the Senate chamber.
The bill sought to make Texas the 12th state to bar most abortions at 20 weeks after fertilization and later — a step that has been blocked in three states so far as unconstitutional. The more pressing concern for clinic managers and advocates for women’s rights was the requirement that all 42 abortion clinics in the state be licensed as ambulatory surgery centers.
The longest filibuster in American history took place 36 years earlier in the very Senate chamber where Ms. Davis stood. In 1977, then-Senator Bill Meier filibustered a worker’s compensation bill for 43 hours.
Five clinics performing late-term abortions already meet that standard. But for most of the remaining 37, the new restriction would require costly renovations or relocation. The five clinics are in large cities — Austin, San Antonio and Dallas each have one, and Houston has two — and women in rural areas and small towns far from those cities will be underserved, advocates for abortion rights said.
Ms. Davis’s filibuster pushed her Republican rivals to make an embarrassing and rare public reversal. Their attempts to derail her filibuster as the midnight deadline neared caused the gallery to erupt in screams, throwing the results of the vote on the bill into disarray. Hours after claiming that they passed the bill Republican leaders reversed course and said the vote did not follow legislative procedures, rendering the vote moot and killing the bill. The legislative session expired at midnight.
Two clinics in McAllen and Harlingen in South Texas — the only abortion providers in the area — would close if the bill had passed, they said, forcing women seeking abortions to travel a few miles across the border into Mexico rather than drive four hours to San Antonio, both for surgical procedures and abortion-inducing drugs.
It was Ms. Davis’s second star turn: In 2011, she filibustered a budget bill that included huge cuts to public education, forcing Governor Perry to call a special session in order for it to pass. And it cemented her reputation as a Democrat in a Republican-dominated state who many hope will run for statewide office.
“We know that it would shut down dozens of clinics in the state of Texas, a state of 26 million people, and there will be women who cannot reach a health care provider to get reproductive health care for hundreds of miles,” said Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and a daughter of Ann W. Richards, the former Texas governor. “This is the thing that’s frightening. Women will do whatever they have to do to take care of themselves.”
“She’s carrying every woman in the state of Texas, if you will, on her shoulders,” said Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and a daughter of Ann Richards, a former governor.
Ms. Davis, herself, has known long odds, and, for Democrats, was the perfect symbol in a fight over women’s rights of what a woman can do. She was a teenager when her first daughter was born but managed to pull herself from a trailer park to Harvard Law School to a hard-fought seat in the Texas Senate, a rare liberal representing conservative Tarrant County.
The bill seeks to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, require abortion clinics to meet the same standards as hospital-style surgical centers and mandate that a doctor who performs abortions have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Opponents say it could lead to the closing of most of Texas’s 42 abortion clinics.
“She’s carrying every woman in the state of Texas, if you will, on her shoulders,” Ms. Richards said. “If there’s anybody who can do it, it’s her.”
Rocking back and forth in her sneakers, Ms. Davis read from letters sent to her office, testimony submitted to committees and an article published in The Austin Chronicle. At 10 p.m., the presiding officer of the Senate, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, sustained a violation, her third, for straying off the topic, which Democrats disputed. She had been talking about a bill that had previously passed that prohibited abortions without the mother first undergoing a sonogram.
Ms. Davis is something of a filibuster star among Texas Democrats. At the end of the legislative term in 2011, she forced Mr. Perry to call a special session after her filibuster ran the clock out on a budget bill that included cuts in public education. But at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, 11 hours after she first stood up, Mr. Dewhurst sustained a violation against her for straying off the topic. It was her third violation of the Senate rules.
As the clock neared midnight, Republicans attempted to end the debate and to vote, causing the crowd to erupt. At midnight, another senator stood at Ms. Davis’s paper-cluttered desk and raised her arm in victory. The crowd roared. Ms. Davis smiled. She had yet to sit down.
Mr. Dewhurst called for a vote on the bill but as the clock neared midnight and the crowd erupted, several Democratic senators said they believed they were voting on a procedural matter. “I don’t mind losing fair and square, but this has been a total sham and mockery of the rules,” said State Senator Leticia Van de Putte, a San Antonio Democrat.
Brian
Stelter contributed reporting from New York.
Amy Hagstrom Miller, the president of Whole Woman’s Health, which operates abortion and women’s health clinics in Texas and two other states, said the bill would force her to shut down the group’s five clinics in Texas. The group also owns a sixth Texas facility in San Antonio that complies with ambulatory surgical requirements, but Ms. Hagstrom Miller said it had operated at an annual loss of $400,000 since opening two years ago.”
Ms. Hagstrom Miller said opening clinics that met the new requirements would be financially untenable. “I believe in providing really compassionate, medically acceptable care, but why would I do it in Texas? I will surely look elsewhere,” she said.
Another of the group’s clinics is the one in McAllen, close to the Mexican border.
Already a large number of women cross the border to obtain abortion-inducing drugs in Mexico, Ms. Hagstrom Miller said, and she said she expected the number to rise if the clinic closed.
Many women seeking abortions, she said, are already mothers and do not have the time or money to travel long distances for the procedure.
“I’ve seen women who asked their partners to punch them in the stomach repeatedly,” Ms. Hagstrom Miller said, adding that she believed the law and widespread closings of clinics would force more women to try “self-induced abortions.”
Manny Fernandez reported from Austin, and Erik Eckholm from New York. Laura Tillman contributed reporting from McAllen, Tex.
