With Democrats Gone, a Texas Gerrymander Is Stymied for Now
With Democrats Gone, a Texas Gerrymander Is Stymied for Now
The speaker of the Texas House issued civil arrest warrants for lawmakers who fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum, but the scattered Democrats remained defiant.
The gavel of a frustrated Texas House speaker fell on a truncated meeting of the legislative chamber Monday afternoon, as Democratic members who left the state on Sunday to block passage of a redrawn U.S. House district map appeared to be everywhere but in Austin.
Some of them were with Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York as she vowed to match President Trump’s push for aggressive partisan redistricting with a push of her own. Others were at a conference of state lawmakers in Boston, where Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois spoke to Democrats who chanted, “Fight! Fight!”
The largest number camped out in a secluded conference center outside of Chicago, appearing remotely for cable television and radio interviews and defying threats from Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Republican state lawmakers back home. Texas Republicans could only fume that without a quorum present in the state House of Representatives, they could not do any legislative work, including a planned vote on a new map of the state’s congressional districts that they hope will flip five that are now held by Democrats to G.O.P. control.
“I believe they have forfeited their seats in the State Legislature because they’re not doing the job they were elected to do,” Mr. Abbott said about the absent Democrats Monday in an interview on Fox News. He promised to begin a legal process to remove them from office.
“Come and take it,” State Representative Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat and the chairman of the chamber’s Democratic Caucus, said about his seat, speaking from a Chicago suburb.
Texas Democrats Leave State to Block Vote on Gerrymandered Map
The legislators’ departure was a last-ditch effort to stop Republicans from adopting a redrawn congressional map that would flip five Democratic congressional districts to favor Republicans.
- “The tool they’re using is a racist, gerrymandered map. A map that seeks to use racial lines to divide hard-working communities, who have spent decades building up their power and strengthening their voices. And Governor Abbott is doing this in submission to Donald Trump.” “While Texans are waiting for relief, Republican leaders are redrawing maps to silence voters, hijack our democracy and this doesn’t stop with Texas. This isn’t just about the people who voted for us. It’s about every American who believes that the power belongs to the people, not one man.”
Texas Democrats Leave State to Block Vote on Gerrymandered Map
The Texas House met in the State Capitol in Austin for nine minutes on Monday. At least two-thirds of the 150 members — or 100 members — must be in attendance for any business to be conducted. But 56 of the 62 Democrats were not there.
“A quorum is not present,” said the speaker, Representative Dustin Burrows, a Lubbock Republican. “They’ve shirked their responsibilities under the direction and pressure of out-of-state politicians and activists.”
He issued civil arrest warrants intended to compel attendance by the absent members. The governor then directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to assist the House in locating them.
In the Chicago suburbs, Rep. John Bucy III, a Democrat, called the warrants “bluster.”
“I’ll add it to my list — I’ve had some of those filed on me before,” he said.
Mr. Abbott later raised the stakes, directing the Texas Rangers to investigate potential violations of bribery laws by the absent Democrats and anyone who provided them funds “for the purposes of skipping a vote.”
The fight over the rare effort to redistrict a state in the middle of a decade, undertaken at President Trump’s behest, was quickly spreading from Austin to state capitals around the country. Democratic state legislators from Texas stood on Monday morning with Governor Hochul in New York as she delivered a message that impartial political mapmaking was an idea whose time had passed.
“If Republicans are willing to rewrite these rules to give themselves an advantage, then they’re leaving us no choice; we must do the same,” Ms. Hochul told reporters in Albany.
Accompanied by the speaker of the New York State Assembly, Carl E. Heastie, in the ornate Red Room of the State Capitol, Ms. Hochul said she would pursue every avenue to maximize Democrats’ electoral chances in the state for the midterms, including amending the State Constitution to eliminate New York’s independent redistricting commission.
“I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” Ms. Hochul said. “With all due respect to the good government groups, politics is a political process.”
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The Democrats’ position in New York and other states, including California, Illinois and New Jersey, was something of a Texas Two Step. The lawmakers who fled Austin are trying to thwart a partisan redrawing of the House maps in Texas, while Democratic governors are threatening to redraw their own states’ maps.
On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said Democrats in the nation’s largest state were moving forward with an aggressive redrafting of the state’s map to favor Democrats that he hopes to bring before voters as a ballot measure. He said it would only go into effect if Texas changed its map.
“Whatever they are doing will be neutered here in the state of California,” Mr. Newsom vowed.
Mr. Abbott called it “kind of outrageous” that Texas Democrats would protest aggressive Republican redistricting by going to New York and Illinois, where Democratic lawmakers have used their power to draw lines that favor their party.
So far, the Texas Democrats have scoffed at Mr. Abbott’s threat to declare their seats abandoned. The state attorney general, Ken Paxton, has said that doing so would not be easy, in part because it would involve going through a lengthy court process that has not been tested.
“We’re not sure if it works,” he said in a podcast interview on Monday.
He added that it was unlikely that the absent lawmakers would be forced to return to Austin, even though he has threatened to help apprehend them.
“Trying to arrest them,” he said, “is going to be a challenge.”
Instead, Mr. Paxton predicted that the Democrats would have to return on their own, because their jobs and families are in Texas. That might not happen for weeks, since the Democrats have said they would stay out of the state until the end of the 30-day legislative special session, which began July 21.
Mr. Paxton said the Republicans would wait them out.
“I think the governor is going to be forced into calling several special sessions,” he said.
Most of the Texas Democrats who stayed away to prevent a quorum left the state on a charter plane to Illinois late Sunday, and have been staying at a sprawling conference center west of Chicago.
Behind gates barring uninvited visitors from the center, the lawmakers have been sharing meals and strategizing. Many of them have conducted meetings over video links while holed up in guest rooms. Others have been watching the news on television to see how they were being portrayed, and monitoring calls and emails from constituents.
Though some of the lawmakers were concerned about a walkout that could stretch on for weeks, keeping them far from families and their jobs outside the Legislature, they spoke publicly of unity and resolve.
“People are saying we must fight, and that’s the consensus,” said State Representative Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, Democrat of San Antonio.
On Monday evening in Warrenville, Ill., members of Congress from Texas and Illinois joined the Democratic state representatives at a union hall, casting the issue as one that could affect voters well beyond Texas.
“We’re having a national conversation over voter rights,” said Representative Julie Johnson of Texas, whose Dallas-area district would be stretched under the new map into an elongated tadpole with its bulbous head 120 miles east of the city. “Democrats are no longer going to sit by, handcuffed. This is an all-out war.”
Ms. Hochul, who hosted some of the fleeing lawmakers for breakfast at the Executive Mansion in Albany on Monday, said that they each were “profiles in courage.”
The Texas lawmakers were tight-lipped about their travel plans, but made clear that they were not going to go back to Texas anytime soon.
Mihaela Plesa, who represents parts of Dallas, Plano and Allen in the Texas House, said that the stakes in the Republicans’ power grab could not be higher. “The fight isn’t just about lines on a map, it’s about lives on the line,” she said, invoking the State Legislature’s inaction on flood relief after the devastating July 4 floods that killed more than 135 people.
At the annual National Conference of State Legislatures meeting in Boston, Mr. Pritzker rallied Democratic legislators with a lunchtime speech on Monday. The lunch was closed to the news media, but chants of “Fight!” could be heard through the doors.
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“He has our back,” State Senator Royce West, who represents the Dallas area, said after the lunch.
Beyond bravado, actually countering the Texas gerrymander with Democratic gerrymanders may not work, at least not in time for the 2026 midterm elections.
New York lawmakers tried to remove politics from redistricting in 2011 by putting the power to draw maps in the hands of an independent commission.
Disbanding that commission, as Ms. Hochul is proposing, would require a complicated and time-consuming process of legislating to amend the state’s Constitution. The soonest that Democrats could make changes in New York would be 2027, Ms. Hochul said. But she said that Democrats may also pursue litigation to get the maps redrawn more quickly.
Mr. Heastie, the Assembly speaker, seemed to acknowledge the contradiction between his party’s oft-stated devotion to democracy in the Trump era and its willingness now to bend the rules.
“Democracy should be fair,” he said “It’s very difficult to say play fair when your opponents are playing dirty.”
In a statement, Rob Ortt, the Republican minority leader in the New York State Senate, said Monday’s event was “a political stunt” and blasted what he called Democratic hypocrisy. “Voters know what this is really about — political power,” he said.
David Montgomery contributed reporting from Austin, and Laurel Rosenhall from New York.
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
Grace Ashford covers New York government and politics for The Times.
Julie Bosman is the Chicago bureau chief for The Times, writing and reporting stories from around the Midwest.
David W. Chen reports on state legislatures, state level policymaking and the political forces behind them.
