Sen. Sarah Eckhardt Analyzes “Gunfire and Fireworks” of This Legislative Session

State Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, D-Austin, at her desk on the floor of the Texas Senate (photo by Carter Johnston)

At about the halfway point of the 140-day legislative session, the Chronicle sat down with Sarah Eckhardt, Austin’s progressive state senator, for an in-depth discussion of the session and the national political moment. With the regular session ended, we circled back to Eckhardt to reflect on how the Texas Legislature handled the first four months of the second Trump administration. Here’s what she had to say, lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.

Sen. Sarah Eckhardt: I’m sitting here sifting through the rubble.

The Austin Chronicle: Right. This closes out your third regular session. If you were to assign a theme or a spotlight issue to this session, how do you think you would do that?

Eckhardt: Definitely, there’s a growing appetite for authoritarianism.

Chronicle: It’s more intense now than it was in 2023 or 2021?

Eckhardt: It feels more intense, yeah. And it feels like perhaps it’s more intense because there’s going to be some shuffling of the deck in the statewide positions, and so there’s a lot of performative authoritarianism to prove up their bona fides.

Chronicle: What examples are you thinking of?

Eckhardt: You know, the bathroom bill was resuscitated. A committee on family and marriage. A doubling down on the total ban on abortion while paying some lip service to an emergency medical exception that, yes, was in there all along, but as I’ve said before: Clarifying one’s cruelty doesn’t make you any less cruel. Of course, the Ten Commandments bill, and only two genders in Texas. I mean, lots and lots of opportunities to add your culture warrior credentials.

Chronicle: Thinking about funding cuts, did the Legislature overall act like things were changing in the federal government?

Eckhardt: Not at all. To the extent that there was a recognition that the federal government is pulling back and causing some economic chaos, it was handled behind closed doors. Nobody wanted – well, Democrats were fine with it, of course – but Republicans did not want to openly question the federal administration. So to the extent that there was shoring up in education, energy and water, and emergency response, nobody openly acknowledged that we cannot rely on the federal government.

It was a lot of gunfire and fireworks on Main Street type stuff, rather than workmanlike, “Let’s sit down at a table and figure out what happens when we don’t have this historic surplus and Texans are rightfully concerned about housing stability, food stability, the cost of insurance.” We did hardly anything on those three things.

Chronicle: Thinking about the defeated bills that were most crucial, what comes to mind and what did it take?

Eckhardt: If it was originating in the Senate, the strategy was to at least make a record of how bad it was going into the House, and then hope that the House process – where there’s more debate – could lessen the bad effects or kill the bill on a point of order. So that was the play for most of the session, until that one Wednesday where we had a strategic advantage in the Senate and could kill off eight bills in one day. [They included a DEI ban and placing a celebration of the Bible directly into state statute for the next 10 years.] The next day we came back and passed by agreement with our Republican colleagues eight bills that were good – half Democrat and half Republican.

Chronicle: Because the procedural issue would have allowed Democrats to kill every bill moving forward, was there any discussion, even briefly, of “let’s block all these bills”?

Eckhardt: I think there was a gleeful moment where we realized we could, but nobody seriously thought that we should. Democrats have long held the position, and I’m very proud of this, that we are not a retribution party. We don’t use power for power’s sake. We use power for good policy.

Chronicle: On this concept of retribution: Recently I was watching a video of fascism professors from Yale who are leaving the country, and one professor used a phrase that I haven’t heard much: dominant group victimhood. Part of what’s interesting about Texas is this attitude from Republicans that they are the victim party, even though they run the state, and have since the ’90s. Are you seeing that? Or are you seeing more of a celebration now?

Eckhardt: Dominant group victimhood, that’s a good way to describe it. The politics of grievance has been another way folks have described it. And then there’s the older description: just sore winner syndrome. And the perennial issue, I think that really proves this up, is their insistence on the “big steal.” We used to have bills, even this session, that continue to chew the cud of a 2020 big steal even though they all won in the same election cycle.

But I’m going to throw in another philosophical idea that perhaps explains the politics behind the moment we’re living in. The GOP has been engaged in a decades-long messaging campaign that says: Government is incompetent if not corrupt. And if you elect the GOP person who is espousing this view, they will prove it to you. It’s a way to make people scared all the time.