June 26, 2013 | On June 25, 2013, Texas state senator Wendy Davis waged a talking filibuster to kill SB5, a Republican-backed bill that would close most Texas abortion clinics. As Davis’s filibuster looked more and more likely to succeed, her opponents used increasingly questionable tactics to force a vote before midnight, the end of the special legislative session. At 12:02 AM on June 26, the Texas Senate’s GOP leadership called a vote on the bill, in defiance of the chamber’s own rules, and declared victory. Davis’s supporters, both those in the gallery and the 182,000 who watched on the Texas Tribune's live feed, used the Senate's own rules to force the GOP to nullify the invalid vote.
The Irregular Gentlewomen are releasing WendyClock, which is an open-source timeline of #standwithwendy. We strongly encourage people to fork the repo and submit pull requests — this is an open beta release! We have done our best to track down citations of the shenanigans, but if you know of other datapoints, please help us organize the information.
We are grateful to Tristan Healy, Danielle Church, and Megan Sumerell for their help; without them, this release of WendyClock would not be possible.