Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has stepped up his war of words with Democratic lawmakers who have left the state to foil an aggressive redistricting plan aimed at giving his Republican party five additional seats in Congress, saying on Sunday that the fight “could literally last years”.
Abbott issued his new threat on Fox News Sunday, saying that he would use his powers to call a special session of the Texas legislature to extend the battle indefinitely. The special session lasts 30 days, he said, “and as soon as this one is over, I’m going to call another one, then another one, then another one, then another one”.
Whenever the absent Democrats return to Texas, Abbott said, they would be arrested for violating their oath of office. “If they want to evade that arrest, they’re going to stay outside Texas for literally years,” he remarked. “And they might as well start voting in California or Illinois, or wherever they may be.”
Related: Can the FBI arrest the Democratic Texas lawmakers who left the state in protest?
Sunday’s TV political talk shows were dominated by the increasingly acrimonious dispute over Texas’s audacious gerrymandering plans which were instigated at the direct behest of Donald Trump.
The move to flip five US House seats to the Republicans is being made as polls indicate that the US president’s party will struggle to hang on to its razor-slim majority in the chamber in next year’s midterm elections. The Republicans currently hold a margin of just three seats.
The stakes could not be higher: were Trump able to hang onto his narrow control of Congress, he could cement the attacks on democratic and constitutional norms that he has begun in the first six months of his second presidency.
As the crisis reaches a crunch, more than 50 Texas Democrats have left the state, heading to Democratically-controlled states, including Illinois and New York. The relocation is designed to deprive Republicans of a quorum needed to pass the new gerrymandered maps in the Texas legislature in Austin.
Democratic governors went on the political shows on Sunday to launch their own barrage of words threatening counter-action. The strong language deployed was the latest indication that the leadership of the Democratic party, which has floundered in the face of Trump’s radical authoritarian-leaning tactics, is determined at this point to take a stand.
New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul accused Abbott on Fox News Sunday of being a “lap dog” for Trump. “Knock it off,” she told her counterpart in Texas. “Let’s get back to governing.”
She added that if Texas continued with what she called “these games”, “we’re not going to sit on the sidelines – we’re New Yorkers. We fight back.”
New York’s room for maneuver, however, is more limited than that of Texas. The state has an independent redistricting commission that oversees the drawing of its electoral maps which has been the subject in recent years of much court action.
Hochul said that the restrictions would not hold New York back. “We amend constitutions – we did it a few years ago,” she said. “We can put it to the people. I’m not going to let our democracy be eroded away because there’s a blatant power grab in our nation’s capital.”
JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois where many of the Texas Democrats are holed up in an undisclosed hotel outside Chicago, unleashed his own verbal volley on NBC’s Meet the Press. He accused Trump of being a cheater, saying: “He cheats on his wives. He cheats at golf. And now he’s trying to cheat the American people out of their votes.”
Pritzker was dismissive of claims by Texas US senator John Cornyn that the FBI had been brought in to help find the missing Democrats. “Texas law does not apply in the state of Illinois, and there’s no federal law that would allow the FBI to arrest anybody that’s here visiting our state,” Pritzker said. “So, it’s a lot of grandstanding.”
As the governors were thrashing it out in the TV studios, lawsuits continued to fly around Texas’s courts as both sides seek to gain the upper hand legally. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton is suing a sample group of 13 of the Democratic lawmakers claiming that the “runaways” have officially vacated their offices.
Paxton is now asking the state’s supreme court to remove the 13 from their seats.
Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic presidential candidate from El Paso, Texas, has also waded into the fray. On Friday, a state court in Fort Worth blocked his political action committee, Powered By People, from using its funds to support the fleeing lawmakers.
O’Rourke has counter-sued, arguing that Paxton was trying to “intimidate” a potential rival in next year’s US senate race. Speaking at an event in New Orleans on Friday, he accused the Republicans of being “would-be fascists” and warned that if they got away with their plan to maintain power in Congress in 2026 “the consolidation of authoritarian control in the hands of Donald Trump will be nearly unstoppable”.
Trump’s ruse to create more winnable congressional seats is being taken so seriously in Democratic circles that it has gelled even die-hard opponents of party political gerrymandering to come out in favor of counter measures. Bernie Sanders, the independent US senator from Vermont, is a fierce critic of the redrawing of electoral maps for partisan benefit.
Yet he told CNN’s State of the Union that the Democratic party had no option but to fight fire with fire, saying: “Democrats have got to fight back. I think it’s pathetic, but I think that’s what they’ve got to do.”
Asked whether that his position was defensible, given his years of opposing gerrymandering, Sanders said: “What we have now is terrible, and Republicans are making it worse. Well, what do you do if Republicans are doing it? You have to respond. It’s pathetic, but I think you have to respond.”
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