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In sports, the winning team doesn’t get to rewrite the rules to guarantee it’ll never lose again. In a democracy, the same principle should hold: Winning an election shouldn’t allow a party to rewrite the rules so it’s no longer accountable to the electorate.
But Republicans are turning Texas into a testing ground for exactly that kind of power grab. At Donald Trump’s urging, GOP lawmakers launched a mid-decade redistricting push designed to lock in their advantage. With only 62 seats in the House compared with the Republicans’ 88, Democrats had no real power to stop it—except by leaving. They broke quorum, fleeing the Capitol to stall the vote. Texas has seen this kind of maneuver before, but Republicans have their own countermeasure: law enforcement escorts to haul absent lawmakers back and force the Legislature to function.
That’s where Rep. Nicole Collier drew the line. Instead of returning under police guard, she stayed behind, effectively locking herself inside the chamber. Some have described her as a hostage. The legislator has referred to herself as a “political prisoner.” But Christopher Hooks, who has spent years chronicling the mix of absurdity and high stakes that define the state’s politics for Texas Monthly, says Collier’s lonely protest is better understood as matching theater with theater and not a crisis.
I spoke with him about how this protest fits into Texas’ long history of political stunts, why it’s struck such a nerve, and what it reveals about the current political climate in the state. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Aymann Ismail: What the hell is happening in Texas? I’m seeing that a lawmaker is being held hostage in the House chamber. Is that true?
Christopher Hooks: The whole thing is absurd. This was ultimately caused by Donald Trump, who said: “Violate your rules and norms and give me a new congressional map.” That was a huge breach of norms and trust in the Texas House. Democrats leaving the state was a breach to meet that breach. This is the fourth quorum break in 50 years in Texas. A quorum break happens when there’s been a major violation of how democracy is supposed to work in the state. You recognize you’re going to lose on an important point, so you breach the normal rules of the Legislature and leave. It’s happened often enough that there are rules and expectations around it. One is that once you break quorum, the state can arrest you and bring you back. That’s been true every time. It’s why they usually leave the state. It’s why they left this time. And now the House has to put itself back together again. What we’re seeing is that this still hasn’t happened.
I see where this is going …
Once you leave the Legislature, both sides start playing to an external audience. There are negotiations behind the scenes to bring people back, but Democrats and Republicans are also staging political theater to win over public opinion. That was true this time, just as in past quorum breaks in 2021, 2003, and the 1970s.
What feels different this time is the level of anger, especially from Republicans. In the past, the deal was basically: Let Democrats leave for two weeks, then come back, and the Republicans will get what they want. But this time, the anger from GOP voters and the base has been significant. They don’t just want Democrats to return so Republicans can pass the map. They want them humiliated. Republicans have been pressuring their elected officials to, even after the Democrats came back, arrest them or find other ways to punish them.
At the same time, Democrats getting a police escort back isn’t unusual. The Legislature has always had the power to compel attendance.
Permission slip?
The Democrats came back Monday to meet the quorum for the second special session. They showed up and basically said “We give up” (though not in those words). Dustin Burrows, the Republican speaker, told them that if they wanted to leave, they needed a permission slip signed by him, like in high school. And he assigned a state trooper to escort them. It’s strange but within the rules. Once members have left, he can compel their attendance, and sending them home with a trooper fed into what Republicans wanted: disciplining Democrats. Most signed the slip and accepted a police escort so they’d return that day or Wednesday. Nicole Collier did not.
Collier said, “I’m not going to sign this permission slip. I’m not going to leave with a police escort. I’m going to stay here.” I think that it’s political theater to match the theater happening on the other side.
Where exactly is she staying? Can someone actually live there?
Within the chamber, there’s the members’ lounge, bathrooms, and some spaces where she could refresh herself. I’ve been told that it normally closes at 9 p.m., though I don’t know if that’s the case now. Once she started, other Democrats, staffers, and visitors came by to support her. So it’s a bit like a filibuster, except she’s just sitting in an empty room.
So who is Nicole Collier? Is it like her to pull a stunt like this?
I am a little surprised it was Collier. She has a reputation for being smart and diligent, with a good mind for policy, especially in criminal justice. She’s not one of the louder or more rebellious Democrats. Plenty of others seemed more likely to do this. But those people signed the slip and went home, which I would have done too. They were tired. They’d been out of the state for weeks and just wanted to be with their kids and watch TV. So, yes, I was surprised it was Collier who did this.
I can only speculate about what led her to do this. If nothing else, it shows good political instincts. Doing this brought national attention at a time when people were starting to forget about the Texas Democrats. In the past few days, there have been big protests at the Capitol, and this kind of strange, almost Curb Your Enthusiasm–style stand reminded people of what’s happening here. There was a livestream the other night, with 60,000 people watching her in the middle of the night.
So how do you differentiate between a stunt and an actual political crisis? I’m still not sure what to think of this.
I’ve seen some people on social media calling this authoritarianism, and I don’t really see it that way. There are things that are very worrying about what’s happening in Texas. The attempt to do a mid-decade redistricting is repulsive and a violation of democratic norms in an effort to give the president a guaranteed congressional majority he can’t win otherwise. That’s horrible.
But this quorum break is theater on both sides, and it will continue until people come back together again. They haven’t yet, but they always do. Democrats privately concede that they have no way of stopping this map. If it’s stopped, it will be in the courts. They won’t say that in public, but eventually they’ll have to return to make the chamber work.
And how have their Republican colleagues been handling this whole stunt?
Burrows, the speaker, has been more conciliatory than statewide Republicans who’ve said, “Arrest them all, throw them out of office.” Burrows hasn’t been saying that. I think he knows that at the end of the day, he has to sit down with Democrats, at least to some extent, and put the House back together. But his move (sending DPS officers with Democrats) was a light touch compared to what Republicans wanted him to do. And Collier saying no was her calling Burrows’ bluff.
What worries me is that the Republican desire to see Democrats punished is much greater than I expected. There’s real anger that may not be satisfied just by making them go home with a police escort. I wonder how that affects the House. It wasn’t working well anyway. Bipartisan cooperation has been in severe decline in recent years. What the president pushed them to do may have broken it further. Going forward, I wonder if Democrats turning Collier into a hero makes the GOP want to punish them more. Right now both sides are lashing out. And I don’t know where that ends.
Sounds like Collier’s stand has put Burrows between a rock and a hard place.
He’s not in a good spot. Texas is a very Republican state, and the least Republican part of it is the Texas House. For years it’s been a bit of a check on whatever other people wanted to push through. Republican activists have put a lot of pressure on knocking over the current speaker and getting their own one, which has been the major friction in Texas politics for maybe 15 years. Burrows has a lot of people gunning for him, and he’s being asked to do the most with this redistricting. The governor approves, the Texas Senate will approve, but Burrows has to pass it in the House while also maintaining its integrity. At the end of the day, he’ll still need to work with some Democrats next session. So he’s attempting to play it with a softer touch.
But to his right are people like Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s running in the primary against Sen. John Cornyn. Both are competing to be the hardest line against House Democrats. Cornyn got the FBI involved, but of course the agency didn’t or couldn’t do anything. Paxton has been talking every day about wanting the lawmakers arrested and removed from office. Gov. Greg Abbott has followed his lead, and there are still some legal cases pending that could hypothetically see House Democrats removed from office, their seats vacated. I don’t think that will happen, but it’s 2025. I don’t know what they’ll do anymore.
Burrows has to walk a fine line. At the end of the day, he has to reestablish relationships and lead. So he’s been asked to eat the big bowl of … unpleasant material handed to him by the president, and he’s just trying to figure out his way through.
How is the national Democratic leadership tied into all of this?
The national Democrats, and Hakeem Jeffries in particular, really encouraged the Texans to leave the state. They tried to offer a vision for what could be accomplished, encouraging California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and others to do redistricting in their own states. When I talked to Texas Democrats before they left, there was some grumbling. They said, “National Democrats are pretty useless, and they’re asking us to do something that’s a huge burden—taking weeks out of our lives, potentially costing us a lot.” But they did it anyway.
Texas Democrats were trying to model something they hoped others would take up. If California, Illinois, or other states balance out what Texas does, they’ll feel it was worth it. On the other hand, Republicans are now talking about drawing a map with even more Republican districts in Texas, to counter what California is doing. Other Republican states may redistrict too. So the Texas Democrats threw the dice. Their contribution is mostly done, and now it’s up to everyone else to figure out what to make of it.
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