State Rep. Claudia Ordaz Perez represents Texas’s House District 76 in El Paso County. She is the former Mayor Pro Tempore and City Councilwoman for the City of El Paso, where she was an advocate for working parents and family caregivers. At City Council, she was successful in creating local policies impacting living wages for workers, local park enhancements for children, funding for new infrastructure for municipal police and fire departments, local animal shelter improvements, and promoting investment opportunities to expand job growth in the Borderplex region.
In 2021, Rep. Ordaz Perez was among a group of Texan Democrats who broke quorum to halt a legislative session in Texas and fight a controversial voting rights bill. The law added new identification requirements for voting by mail, banned 24-hour voting and drive-through voting and established uniform voting hours in the state. Republicans argued it was needed to ensure election integrity. Democrats said the new proposed rules disproportionately affected minority voters and they fled Texas to break quorum as a result.
Busting the quorum isn’t unheard of — in fact, it has happened at least two other times in Texas political history. But it is considered a nuclear option, a last resort when the debate has shut down and one side believes it’s being railroaded. As their quorum-breaking departure captured attention around the world, the Texas' Democrats' drastic move to break quorum was hard to ignore. And while they may not have spurred immediate federal change in their favour, this dramatic walkout halfway across the country marked a new inflection point in the national voting rights debate and shaped Texas politics forever.
In this Episode, Rep. Ordaz Perez shares the needs of the borderplex community in El Paso, the changes in legislation that drove her to work with fellow Representatives to break quorum, the development of the “black and brown” movement led by women, the reception in Washington D.C. and the importance of data informed discussion on critical legislation to protect democratic process in the United States.
https://house.texas.gov/members/member-page/?district=76
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