The abortion queen says she’s in. Texas State Senator Wendy Davis has begun telling prominent Democrats in the state that she will be running for Governor next year. She will likely be up against Republican Greg Abbott, currently the Texas attorney general. Until a few months ago I had never heard of Davis. But, as Tom Dart wrote for The Guardian, “The state senator from Fort Worth became an overnight celebrity in June, as a result of her 11-hour filibuster against restrictive new abortion legislation.” Being reelected in 2012, her term as Senator would ordinarily not be up until 2016, but earlier this year the Texas senators drew for terms in a post-redistricting, once a decade process and Davis drew a two year term. If she loses the gubernatorial election next year she will not have a Senate term to complete.
Her voting record as Senator is largely unknown outside of Texas, except of course for the abortion bill. Mark P. Jones, Chairman of Political Science at Rice University examined the voting records of all the senators and found hers to be fourth most liberal senator out of the 23 senators who served in all three time periods examined and the eight who served in two of them. Her signature accomplishment is most certainly the filibuster she mounted to block Senate Bill 5 this past June. Senate Bill 5 bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, requires abortion clinics to meet the same standards that hospital-style surgical centers do, and mandates that doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Davis spoke for eleven hours and did manage to keep the bill from being voted on before the session was over by statute. Liberals and feminists groups were ready to erect statues in her honor. But, Governor Rick Perry added the bill to those being considered by a special session, where it was passed and then signed into law by Perry. As a writer for National Review Online put it, “Wendy Davis won the battle, but Rick Perry won the war.”
Aside from her temporary success at stopping the abortion bill, I have not found any article touting her accomplishments in office. Were it not for her filibuster I doubt she would have been prompted to run for Governor. Apparently, trying to make it remain possible for women in Texas to have abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy is something the left holds dear enough to want to elevate this woman to the Governor’s office of the second most populous state in the nation. Abortion is sacrosanct and all other issues are secondary. One thing is for sure, none of Davis’s campaign literature will contain the phrase, “For the children.”
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