Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu along with other members of the Texas House are joined by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker as they speak about Texas Republican plans to redraw the House map during a press conference On August 3.
On Sunday evening, Texas House Democrats made the fateful decision to flee the state to block Republicans from quickly passing a new Trump-ordered redistricting plan that could give Republicans up to five new seats in the US House, rigging the midterms before a single vote has been cast.
It’s a risky and expensive strategy for Democrats; each member who leaves will be subject to $500 in fines per day. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened to arrest and expel Democrats who leave the state, citing a nonbinding legal opinion from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that will ultimately be up to the courts to decide. But denying Republicans a quorum was the only way Democrats could at least temporarily stop Trump’s Texas takeover and put pressure on their party to devise a national response.
“Republicans are stealing our democracy right before our very eyes,” Texas Democratic Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer said when a large contingent of Democratic House members arrived on Sunday outside Chicago, Illinois, joined by Gov. JB Pritzker. “Texas Democrats are here and we have a message to Donald Trump: not on our watch.”
“You’re saying to Texas voters: you don’t get to pick who represents you. Donald Trump picks who represents you.”
The decision by Texas Democrats to go to blue states like Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts underscores how nationalized this battle has become compared to the last time Democrats left the state to attempt to block a mid-decade redistricting plan, when they fled to Ardmore, Oklahoma in 2003.
Democrats left in a hurry because Texas Republicans were doing Trump’s bidding at lightning speed. On Friday, the Texas House redistricting committee held the only hearing on the GOP map, voted it out of committee on Saturday morning on a party-line vote, and were set to pass it through the House on Monday.
“In this moment of democracy survival, people need to be prepared to do anything in order to ensure that our constitutional system of government continues to exist,” former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder told me on Monday. “The authoritarian move that was dictated to Texas by the White House needs to be opposed by any means necessary.”
Instead of investigating how more than 135 Texans died in horrific flooding, the GOP-controlled legislature made re-gerrymandering the state their top priority.
Abbott claimed the new redistricting map was intended to address “constitutional concerns,” referencing a legally dubious letter from the Justice Department alleging that four districts, all represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats, were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” But Republicans in the legislature admitted it was all about picking up as many seats as possible to further Trump’s plan to manipulate the midterms and insulate their party from an angry public through extreme gerrymandering.
“I’m not beating around the bush,” Republican Rep. Todd Hunter, who introduced the map, said at a legislative hearing on Friday. “We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance.” Contra Abbott and the Justice Department, he admitted the map was being redrawn “for partisan purposes.”
“This bill was not based off that DOJ letter,” added Rep. Cody Vasut, the chair of the House special committee on redistricting. “This bill was based off of improving political performance.”
The GOP plan would create 30 districts, out of 38, that Trump carried by 10 points or more, up from 25 in the current map, and reduce the number of seats that Trump carried by 10 points or less from two seats to zero.
“The Republican members on this dais have outsourced our democracy to Mar-a-Lago and the Oval Office,” responded Democratic US House Rep. Greg Casar, whose Austin-based district is effectively dismantled under the new map. Though non-white voters are 60 percent of Texas’s population and fueled 95 percent of new growth in the state over the past decade, the plan increases the number of majority white districts, from 22 to 24, and dismantles the districts of two lawmakers of color, Casar and Rep. Al Green of Houston.
“You’re saying to Texas voters: you don’t get to pick who represents you,” Casar said. “Donald Trump picks who represents you.”
Demanding that Texas redraw its maps mid-decade, when the legislature is practically the same as the one that passed the last congressional redistricting in 2021 and that map is being challenged in court for discriminating against voters of color, is yet another way that Trump is normalizing something that is deeply abnormal. And he’s setting off what Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) calls “a race to the bottom” that will lead to even more extreme gerrymandering nationwide.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has already vowed to respond, floating a complex plan to convince the legislature to pass new maps targeting vulnerable Republicans and bypass the state’s independent redistricting commission, which voters would then be asked to approve in a special election this November. Other blue states could follow, although their options are complicated either by independent commissions or because Democrats have already maximized the number of seats they can pick up in such states. A case in point: Democrats already control more than 80 percent of US House seats in Illinois, where most Texas Democrats arrived on Sunday evening. That map received an F for partisan fairness from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) on Monday called on Democratic state legislatures to “pursue redistricting mid-cycle” while noting that their party will be at a distinct disadvantage in a gerrymandering arms race. According to the DLCC, “Republican state legislative majorities oversee 55 Democratic Congressional seats while Democratic state legislative majorities oversee only 35 GOP Districts.”
Holder, who has long supported an independent redistricting process, compared the Democrats newfound embrace of aggressive redistricting tactics to the US embrace of Joseph Stalin during World War II. “This is a perilous moment for our democracy, and so you have to do things that you wouldn’t necessarily support, and that over the long term, I do not support,” he told me. “I’m concerned about a race to the bottom where gerrymandering just proliferates all around the country. It’s what we’ve been fighting against. But what they are trying to do here in Texas really is, and I can’t emphasize this enough, a threat to our democracy, and as a result, extreme measures have to be taken to fight it.”
Red states, from Ohio to Florida to Missouri, and beyond, are sure to respond, engaging in the very type of behavior that voters abhor and that super-charges public distrust in political institutions: self-interested politicians pre-determining election outcomes to benefit themselves and their party while depriving the electorate of meaningful choices and representation.
It’s hard to see where this ends or how it ends in a good place for American democracy.
“If there’s a gerrymandering arms race, it ends with the American people being cheated of their democracy,” Holder said. “It ends with the American people being deprived of their most essential right, and that is to cast a meaningful ballot. These are temporary measures that the Democrats have to take, and then we’ve got to get back to fighting for fairness.”
The last time Texas Democrats broke quorum, to block a sweeping voter suppression bill in 2021, they went to Washington to lobby Democrats to pass federal legislation that would’ve banned this type of egregious partisan gerrymandering.
That effort failed when two Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, joined with Republicans to filibuster it. The consequences of that inaction, along with Supreme Court decisions effectively legalizing partisan gerrymandering and gutting protections against racial gerrymandering, are on full display today.
“This quorum break is not about the Democratic Party,” Martinez Fischer said on Sunday. “It’s about the democratic process.”