How To Survive a Republican Power Grab

This was not how Greg Casar planned to spend his recess. On a Thursday afternoon in mid-August, as the clock ticked down on the first special session of the Texas legislature, the 36-year-old second-term Democratic congressman was sitting at the head of a small wooden conference table, commiserating with the legislator on the other end of the phone about the mess their Republican colleagues had foisted on them. Casar, the youngest-ever chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, had hoped to visit a swing district to hammer Republican Medicaid cuts during the summer break. Instead, he was holed up in the capital, trying to fend off a power grab that threatened to upend both the midterms and his career.

We were at his district office in an unmarked building in East Austin. The sparsely decorated walls and bare concrete floor gave the place a transient feel. On the table sat a dozen tubs of Play-Doh. “For our anxiety,” shouted a staffer from a cubicle by the wall. When his call was over, Casar, dressed casually in an untucked short-sleeved button-down and bluish-gray chinos, put down his phone with a “Tuck Frump” sticker on the case, and filled me in: A state senator from Houston wanted to grab him for an event—details to come.

“I’ll do whatever she wants to,” he said, with a laugh. “I’ll be in whatever she wants.”

Ever since President Donald Trump asked Texas Republicans to redraw their maps^[2] to add five more GOP seats, it had been one thing after another. In the short span since I’d shown up, a state representative who had fled the state with her colleagues to prevent a quorum called to check in. A congresswoman from Houston wanted to talk strategy. David Hogg, the gun control activist and former vice chair^[3] of the Democratic National Committee, was texting. Casar had just spoken with colleagues from California about a retaliatory map^[4]. There was an organizing Zoom to hop on and another that evening; a video to film about the maps for a Latino group; and a Q&A with an influencer to promote a big rally outside the state Capitol. Casar called a 15-year-old constituent who had left a message. He wanted to talk about redistricting.

Under the new lines, Casar had been redrawn into the same district as Lloyd ­Doggett, a 78-year-old, 16-term congressman with $6 million in the bank and no desire to step down. A primary would be difficult and expensive. Avoiding one would be a test of Casar’s influence and tact. In some ways, his situation embodied that of the party as a whole—a rising generation of leaders, caught between a defiant old guard^[5] and an opposition willing to change the rules to stop them. Casar has energy and a vision for where the party should be headed, and a red-state labor ­organizer’s capacity to roll rocks up hills. His belief that Democrats need “villains,” and an agenda rooted in populist simplicity, seems tailor-made for the age of oligarchy. Steve Adler, the former mayor of Austin, told me Casar should be in Congress for the next 30 years. Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, calls Casar “the future.” What he needed first was a district.

Over a tumultuous but pivotal week in August, I tagged along as Casar juggled the dictatorial present and an uncertain future. To him, the attempt to racially gerrymander his constituents represented a challenge to the Democratic Party that transcended the midterms. If the Supreme Court let the maps stand, and the Voting Rights Act was gutted further^[6], what was happening to Austin and Houston could then happen all over the country. Fewer Black and Hispanic opportunity districts would mean fewer and less powerful nonwhite representatives. It would cause voters to disengage from politics even further, and change what kind of Democrats might win.

“We’re already losing ground with working-­class Latino and Black men,” he said. “I’m afraid that there could be a lot of things that go wrong with the Democratic Party, but frankly, if we lose the power of ensuring that districts don’t cut up Black and brown communities, then we could wind up with a system of authoritarian Republicans and then very milquetoast, technocratic, incoherent sets of Democrats.”

We were supposed to be making small talk between calls. “I didn’t think this was what we would talk about,” he said, almost apologetically. “That’s just what I’m thinking about today. I just don’t think we’ve thought about the further-reaching implications of what that could mean.”

When the maps dropped in late July, Casar and a small group of allies convened an emergency meeting to plot his path forward. The congressman, who called into the session on his way home from the gym, quickly settled on a plan. While he would declare his intention to run in Austin no matter what (and work with Zohran Mamdani’s media strategist on a launch video^[7]), Casar would not say a word about the primary. He would fight for his job by doing his job—introducing bills, leading the CPC, and doing whatever he could to block or delay redistricting.

Part of that work included helping Democrats define more clearly what—besides Trump—they were really against. Like a certain centibillionaire^[8] with a gigafactory in his district. (Casar keeps a “Muck Fusk” sticker on his laptop.) Or an ICE contractor making money “hand over fist” off his constituents. He believes Democrats “have to be able to pick a villain.” So the next morning, Casar invited me to see one for myself.

About 40 minutes northeast of downtown Austin, the small city of Taylor is the Republican dream in miniature. On the way into town, I passed by a $17 billion Samsung semiconductor factory lured to the area by generous incentives. The flag of South Korea flew overhead. Subdivisions sprang up like mushrooms. Near the railroad tracks was CoreCivic’s T. Don Hutto detention center—a former prison repurposed as a holding pen for immigrants. The promise of Texas Republicans is that you can be both: high-tech and medieval.

Casar parked down the road from the entrance, between a Union Pacific yard and a small park. A dozen or so TV producers and activists were waiting for him. Someone pulled him aside to straighten his tie. Then they set off toward the gates.

His purpose was twofold, Casar explained. He was there to check on a constituent whose daughter had reported that he and others were stuck without air conditioning in broiling conditions. But he was also helping to establish a record of what was happening at ICE. For months, the Department of Homeland Security had flouted a federal law^[9] that allows members of Congress to perform oversight at ICE detention facilities without notice, insisting that all visits must be scheduled in advance. He stashed his phone in his breast pocket, with the camera facing conspicuously out.

By the time Casar reached the driveway, CoreCivic was waiting. Traffic cones blocked the entrance, where a large goateed man in a powder blue CoreCivic shirt and a royal blue CoreCivic hat got out of a van, and without identifying himself, read in a monotone from a script: “Good morning. I understand you are interested in visiting an ICE facility. I would like to walk you through the process of requirements.” Visitation requests were to be submitted in writing. Follow-up questions could be sent over email. “Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.”

“Sir, so I have the law here,” Casar said, holding up a copy of the statute.

The man cut him off: “You all are not allowed on the property. Have a nice day.”

“Is there an attorney or supervisor I can speak to, sir?” Casar asked. “As a member of Congress—”

The van door opened.

“—the law requires that I be allowed to enter the facility.”

The van door slammed.

“Is there somebody that I can speak to?”

The engine started but the van didn’t move. The guard stared off toward the trains.

Casar first visited T. Don Hutto when he was 21. Moved by a class at the University of Virginia where students read Tolstoy^[10] alongside incarcerated teens, he’d begun visiting immigrants at the detention center while interning in Austin. The detainees he met were his age, if not younger. They were, he said, “without sounding exaggerated or patronizing about it, the most harmless people you can imagine on Earth.”

For Casar, a high school cross-country star^[11] who was raised in Houston by immigrant parents from Mexico, his time in Charlottesville was a political baptism. He volunteered for Barack Obama and helped revive a campaign to force the university to pay workers a living wage.

“Greg has an intensity,” said Erin Franey, a classmate who worked with Casar on the living wage fight. He had a knack for “recognizing all these intricate nuances, and this discernment of like, What’s the next step? And what’s the twelfth step from now?” Franey described the future congressman as a coalition builder, who brought disparate groups together and helped turn a niche cause into a popular movement.

Casar was the picture of a college activist, spending late nights on the top floor of the anthropology building, hashing out strategy. When an alt-weekly asked him^[12] to show off the contents of his backpack, Casar pulled out a Guatemalan bracelet, a hacky sack, a half-eaten orange, a volume of Kant, and the novel Ashes of Izalco, about the massacre of Indigenous residents in 1930s El Salvador. In a video of a rally^[13] from this time, Casar’s hair is a mess, and his beard is not quite there. But his message was shovel-ready: a clear demand—$11.44 an hour—and a push to ban private companies from contracting with UVA unless they, too, paid up.

That campus work led him to Austin, and to the Workers Defense Project, a group advocating for worksite protections for often-undocumented laborers in a state that’s notoriously hostile to both. WDP and Casar worked with what they had. One of his first tasks was organizing a thirst strike to build support for a city ordinance forcing contractors to offer water breaks. At a luncheon I attended for local Hispanic leaders while shadowing Casar, an elderly woman grabbed my arm to tell me about the candlelight vigils WDP held outside the homes of deadbeat contractors. Jim Rigby, an Austin pastor, recalled one vigil where a businessman with Lexuses in his driveway broke down in tears as he tried to explain why he couldn’t afford to pay.

Casar’s official role was “business liaison,” the New York Times noted^[14] in a 2013 story about the group, but “his title might more fittingly be thorn-in-the-side.” He marshaled construction workers to testify at city council meetings. According to Emily Timm, the organization’s co-founder, when a group of hotel workers showed up at one hearing, ostensibly to support an embattled developer, Casar worked out that they were actually on the clock—and coaxed them into telling their story to the press^[15]. The WDP showcased Casar’s political sensibilities: coalition building, strategic planning, and a willingness to make an example of opponents.

In 2018, as a member of the Austin City Council, Casar followed the case of a constituent named Laura Monterrosa, a Salvadoran asylum seeker placed in solitary confinement after a guard allegedly sexually assaulted her and she attempted suicide. Monterrosa’s cause had attracted national attention. When Casar dropped by to check on her, he was stopped in the driveway. CoreCivic’s concern, an official explained^[16], was that he planned to talk to the press afterward about what he saw.

This time, the cameras were already rolling. After being rebuffed by the man in the van, Casar paced on the grass for a few minutes before announcing that he was going to ring the doorbell. He paused to let TV crews mic him up, then walked purposefully up to the gate and asked to speak with a supervisor.

“Sure,” said a woman on the other end of the intercom. “Just give me a few minutes.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“A few minutes,” she repeated. “Stand by.”

“Of course,” Casar said.

A few minutes became 20. A lawyer who was there to see her client parked along a ditch and joined Casar by the gate. The woman ignored her too. Casar asked if they could wait inside because of the heat. Nothing. Casar’s soft, Texas manners began to flag. He showed his congressional pin. He flashed his congressional ID. The only noise was the rippling of the flags overhead, and the murmur of the idling van.

A short while later, he came walking back, still clutching the statute. As a cameraman crouched down to reattach a dangling lapel mic, Casar unloaded for the cameras. “CoreCivic, the multimillion-dollar corporation that runs this prison for immigrants on behalf of the Trump administration” is “breaking the law to keep me out,” he said. “This big corporation is taking taxpayer money, locking up innocent people from Texas, and then is trying to hide them in there.”

After announcing that he was adding his name to a lawsuit a dozen of his colleagues have filed against the administration, Casar called it a morning. It had been jarring to watch a member of Congress be simply ghosted. (CoreCivic did not respond to my own requests for comment.) As we walked back toward the cars, his scuffed white sneakers crunching on loose gravel, I asked if it felt futile to see his authority casually disregarded. No, he replied, it felt familiar: “It’s just a common tactic from the boss.”

The episode was more proof, to Casar, that the administration and its allies were scared of scrutiny. He wanted progressives to sustain that pressure. If he feared that the redistricting process would leave the Voting Rights Act in tatters, and his party more “milquetoast,” Casar was also worried that too much idealism might hamper its response. While Texas’ Democratic state representatives hunkered down outside Chicago, he was lobbying progressives in California to scrap their independent redistricting commission so they could add more Democratic seats.

“It’s good to be a shining light on a hill when you’re inspiring others,” he said, but this fight was about power, not policy. “You’re not inspiring former Confederate states to do independent redistricting.”

When he wasn’t working the phones on redistricting, Casar was helping to plot progressives’ next offensive. His election as CPC chair in December 2024 punctuated a rapid ascent on Capitol Hill. After winning a primary handily in 2022 for a seat that stretches from Austin to downtown San Antonio, Casar impressed colleagues during his first term while serving as a progressive-caucus whip, a role that put him in regular touch with about 100 members. Garcia, the top Democrat on oversight (where Casar also serves), described his friend as a strategist who “will crack open a beer at the end of the night and talk it through.”

Casar is close with a group of young-for-DC progressive colleagues who, like him, have not been content to quietly accrue seniority. (“He is the first sophomore congressman to lead the Democrats on a committee in over 100 years!” Casar said of Garcia. “Good for him, and also that sucks!”) He’d sometimes catch shows with Reps. Maxwell Frost and ­Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the 9:30 Club. After work, Frost told me, he and Casar sometimes take turns playing albums for each other at the Texan’s apartment. (“He has a beautiful Pro-Ject record player with great speakers,” Frost said.) But he’s also opened channels with Democrats who don’t embrace the label—purple-district representatives such as Pat Ryan^[17] of New York, with whom he shares an interest in economic populism.

People who followed his rise in Austin say there’s a “practical” streak in Casar that’s borne out in his political alliances. He was someone, said Adler, the former mayor, who was constantly looking to expand the tent without regard for “purity.”

He learned “what it means to navigate your way to successful outcomes,” Wendy Davis^[18], a former state senator and gubernatorial nominee, told me. “Sometimes that means we have to give up the perfect for the very, very good. And I think he’s just exceptionally good at that…He has this ­beautiful mix of progressive idealism and yet a pragmatic approach to how to actually accomplish those goals. And it’s kind of rare.”

But Casar hasn’t forgotten the power of a protest. When Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law effectively overriding Austin’s water-­breaks rule, Casar pressed Biden’s Labor Department to issue its own standard. To force the point, he staged a nine-hour thirst strike outside the US Capitol in a July heat wave. The United Farm Workers icon ­Dolores Huerta, whom Casar had sought advice from during his first run for office, took the red-eye to Washington to give him his final sip^[19] of water.

On the drive back from Taylor, Casar munched on Shipley donuts and took a meeting on what he was calling the “Battleships” program. The conceit was that what the Congressional Progressive Caucus needed were actionable ideas that could double as a campaign message and a governing agenda. The point was to pick fights on issues that polled well even in swing districts, but that corporate interests might oppose. It also reflected his view of where the party had erred. In the wake of the last election, some Democrats have argued that their problem was pronouns. Casar believed the party could tackle the root causes of the party’s crisis without abandoning vulnerable people.

“There’s a regular poll for decades that said, ‘What do you like about the Dems? What do you think they’re for?’ And until close to 2010, the number-one positive thing about the Democratic Party is that it was the party for working people,” he told me later. “Now it says it’s not the case, and our strengths are on health care and climate—which are important things that I care deeply about, but we can’t protect health care or the climate if we don’t first make sure that most working people think we’re the party for them.”

If the Resistance 2.0 feels heavier, almost haunted, it’s because the first Resistance necessitated a second. While the Biden era produced some progressive wins, Casar felt Democrats often got bogged down in the details, constructing fine-tuned policy prescriptions that satisfied wonks but not voters.

Take the child care funding that then-Sen. Joe Manchin ultimately blocked from the Inflation Reduction Act. “Even that is still so technocratic,” Casar said. “If we have to go out there and try to tell people, ‘We’re trying to bring down the cost of child care, and the way we’re going to do it is we’re going to send money to states, and hopefully your governor sets up a subsidy program for a child care center that could then maybe qualify for a voucher,’ people will be like, Shit isn’t gonna help me.”

Earlier in his career, Casar said, he was in “so many strategy meetings” about flipping Texas blue^[20]. One involved talking to voters in Democratic cities about government. “One of the only places in the entire state where people could identify what a Democratic politician had done for them was Julián Castro, as mayor of San Antonio, passing ‘Pre-K 4 SA^[21],’” Casar said. “It’s universal and bold and new and helpful to people, and they knew that if they voted for [him], it was something he was going to try to do, and he did it.”

There was power in straightforward solutions, and identifiable bad guys. Trump understood this in a cynical way, and Mamdani channeled it more positively, Casar said. Pointing to a construction site across the street where a crew of workers was putting up a new development, he offered a simple test.

“If I walked over there and said, ‘Hey, here’s two things that I’m working on,’ will they give a shit?” he asked. “If the answer is yes, we should probably do it. If the answer is no, we should probably bring it up once we solve the whole ­democracy-is-falling-apart problem.”

Everything was building toward the big Saturday rally at the Capitol—a last stand before the quorum-breakers returned home and the Texas redistricting battle entered its legislative endgame. Lawmakers had indicated that their next big fight would be in the courts. The Austin primary loomed, and Doggett, speaking that morning, showed no signs of stepping down. Instead, he argued that the map offered an opportunity for “a dynamic nominee” to win back Hispanic voters in one of the Trump-leaning districts Republicans created outside the city. In other words, Casar, the Latino candidate, should move to South Texas. If that point was too subtle, Doggett made an explicit argument against generational change, invoking two progressive icons who, he noted, were still going strong. Bernie Sanders was 83, Doggett told the crowd—and Huerta, who would be speaking later that day, was an energetic 95.

“The only way that we will stop Trump’s fascist authoritarianism,” he said, “is to benefit from the contributions of every generation.”

Casar rolled up to a union parking lot across the street soon after. He was getting texts about what he’d missed. We made our way to a makeshift green room, in the office of a state representative who had left the state. Huerta was sitting in a chair in the back, watching the rally on a laptop while writing notes in longhand on pieces of white paper. Casar crouched at her side, filling her in on the status of the redistricting fight, and reminding her of advice she’d given him during his first campaign for city council: “Do house meetings.”

Then he left the room and began to rework the top section of his own speech after Doggett’s warning shot. He sat for a few minutes, scribbling notes at the top of the page. Satisfied, he ducked into the kitchen, and began to recite it to himself, gesturing with his hands as he went. It looked like something out of 8 Mile.

When Doggett later announced he would cede the new district to Casar if the maps survived a court challenge, you only had to look at the scene that afternoon to understand how a second-term congressman had outlasted the dean of the delegation. Casar urged the 5,000 or so people in attendance to forget about any future campaign and focus on the maps. He urged California to finish the job. And he offered a glimpse of the sort of populist, anti-corruption program that the CPC aims to deploy next year—including Social Security expansion and a ban on congressional stock-trading.

“At the same time that Greg was out there saying, These maps suck, let’s have a rally, let’s have a march, let’s all show up at the Capitol, Lloyd was going around asking for endorsements,” said Mark Littlefield, an Austin political consultant who has followed both congressmen for years. “It was a night and day difference how they were handling their politics during that little two- to three-week period.”

To Littlefield, the process captured something unique about Casar. “Lloyd’s a great vote,” he said, but Doggett’s “not the first person to say I’m going to lead on organizing our party or our community, and moving it towards this direction to get something done. That’s not what he does. That’s what Greg does.”

Democrats wanted leaders who would fight Trump and the maps, not their allies. But it was also a testament to the relationships Casar had forged in office and as an organizer. Half the Austin City Council was prepared to issue a joint endorsement of the junior congressman, according to a source familiar with the campaign, and a dozen members of Congress had offered their support. Casar’s friendships didn’t go back as many decades as Doggett’s, but they told a story too. After watching Huerta’s remarks from just off the stage, Casar walked with her back up the steps, surrounded by photo-seeking well-wishers. Amid Doggett’s call for intergenerational unity, it was hard to miss the symbolism.

Right now, Democrats everywhere are running into the sort of walls that progressives in cities like Austin—a “blueberry,” as one rally attendee put it, in a big patch of red—have crashed up against for years. You do oversight and they turn you away. You write a law and they ignore it. You win a district and they redraw it. You roll back police spending and the governor threatens to take over the department^[22]. The challenge Texas poses to Democrats at all levels of politics is not just that Trump might achieve what he’s after, but that in a lot of ways Republicans already have. So what are you going to do about it?

Before she left town, there were a few people Casar wanted Huerta to meet. When a progressive luminary comes to town, Casar sometimes has a ­labor-related ask. He brought Sanders to a Hyatt to hand ­management a letter on behalf of unionizing workers. This time, Casar wanted to introduce Huerta to his friends at the airport.

They met at gate 21. When Casar was on the city council, he explained, he and his allies had pushed through a statute ­extending the city’s $15 minimum wage to include airport workers and compelled the major concessionaires to recognize collective bargaining. As a result, people who had once made $7.25 an hour were now pulling in $25. “Before they had to sell their cars” to make ends meet, Casar had bragged to Huerta. “Now they’re buying Christmas presents for their friends’ kids.”

This was his theory of change in action, an insider’s understanding of the levers of power, and an organizer’s grasp of pressure points. Workers, some wearing their uniforms from Salt Lick and Tacodeli, gathered around the woman who made “¡Sí, Se Puede!” a rallying cry.

They lingered for a few minutes, before Huerta slipped her arm into the crook of his and walked toward her gate. Casar, often frustrated during his summer in purgatory, spoke with the warmth of someone in the presence of something fragile and unique. His voice went a little higher, and a little softer.

“We’re right in the middle of it. But this was the best day so far, in a couple weeks,” he told her. A staffer was deputized to walk Huerta a bit farther, but the 95-year-old waved him off. She was actually fine. She’d just wanted to talk.

“Estoy aquí,” Huerta said.

“Aqui estamos,” Casar said. “You know we’re just one red eye away from each other.”