In the court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock—an Abbott appointee who formerly worked for the governor—ruled that because Wu and other House Democrats “voluntarily returned” to the Capitol two weeks after their August departure, it was not necessary for the court to get involved.

“The nineteenth-century framers of the Texas Constitution … understood that in a legislature with a two-thirds quorum rule, the power ‘to compel the attendance of absent members’ can be the difference between a functioning government and debilitating gridlock,” Blacklock wrote. “They entrusted the power to compel legislative attendance not to the judicial branch but to the present members of each House.”

The court also rejected a petition by Attorney General Ken Paxton to expel Wu and 12 other Democrats over the walkout, consolidating the two requests in one ruling.

How we got here

Texas lawmakers began redrawing the state’s congressional map last summer, outside the 10-year cycle when states are required to redistrict after a federal census. They did so at the request of President Donald Trump, who asked Texas to pass a map aimed at giving Republicans up to five more U.S. House seats to help the party maintain its narrow majority in Congress. While mid-decade redistricting is uncommon, it is not unprecedented—Texas also redrew its congressional boundaries in 2003.

After the Legislature unveiled its proposed map in late July, over 50 House Democrats left Texas for Illinois, California, New York and Massachusetts, where they met with leaders of the Democratic-led states. Democrats decried the redistricting plan as “racially discriminatory” while Republicans insisted it was drawn for political, not racial, purposes.

Their absence prevented the 150-member House from reaching a two-thirds majority, or quorum, needed to pass bills and take other official legislative action. House Republicans voted to issue arrest warrants for their quorum-breaking colleagues shortly after they left in early August, although no members were actually arrested.

Abbott and Paxton vowed to expel members who broke quorum, arguing that Democrats had “abandoned their official duties” and asking the Texas Supreme Court to intervene.

In an August lawsuit, Abbott and his lawyers said that Wu, who chairs the Texas House Democratic Caucus, violated his oath of office by leaving the state and seeking to run out the clock on a 30-day special legislative session.

“Most people who repeatedly fail to show up for work get fired. Public servants must be held to the same standard,” Abbott wrote. “Permitting [Wu] to continue occupying his office so that he can abdicate the duties of that office will only enable future legislators to grind state government to a halt.”

Wu’s lawyers responded that in breaking quorum, he was representing Texans’ interests by fighting a congressional map that he felt would negatively impact his constituents and “target voters based on race.”

“[Wu] has not died and has not been expelled from the House by the constitutionally prescribed means: a 2/3 vote of the House,” Wu’s lawyers wrote in August. “His presence in another state is not a voluntary resignation. … Respondent is entitled to serve through the entire term to which he was elected.”

When Democrats returned to Austin at the beginning of a second special session, the Legislature quickly passed the new congressional map and more than a dozen other bills, Community Impact reported.

The latest

In the May 15 opinion, Blacklock highlighted the separation of powers, citing legal precedent from a case following a 2021 quorum break, when the state Supreme Court found that “it is not [the judicial branch’s] role to resolve disputes between the other two branches that those branches can resolve for themselves.”

Blacklock noted that when Democrats left the state last summer, “the present members of the House wielded their constitutional power to compel attendance” without judicial intervention.

“Whatever wrong may have been committed by the absent House members, the Texas Constitution’s internal political remedies, none of which involve the judicial branch, were sufficient to the task of restoring the House’s ability to do business,” he wrote. “Should those remedies unexpectedly prove inadequate in a future case, we might have occasion to consider whether any judicial remedy could ever be available.”

Wu celebrated the ruling in a May 15 statement.

“When Greg Abbott threatened to arrest and expel us for denying him a quorum, we told him he should ‘come and take it.’ He tried,” Wu said. “The Constitution does not let a governor erase voters’ choices when their choices are inconvenient to him.”

Abbott’s office argued that the governor’s lawsuit helped end the walkout and said the state was prepared to fight future quorum breaks.

“No elected official has the right to abandon their duties, flee the state, and shut down the people’s business,” Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for the governor, said in a May 15 statement. “If

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