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    NAACP sues Texas over congressional redistricting, saying it strips Black voters of political power

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    Texas’s redrawn congressional maps have drawn a lawsuit from the NAACP, accusing the state of committing a racial gerrymander with its maps that strip Black voters of their political power.The lawsuit, joined by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, names Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and secretary of state, Jane Nelson, as defendants. It asks a federal judge for a preliminary injunction preventing the use of the redrawn maps, arguing that the redistricting violates the US constitution by improperly reducing the power of voters of color. It also argues that the maps violate section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.“We now see just how far extremist leaders are willing to go to push African Americans back toward a time when we were denied full personhood and equal rights,” the president of the Texas NAACP, Gary Bledsoe, said in a statement. “We call on Texans of every background to recognize the dangers of this moment. Our democracy depends on ensuring that every person is counted fully, valued equally and represented fairly. We are prepared to fight this injustice at every level. Our future depends on it.”Texas Republicans passed a redrawn map on Saturday, with the expected result of an increase in Republican representation by five seats in the next Congress. Democratic state legislators are a minority in both chambers of the Texas legislature, leaving them with few options to block it. A group of state house representatives spent nearly a month away from the state to deny Republicans a quorum. That maneuver ended last week, after California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the state legislature began a process to counter the Republican gerrymander with a Democratic gerrymander of their own.“The state of Texas is only 40% white, but white voters control over 73% of the state’s congressional seats,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP. “It’s quite obvious that Texas’s effort to redistrict mid-decade, before next year’s midterm elections, is racially motivated. The state’s intent here is to reduce the members of Congress who represent Black communities, and that, in and of itself, is unconstitutional.”Democrats in Texas promised lawsuits out of the gate.The League of United Latin American Citizens – a group of 13 Texas voters – filed suit within hours of the redistricting bill’s passage. The map “eviscerates minorities’ opportunity to elect their candidates of choice in four key areas of the state”, the filing states.Other challenges are likely to follow. Republicans, however, believe that they are operating on favorable legal ground, hoping to overturn key sections of the Voting Rights Act as the lawsuits work their way through the courts.The US supreme court will hear a re-argument of Louisiana v Callais in the term to come. In that case, the court will be asked to upend the core tenet of the Voting Rights Act and hold that the use of racially identifying voter data to prevent voters of color from being able to select a candidate of their choice is actually an act of racial discrimination.Without that protection, Republican state lawmakers across the country can be expected to redraw maps for increased partisan advantage by cutting Black-majority districts into ribbons.Meanwhile, Donald Trump said the Department of Justice would sue California for its redistricting. Last week, the Democratic-led legislature placed a measure to redraw the state’s district lines on the 4 November ballot.In a sharp break against longstanding progressive efforts to turn redistricting over to neutral commissions, the NAACP said today that it “is urging California, New York and all other states to act immediately by redistricting and passing new, lawful and constitutional electoral maps” to counter expected efforts in Texas and other states to redraw maps for midterm advantage. More

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      Republicans are trying to ensure we’ll never have another fair election | Judith Levine

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      “Christians, get out and vote, just this time,” Donald Trump exhorted the audience at a campaign event organized by the conservative Turning Point Action in July 2024. “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”Since his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, Trump has been building toward delivery on that promise, first by fomenting suspicion of widespread election fraud, then by trying to overturn the results via legal challenge and intimidation, and finally, on 6 January 2021, by force. Now the White House and Republicans both in Washington and the states are colluding more brazenly than ever to “fix it” – “it” meaning free and fair elections they might lose.Republicans’ aim is permanent control of the US government. Trump’s is the crown. As their assaults on voting rights – and the institution of elections itself – escalate, their success begins to look, if not inevitable, alarmingly possible.Trump’s tactics are working.The 2020 election was the cleanest and most efficient in memory. Claims of rampant fraud are lies – the big lie, as the 2021 House impeachment committee put it. But not among Republican voters. A Pew survey taken before the 2024 election found that Trump supporters were “deeply skeptical about the way the election will be conducted”, especially compared with Harris supporters. Whereas over 85% of Democratic voters believed in 2024 that absentee ballots would be counted accurately, and ineligible voters prevented from voting, among Trump supporters only 38% and 30%, respectively, felt the same.Buoyed by the big lie – and liberated by the supreme court’s 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act – voter suppression attempts reached a peak after the 2020 elections, when legislators introduced more than 400 restrictive bills. Signing Georgia’s 98-page Election Integrity Act in 2021, Brian Kemp, the Republican governor, was unambiguous about its partisan aim. “After the November election last year” –when record turnout in the reliably red state yielded victories for Biden and two Democratic US senators, and the secretary of state resisted Trump’s shakedown to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse the outcome – “I knew, like so many of you, that significant reforms to our state elections were needed,” he said.By September 2024, 31 states had enacted 114 such laws.In May 2024, Trump told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he would accept the results of the election only if “everything’s honest” – that is, if he won. This definition of honesty took hold. According to some polls, before election day, fewer than a quarter of Trump supporters believed the election would be fair. After it, their confidence rates more than doubled. And while Republican concerns about fraud were pervasive in 2020, they were – surprise, surprise – virtually nonexistent when the 2024 results came in.With their man in the White House, congressional Republicans set about preparing for his coronation. Three days into Trump’s term, the Tennessee representative Andy Ogles introduced a bill to amend the constitution to allow presidents to serve three terms. At Trumpstore.com, you can buy a red “Trump 2028” cap for $50.On 25 March Trump issued the executive order “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which melds his xenophobic paranoia-mongering with his desire to “fix” elections. Its mandates range from requiring proof of citizenship to vote (an answer to the spectral threat of undocumented people stuffing the ballot boxes) to a ban on the bar codes that expedite vote counting.The executive order itself is illegal. The constitution gives the states, not the president, the power to regulate elections.On 4 April, the House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, requiring registrants and voters to document citizenship.The GOP’s election-interference campaign is accelerating. On 7 July, the justice department’s civil rights division wrote a letter to Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, and Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, alleging that four of its majority-minority “coalition districts” are illegal under the Voting Rights Act and directing the state to redraw its electoral map. Voting rights experts dispute this interpretation. In fact, the law prohibits the dilution of the electoral power of voters of color either by packing them into one district or spreading them out by gerrymandering–which is what the new map would do.In mid-July, the justice department issued broad requests to state election officials to turn over their election data and voter rolls. In Colorado, where Biden won by 11 points in 2020, a guy called Jeff Small – chief of staff to the Colorado Republican representative and Save Act cheerleader Lauren Boebert – began contacting officials claiming he was working with the Trump administration on election “integrity” and asking if they would kindly let the feds, or somebody, inspect their voting machines, according to Washington Post reporting. After one such request, the Department of Homeland Security called to follow up.Officials of both parties were outraged, especially when it came to monkeying with the equipment, an illegal act. “Anybody who is asking for access to the voting machines outside of the law” is suspicious, the Republican executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association told the Washington Post. “That automatically raises red flags in terms of their intent.”Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state made the larger point: “This all is part of a bigger ploy to further undermine our voting in this country,” she said. “They are actively in a power grab.”Meanwhile, the White House was leaning on Texas’s governor and legislative leaders to redraw their electoral map according to Trump’s specifications, dismantling Democratic strongholds to create five more Republican House seats – to which the president averred his party was “entitled”. When Texas got onboard, on 3 August the state’s 51 Democrats left the state, risking fines and arrest, to thwart the effort.To cover all bases, on 7 August, Trump ordered the commerce department to prepare a new US census leaving out undocumented immigrants. Under the constitution, the census counts the number of “persons”, not citizens; it must be conducted “within every … ten years”, and states must redistrict to concur with new data. In a post on Truth Social, the president described a bespoke tally “using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024”.The same day, the vice-president, JD Vance, descended on bright-red Indiana with a trio of Trump appointees to strong-arm its leaders to redistrict as well. Afterward, on X, Indiana’s lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith, genuflected to Vance: “Your bold leadership and unwavering support for President Trump’s mission to expand the conservative majority in Congress is exactly what America needs right now.”On Fox News, the vice-president echoed Trump’s contention that counting undocumented immigrants in the census unfairly gives the advantage to Democrats, whom he also charged with “aggressive” gerrymandering. “We’re just trying to rebalance the scales,” Vance said.After two weeks, Democrats returned to the Texas state house. Republican leaders forced them to sign “permission slips” to leave the chamber and assigned police escorts to monitor them. After refusing to sign, one Democrat spent nights in the chamber. While speaking on the phone with Gavin Newsom, the California governor, from the bathroom, she was informed the call constituted a felony, she said.On Saturday, the Texas senate approved legislation creating the new map, which Abbott says he will sign “swiftly”. The move had already set off an avalanche of mid-decade redistricting, led by California. Other states, controlled by both parties, may follow.Last week on Truth Social, Trump announced he would “lead a movement” to eliminate mail-in ballots – an idea he apparently picked up from Vladimir Putin – and also “inaccurate” voting machines. He said he would sign an executive order to this effect soon. “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump fantasized. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”Maybe the following order will eliminate voting altogether – for the good of our country, of course.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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      Texas senate gives final approval to redrawn congressional map that heavily favours Republicans

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      The Texas senate has given final approval to a redrawn congressional map that gives Republicans a chance to pick up as many as five congressional seats, fulfilling a brazen political request from Donald Trump to shore up the GOP’s standing before next year’s midterm elections.It will now be sent to governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, who is expected to quickly sign it into law, however Democrats have vowed to challenge it in court. The Texas house of representatives approved the map on Wednesday on an 88-52 party-line vote, before the senate approved it early on Saturday.The effort by Trump and Texas’ Republican-majority Legislature prompted state Democrats to hold a two-week walkout and kicked off a wave of redistricting efforts across the country.Democrats had prepared for a final show of resistance, with plans to push the senate vote into the early morning hours in a last-ditch attempt to delay passage.Senator Carol Alvarado revealed her filibuster plans to delay its final passage, in a post on social media. “Republicans think they can walk all over us. Today I’m going to kick back,” Alvarado’s post read. “I’ve submitted my intention to filibuster the new congressional maps. Going to be a long night.”But the planned filibuster was thwarted by a procedural motion by Republicans. It now heads to the governor for final approval.Alvarado’s delay tactics were the latest chapter in a weeks-long showdown that has roiled the Texas Legislature, marked by a Democratic walkout and threats of arrest from Republicans.Democrats had already delayed the bill’s passage during hours of debate, pressing senator Phil King, the measure’s sponsor, on the proposal’s legality, with many alleging that the redrawn districts violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting voters’ influence based on race – an accusation King vehemently denied.“I had two goals in mind: that all maps would be legal and would be better for Republican congressional candidates in Texas,” said King, a Republican.“There is extreme risk the Republican majority will be lost” in the US House if the map does not pass, King said.The vote comes after California Democrats set a special election for November in which they will ask voters to approve a new congressional map in their state. That map would add up to five seats for Democrats, a move designed to offset the new map in Texas. California governor Gavin Newsom launched that effort after Texas began its push to redraw its maps.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublicans currently hold 25 of Texas’s 38 congressional districts. Under the redrawn map, they would be favored in 30 districts. Abbott called a special session last month to draw new maps after Trump requested that he do so.The new map eliminates Democratic-held districts in Austin, Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and replaces them with Republican ones. It also tweaks the lines of two districts currently held by Democrats in south Texas to make them more friendly to Republicans. Swift lawsuits are expected challenging the new districts under the Voting Rights Act amid allegations the new lines make it harder for voters of color to elect their preferred candidates.Lawmakers passed the maps after Democrats in the Texas house of representatives left the state for two weeks, denying Republicans the necessary quorum to conduct legislative business. The Democrats returned to the state on Monday after California Democrats began moving ahead with a plan to redraw their state’s congressional map.Even after Democrats returned to Austin, protests continued at the state capitol this week as Republicans pushed the new map through. The efforts were galvanized by Nicole Collier, a Democratic state representative from Fort Worth who refused to sign a “permission slip” necessary to leave the house floor. Collier refused and remained confined to the house floor and her office until Wednesday.The Texas push set off an unusual mid-decade redistricting battle before next year’s midterm elections, in which Republicans are expected to lose seats in the US House. Republicans currently have a three-seat majority and the president’s party typically performs poorly in a midterm election. Republicans are also expected to redraw the maps in Florida, Ohio, Missouri and potentially Indiana.With the Associated Press More

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      Texas Democrats say they are prepared to return to state after two-week absence

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      Texas Democrats said on Thursday they are prepared to return to the state under certain conditions, ending a nearly two-week-long effort to block Republicans from passing a new congressional map that would add five GOP seats.The lawmakers said they would return as long as the legislature ends its first special session on Friday, which Republicans have said they plan to do. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has said he will immediately call another special session.The Democrats also said they would return once California introduces a new congressional map that would add five Democratic seats, offsetting the gains in Texas. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is expected to announce what he has teased as a “major” redistricting announcement on Thursday.Gene Wu, chair of the Texas house Democratic caucus, said in a statement that he and his colleagues “successfully mobilized the nation against Trump’s assault on minority voting rights”.“Facing threats of arrest, lawfare, financial penalties, harassment and bomb threats, we have stood firm in our fight against a proposed Jim Crow congressional district map,” he said. “Now, as Democrats across the nation join our fight to cause these maps to fail their political purpose, we’re prepared to bring this battle back to Texas under the right conditions and to take this fight to the courts.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe lawmakers said in a statement that returning to Texas would allow them to build a strong public and legislative record that could be used in legal challenges against the map. More

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      Texas redistricting fight with Democrats ‘could last years’, threatens Greg Abbott

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      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.”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.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs 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.” More

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      Texas Democrats receive bomb threat in escalating standoff over redistricting

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      Texas Democrats who left the state say they experienced a bomb threat at their Illinois hotel on Wednesday morning amid an ongoing clash with Republicans over their effort to block a new congressional map from going into place.John Bucy III, a Democrat who represents Austin in the state legislature, confirmed the threat on X on Wednesday and said the lawmakers were evacuated. “This is what happens when Republican state leaders publicly call for us to be ‘hunted down’. Texas Democrats won’t be intimidated,” he said.“We are safe, we are secure, and we are undeterred,” three other members of the Texas house Democratic caucus, representatives Gene Wu, Ramón Romero and Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, said in a statement. They thanked Illinois’s governor, JB Pritzker, and law enforcement officials “for their quick action to ensure our safety”.The showdown between Texas Republicans and the Democrats who fled the state to block redistricting plans escalated late on Tuesday when Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, filed an emergency petition asking the state supreme court to remove Wu, the top Democrat in the state house of representatives, and declare his seat vacant.“Fearing one of eighteen items on the Special Session agenda, Democrat members of the Texas House claim an entitlement to abdicate their official duties by refusing to show up for work,” lawyers for Abbott’s office wrote in the filing, asking the court to rule on his request by Thursday. “These members have abandoned their official duties required by the Constitution.”In a statement on Tuesday evening, Wu said he would not be intimidated by Abbott’s request.“This office does not belong to Greg Abbott, and it does not belong to me. It belongs to the people of House District 137, who elected me. I took an oath to the constitution, not a politician’s agenda, and I will not be the one to break that oath,” he said in a statement. “Let me be unequivocal about my actions and my duty. When a governor conspires with a disgraced president to ram through a racist gerrymandered map, my constitutional duty is to not be a willing participant.”Texas Republicans already hold 25 of Texas’s 38 congressional seats, but Abbott agreed to redraw the state’s congressional districts at the request of Donald Trump to add more GOP-friendly districts. Republicans hold a narrow 219-212 advantage in the US House, and the Texas redraw is a brazen effort to try to shore up Republicans’ advantage before next year’s midterm elections, when Republicans are expected to lose seats.A new map unveiled last week would favor Republicans in 30 of 38 seats and weaken the influence of Hispanic voters throughout the state.Abbott’s effort is considered a long shot, legal experts told the Texas Tribune. In 2021, the Texas supreme court made clear that the state constitution both allows state lawmakers to break quorum and allows for mechanisms for lawmakers to bring them back.“I am aware of absolutely no authority that says breaking quorum is the same as the intent to abandon a seat,” Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, a constitutional law expert at the University of Missouri law school, told the Tribune. “That would require the courts extending the premise to the breaking point. It’s inconsistent with the very text of the Texas Constitution.”The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a Republican, has said he also plans to take legal action to try to remove the lawmakers from office.On Tuesday, Senator John Cornyn asked the FBI to assist in returning the lawmakers to Texas. Trump said on Tuesday that the FBI may have to get involved. “The governor of Texas is demanding they come back,” Trump said. “You can’t just sit it out. You have to go back. You have to fight it out. That’s what elections are all about,” he said. The FBI has declined to comment.Under rules enacted by the legislature, lawmakers also face a $500 daily fine for each day they are not present in the capitol. Many of the costs so far, including a private charter to Illinois, meals and lodging have been picked up by Powered by People, a political group started by former Representative Beto O’Rourke, the Texas Tribune reported. Paxton announced on Wednesday he was investigating the group’s funding of the effort.Trey Martinez Fischer, a Democratic representative of San Antonio in the state legislature, said in an interview he was unfazed by the possibility of racking up fines.“Not concerned about it at all,” he said. “We’ve had rules set aside before, and courts don’t have to interpret the rules the way Republicans want them to be interpreted.”“The group is very committed and we recognize that this is much bigger, it’s much bigger than anybody’s individual congressional district, it’s much bigger than anybody’s individual city, and it’s even bigger than the state of Texas,” he added.Other states appear to be following Texas’s lead and considering mid-cycle redistricting. Ohio is already set to redraw its congressional map this year because of a unique state law, and is expected to add more GOP-friendly seats. Republicans in Missouri and Indiana are also reportedly considering redrawing maps to add GOP-friendly districts.Democratic governors have threatened to redraw the maps in their states too to offset Republican gains, though they do not have the power to draw as many seats as Republicans do. The biggest opportunity for Democrats is in California, which has 52 seats in Congress. Governor Gavin Newsom is reportedly moving ahead with a referendum this fall to ask to adopt a new map that would add Democratic seats and override an independent redistricting commission. More

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      Illinois governor says Texas Democrats who left will be protected amid arrest threats

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      The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, has vowed to protect the Democratic members of the Texas house of representatives who left the state in an attempt to block Republican efforts to redraw Texas’s congressional maps.“We’re going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them and make sure that – ’cause we know they’re doing the right thing, we know that they’re following the law,” Pritzker said at a press conference on Sunday in Illinois alongside some of the the Texas Democratic lawmakers.The Texas Democrats fled the state on Sunday in an effort to prevent the Texas house from reaching the quorum on Monday needed to vote on a newly proposed congressional map.In response to the Democrats’ actions, Greg Abbott, the Republican Texas governor, threatened to expel the Texas Democrats from the state house if they do not return by Monday at 3pm CT – when the legislature is set to resume. Ken Paxton, Texas’s Republican attorney general, also condemned their actions on Sunday and threatened their arrest.“Democrats in the Texas House who try and run away like cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately,” he said in a statement. “We should use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law.”But Pritzker, who said he will support the Texas Democrats, described their actions as “a righteous act of courage”, saying that they “were left no choice but to leave their home state, block a vote from taking place, and protect their constituents”.Pritzker, a billionaire and potential 2028 presidential candidate, is reportedly helping the Democrats find lodging and meeting spaces, but is not assisting with the $500-a-day fine that each lawmaker will have to pay under new rules the house adopted in 2021, according to the Texas Tribune. The outlet reported that the Democrats have been fundraising from large Democratic donors to help pay that fine.The redistricting plan, unveiled last week by Texas Republicans, could allow Republicans to gain as many as five additional US House seats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Currently, Republicans hold 25 of Texas’s 38 seats, and in the overall House of Representatives, Republicans hold a small majority of 220-212.The proposal came after pressure from Donald Trump, who urged Texas Republicans to redraw the maps.“There could be some other states we’re going to get another three, or four or five in addition. Texas would be the biggest one,” Trump told reporters in mid-July. “Just a very simple redrawing, we pick up five seats.”Abbott called a special session this summer and included on the agenda the redrawing of Texas’s maps in addition to proposals to aid victims of the 4 July Texas flooding and other matters.Many of Texas’s 62 house Democrats have gone to Illinois, with others attending the National Conference of State Legislatures in Boston this week and others meeting with the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, in Albany.“We’re leaving Texas to fight for Texans,” Gene Wu, the Texas house Democratic caucus chair who fled to Illinois, said in a statement on Sunday.“We’re not walking out on our responsibilities; we’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent” he added.During the news conference in Illinois on Sunday, Pritzker criticized the redistricting proposal, saying it would “steal five congressional seats, silencing millions of voices, especially Black and Latino voters”.“Let’s be clear, this is not just rigging the system in Texas, it’s about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come,” he added. More

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      Texas Democrats flee state to prevent vote on redrawing congressional map

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      Texas Democrats are fleeing the state to prevent a vote on Monday that could see five new Republican-leaning seats created in the House of Representatives.About 30 Democrats said they planned to flee to Illinois, where they plan to stay for a week, to thwart Republican efforts by denying them a quorum, or the minimum number of members to validate the vote’s proceedings.In a statement, Texas Democrats accused their counterparts, the Texas Republicans, of a “cowardly” surrender to Donald Trump’s call for a redrawing of the congressional map to “continue pushing his disastrous policies”.“Texas Democratic lawmakers are halting Trump’s plan by denying his bootlickers a quorum,” the statement read.The scheme to flee the state is reported to have been put together by the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who met with the Texas Democratic caucus late last month and has directed staff to provide logistical support for their stay.The Texas group has accused Texas governor Greg Abbott of withholding aid to victims of Guadalupe River flooding last month in a bid to force the redistricting vote through.“We’re leaving Texas to fight for Texans,” Gene Wu, the Texas House Democratic caucus chair, said in a statement. “We will not allow disaster relief to be held hostage to a Trump gerrymander.”“We’re not walking out on our responsibilities; we’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent,” Wu added. “As of today, this corrupt special session is over.”Last week, Texas Republicans released a proposed new congressional map that would give the GOP a path to pick up five seats in next year’s midterm elections, typically when the governing party loses representation in congress.The areas affected by the redistricting plane would target Democratic members of Congress in and around Austin, Dallas and Houston, and two districts in south Texas that are Republican but nudging closer toward Democrat control.The plan to flee the state is not without potential consequences. Members of the Texas Democrats face a $500-a-day fine and possible arrest, a measure that was introduced in 2023, two years after Democrats left the state for three weeks to block election legislation that included several restrictions on voting access.Ultimately, that bill passed but not before Democrats were able to claim something of a moral victory after stripping the measure of some of its provisions.The latest plan to leave the leave the state came after a House committee approved new congressional maps on Saturday.“This map was politically based, and that’s totally legal, totally allowed and totally fair,” Cody Vasut, a Republican state representative and committee member, told NBC News.Vasut pointed to disparities in other states, including California, New York and Illinois, where the weighting of seats to votes is strongly in Democrats favor.“Texas is underperforming in that. And so it’s totally prudent, totally right, for Texas to be able to respond and improve the political performance of its map,” he said.The political backdrop to the Texas redistricting fight colors Pritzker into the picture of a national fight. Pritzker, a billionaire member of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, is seen as looking toward a bid for the 2028 Democrat presidential nomination.In June, he addressed Democrats in Oklahoma where he met privately in a “robust” meeting to discuss about Texas redistricting, according to NBC News. He later met with Texas Democrats, where offered assurances he would find them hotels, meeting spaces and other logistical assistance.The absence of the Democrats on Monday threatens to derail other issues Abbott is tabling, including disaster relief after to the deadly central Texas floods last month.“Democrats in the Texas House who try and run away like cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately,” Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, said in a post on X. “We should use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law.”Texas house speaker Dustin Burrows said that if, at 3pm on Monday, “a quorum is not present then, to borrow the recent talking points from some of my Democrat colleagues, all options will be on the table”. More

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      A risky bet? Texas Republicans poised to redraw congressional map on Trump’s orders

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      At the behest of Donald Trump, Texas Republicans are poised to redraw their state’s congressional map to try and gain as many as five congressional seats, a move that is likely to further weaken the influence of the state’s fast-growing non-white population and could wind up backfiring on the party.The effort to redraw the map represents a blunt and undemocratic effort by Republican lawmakers to pick the voters who elect them, and comes at a time when many of the party’s positions are unpopular. The US president and national Republicans are making the push because the GOP holds a 220-212 advantage in the US House (there are three Democratic vacancies) and Trump’s party typically loses seats in the midterm elections, which will happen next year.But it’s a risky bet. Twenty-five of Texas’s 38 congressional districts are currently represented by Republicans, a result that was carefully engineered when lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional map in 2021. During that process, mapmakers focused on shoring up Republican seats instead of trying to pick up Democratic ones.In order to pick up new seats, Republicans will have to spread their voters from safe Republican ones into Democratic districts. It could allow them to pick up more seats, but also makes the Republican districts more competitive and potentially winnable by Democrats in a strong year.The number of seats Republicans are able to pick up “depends on how much risk Republicans want to take,” said David Wasserman, an analyst at the Cook Political Report who closely follows US House races. “Republicans could probably target three Democratic seats very easily, but once it gets to four or five, that could put additional Republican seats at risk.”When Republicans drew the existing map, they blunted the political influence of non-white voters in the state, who accounted for 95% of the state’s population growth over the last decade. The new maps could further weaken their ability to elect their preferred candidates.“The current maps are already blatantly racist and discriminate against voters of color, communities of color, all over the state,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a watchdog group. “There would be absolutely no way you get to five more Republican districts without just completely trampling on minority voting rights.”Two Democratic seats likely to be targeted are the ones in south Texas currently held by representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, Wasserman said. Trump won both districts in 2024 and Republicans could easily tweak their boundaries to make them winnable. Democrats also represent four districts in the Houston area, and Republicans could shift the boundaries to try and pick up one or two districts depending on how aggressive they want to be.The Republican push to redraw the map comes as the state is still reeling from deadly floods that left at least 134 people dead with more than 100 people still missing. Democrats in the Texas legislature are reportedly considering walking out of the special session in order to deny Republicans a quorum needed to pass the maps. Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has said he will assist in “hunting down” members who walk out and compel them back to the capitol.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo justify redrawing the maps, Texas governor Greg Abbott pointed to a 7 July letter from the justice department claiming lawmakers had impermissibly sorted voters based on their race. Both the letter’s argument, and Abbott’s quick acceptance of it, raised eyebrows because Texas officials have said for years they did not consider race at all when they drew the maps.“My jaw dropped when I saw that letter,” said Mark Gaber, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, who is representing some of the plaintiffs suing Texas over the maps already in place. “Either the witnesses were not telling the truth or the entire premise of this special session and the mid-decade redistricting is false.”In its letter, the justice department pointed to four districts where it claimed voters had been unconstitutionally sorted by race. In two of those districts, two different groups of minority voters constitute a majority that can elect their preferred candidates. Another district is majority Hispanic. The final district it raised issue with was drawn after judges found intentional discrimination in a previous district.Several legal experts said those claims were highly questionable.“The DoJ letter is completely concocted and it reflects a complete misunderstanding of the law, but that’s not what they’re interested in,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is representing some of the plaintiffs challenging the current congressional map.“If I were them, I would be consulting legal counsel about the possibility of being found guilty of perjury in what they testified to under oath,” he added.Mapmakers may want to keep communities who share common interests together for reasons that have nothing to do with their race, said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked on voting rights issues at both the justice department and White House said the letter was “nonsense”.“What they appear to articulate in the letters is the notion that any time there happens to be multiple minorities in a district, that’s a constitutional violation. And that’s like seven different versions of wrong,” he said. More