Texas, like ancient Rome

Texas Governor Greg Abbott.LUCAS JACKSON / Reuters

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• Democratic Congressmen Leave Texas Capitol to Boycott Republican Bill Restricting Voting

The strange news does not stop, those events never seen in this century that interest Xi Jinping so much.

This week, more than fifty congressmen and senators from Texas have fled their state and have taken refuge in Washington to prevent the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, from forcing them to go to the Capitol in Austin, the Texas capital, to vote.

It is not the first time that these congressmen are absent to avoid the two-thirds quorum necessary for the reforms with which the Republicans seek to limit the right to vote. But this time the governor has ordered his arrest, has suspended his salaries and positions, and intends to call as many extraordinary sessions as necessary until his surrender is achieved.

This battle is part of the legislative wave launched by the Republican party to drive Democrats away from the polls. Launched after Trump's defeat, its objective is to regain a majority in Congress and the Senate in the 2022 mid-term elections and position itself to regain the White House in 2024. Part of the belief, mostly accepted by Republicans , that it was Trump who won the elections and not Joe Biden, so that instead of facilitating the vote, it must be made more difficult to avoid the colossal fraud that never existed.

The fight affects all institutions, from the Supreme Court, which has already ruled in a case in favor of the Republicans, to the Capitol in Washington, where Trump supporters have a blocking minority in the Senate to block any legislation. that serves to protect the exercise of the right to vote. And to Joe Biden, who has described this citizen right as the moral cause that occupies the heart of his presidency.

This strange news of the 21st century has remarkable historical resonances. The Roman Republic forged from the so-called

, when the plebs tried to organize a separate city from the aristocracy on one of the seven Roman hills, Mount Aventine. Out of the conflict arose the tribunes of the plebs and representative democracy. Also known as

the boycott of Mussolini by the Democratic parliamentarians in 1924, in a bitter and definitive episode of peaceful resistance to the dictatorship after the assassination by the fascist squads of Congressman Giacomo Matteotti. As in the past, the future of democracy in the United States depends in large part on the Texas Aventine.