Former FBI employees warn that the law enforcement agency — which has reportedly agreed to assist Texas Republicans in hunting down Democratic legislators who’ve left the state in protest — is throwing itself headfirst into an ethical dilemma it narrowly avoided 22 years ago.
Texas state Democrats have fled to Illinois, denying Republicans a quorum in the state Legislature and preventing them from passing a proposed gerrymandered map that could cost Democrats up to five congressional seats. The situation escalated on Thursday, when Sen. John Cornyn said the FBI’s director, Kash Patel, approved his request “to assist state and local law enforcement in locating runaway Texas House Democrats.”
It’s unclear what exactly that assistance entails. There are certain penalties for breaking a quorum, but how far the federal government can or would go to bring the lawmakers back is unclear. Republicans have signed civil warrants calling for their colleagues’ arrests, but there’s no federal law prohibiting quorum-breaking. Still, half a dozen former FBI employees told NOTUS that special agents could employ terrorist tracking surveillance tools to geolocate these Democrat lawmakers’ phones and even arrest them to forcefully transport them back home, which would amount to a drastic escalation.