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After more than a month of overtime legislating, the partisan divide cleaving the Texas Legislature came into sharp focus late Wednesday evening, as the Republican-controlled House prepared to close out the special session by adopting new rules clamping down on quorum breaks.

“Doesn’t the minority party have rights?” Rep. Barbara Gervin Hawkins, D-San Antonio and chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, demanded amid a bitter floor debate over the new rules. “I must ask you: How can you smile in a colleague’s face and stab them in the freaking back?”

The Legislature gaveled out of its second special session shortly past midnight Thursday, after Republican lawmaker

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