It was a crazy night in Texas politics that ended just before 4 AM Central Time, with a controversial abortion bill (that would have shut down the majority of Texas clinics) getting killed at the last minute.

Carolyn Jones at The Texas Observer has a great writeup of what went down, but it was basically this.

State Senator Wendy Davis became a hero to the pro-choice movement, with 13-hour filibuster, but with 15 minutes to go before midnight, Democrats seeking to stop the bill were out of options, and the final vote was ready to proceed.

That's when pro-choice activists in the chamber started shouting, and created enough chaos so that the state Senate couldn't vote by midnight, which was the end of the legislative session. The final vote to pass the bill happened just after midnight at 12:03.

However, Republicans claimed that the vote got in before midnight.

According to Jones, Republicans had to admit that they were a few minutes late on the bill, when Texas State Senator Juan Chuy Hinojosa tweeted this photo showing that the initial readout of the vote indicated it happened on June 26, but that a subsequent readout had been changed, showing June 25.

The initial time stamp on the Capitol website and on Senate documents placed the vote at 12:02 or 12:03 on June 26. But then someone mysteriously changed the time stamp to make it appear SB 5 passed before the deadline (see the post below for photographic evidence). The time stamp evidence, circulated on Twitter, eventually forced GOP leaders to admit defeat, at least for tonight.

Here's the photo tweeted by @TxChuy:

Read the full Texas Observer account of what happened here »