Ordinarily, during a special legislative session in Texas, one might expect to see state lawmakers in the capitol in Austin. But as the Republican majority tries to force through a scheme to rig Texas’ congressional map, the circumstances are far from ordinary — and as The Texas Tribune reported, that’s led the Democratic minority to respond in kind.
Texas Democratic lawmakers fled the state Sunday in a bid to block passage of a new congressional map designed to give the GOP five additional seats in the U.S. House next year, raising the stakes in what’s poised to be a national fight over redistricting ahead of next year’s midterm election. The maneuver, undertaken by most of the Texas House’s 62 Democrats, deprives the Republican-controlled chamber of a quorum — the number of lawmakers needed to function under House rules — ahead of a scheduled Monday vote on the draft map.
At this point, the basic elements of this story are probably familiar, but to briefly review, for generations, there’s been a standard approach to decennial redistricting in the United States: Once every 10 years, after the Census is complete and states know how many congressional seats they’ll have, state legislatures draw up new district lines, ostensibly to remain in place for a decade.
But following a model first embraced by then-Republican Rep. Tom DeLay more than 20 years ago, Donald Trump directed GOP officials in Texas to engage in mid-decade redistricting — or re-redistricting — so that Republicans would enjoy nearly 80% control over Texas’ U.S. House delegation, instead of the current 66%.
It’s a strategy rooted in the idea that Republicans, whose commitment to democracy has waned dramatically in recent years, don’t want to wait for voters before they win elections.
When Texas pursued this course a couple of decades ago, Democratic state legislators, after exhausting all other alternatives, took the only available step: They fled Texas, denying the legislature a quorum, which halted policymaking in the state capitol — a strategy periodically employed by Texas lawmakers for the last 155 years.
Now, Texas Democrats are doing the same thing.
The legislators have gone to a handful of locations, but many have gone to Illinois, where Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker has offered refuge to the fleeing Texans.
Texas Republicans, predictably annoyed, have been unsubtle in their over-the-top complaints, threatening to arrest the Democratic officials and accusing them of being “felons.”
I won’t pretend to know what might happen next, when Texas Democrats will be able to return home, or when or whether the newly gerrymandered map will become law. What I do know is that the hyper-partisan effort is reverberating across the country. The New York Times summarized:
The aggressive push by President Trump and Republicans in Texas to squeeze as many as five House Democrats out of office before a single vote is cast in the 2026 midterm elections has opened up a new chapter in an era of unconstrained partisan warfare. ... [T]he bald attempt to redraw the Texas congressional map to shore up House Republicans has pushed many Democrats, including some longtime institutionalists, to a breaking point. Now, they are vowing to ‘fight fire with fire’ and even to embrace some of the very gerrymandering tactics they have long decried as anti-democratic.
If the discussion were limited to Texas, it would still be a dramatically important story that would likely help dictate control of Congress. But it’s not limited to Texas at all.
At the president’s behest, Republicans in a variety of other red states, including Florida and Missouri, are moving forward with partisan mid-decade redistricting schemes, too, hoping to win elections before voters are able to cast ballots. Democrats — who, incidentally, tried at the federal level to eliminate partisan gerrymandering altogether in a democracy-reform package unveiled in 2021 — aren’t taking this lying down.
On the contrary, even Democrats who’ve long opposed gerrymandering have concluded that asymmetric partisan warfare is untenable. With this in mind, and with few other options, the party has begun making plans to combat GOP gambits in red states with comparable efforts in blue states.
“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” Trump said in his second inaugural address. “That’s what I want to be: a peacemaker and a unifier.” Roughly six months later, such talk has been replaced with “an era of unconstrained partisan warfare.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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