UPDATE:
The Republican-led Texas House voted 85-6 to track down and arrest more than 50 Democratic lawmakers who left the state to break quorum and were not at the Capitol when the chamber gaveled in at 3 p.m. Monday, The Texas Tribune reported.
To be clear, the move is largely bluster, since the civil warrants that House Speaker Dustin Burrows promised for each absent member only apply to the chamber’s sergeant-at-arms and state troopers inside the Lone Star State. The representatives who left for Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts are not facing any criminal or civil charges.
During a press conference Monday morning in New York with Gov. Kathy Hochul, state Rep. Jolanda Jones, a Democrat and Houston-based attorney said Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Rep. Burrows — who’ve threatened felony charges, arrests, and financial consequences — are all bark and no bite.
“It would be bribery if any lawmaker took money to perform or to refuse to perform an act in the legislature,” Abbott said on Fox News on Monday — despite providing no evidence any Democrats had engaged in crimes.
“I’m a lawyer and part of my practice is criminal defense work,” Jones said Monday “There is no felony in the Texas Penal Code for what (Gov. Abbott) says. There is no felony in the Texas penal code, for what he says. So, respectfully, he’s making up some shit.”
“He’s trying to get sound bites, and he has no legal mechanism,” Jones continued. “And if he did, subpoenas from Texas don’t work in New York, so how’s he gonna come and get us. How? Subpoenas in Texas don’t work in Chicago. How’s he gonna come get us? So let me be clear. He’s putting up smoke and mirrors, and I’m hopeful that the media doesn’t follow that.”
ORIGINAL STORY:
“Come and take it.”
That’s the response from Texas House Democrats after Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to remove lawmakers breaking quorum from their legislative seats if they don’t return to Austin.
Dozens of Texas House Democrats left the state on Sunday afternoon to block Republican-proposed redistricting maps, which could add up to five new GOP seats in the U.S. House.
At President Donald Trump’s behest, the Texas GOP released new proposed congressional maps last week during a special legislative session. That was unusual, given that Texas maps are typically redrawn every decade with updated data from census counts. The maps represent an aggressive gerrymander that, if passed, would strip nearly a quarter million Black voters out of a congressional district in Houston; pack liberals in Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio into as few districts as possible; and hack up Fort Worth and McAllen.
“The tool they’re using is a racist gerrymandered map, a map that seeks to use racial lines to divide hardworking communities who have spent decades building up their power and strengthening their voices,” said Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the Texas State House Democratic Caucus, in a Sunday night press conference from Illinois, where lawmakers were joined by Gov. JB Pritzker. Most of the House’s 62 Democrats have traveled to Chicago, though some have also gone to Boston and Albany.
Thousands of people showed up to hearings at the Texas Capitol last week, and the vast majority of citizens who testified did so to speak out against the proposed measure. Still, Republicans advanced the maps on Saturday with plans for a vote on the House floor on Monday.
“Governor Abbott is doing this in submission to Donald Trump so that Donald Trump could steal these communities’ power and voice,” Wu said. “We will not be complicit in the destruction of our own communities.”
“We will hold people accountable, and we will defend our state to the absolute best of our abilities,” he added. “We are not here to play political games. We are here to demand an end to this corrupt process.”
Quorum-busting — denying the minimum amount of lawmakers needed to conduct business, effectively halting any House actions — is decades-old tradition for Texas Democratic lawmakers, who walked out of office in 2003, and again in 2021, to protest Republican-backed redistricting and voting access bills. Both ultimately passed.
Former state Rep. Jim Dunnam (D-Waco), who participated in the 2003 quorum-busting, told WFAA: “People remember (the walkout) not as a failure, but as something that got out a message nationally.”
This latest special session, quorum-busting has been on the table for weeks. With a Republican majority in both chambers of the Texas Legislature, Democrats appear to have determined that a walkout was the most effective way to block the new maps, which Democrats have called “racist” and “gerrymandered.”
“Right now, it feels like we’re going to hell and it doesn’t seem like we have a way back,” U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Dallas), who participated in the walkout, told MSNBC on Monday. “This isn’t just about the five seats in Texas. This is about a power grab.”
Abbott responded to the quorum break with outsized posturing in a letter Sunday night, threatening to consider it justification to remove them from office.
“Democrats hatched a deliberate plan not to show up for work, for the specific purpose of abdicating the duties of their office and thwarting the chamber’s business,” Abbott said in a statement on Sunday, despite the fact that denying quorum has been a Texas political strategy since 1870. “That amounts to an abandonment or forfeiture of an elected state office.”
In July, when House Democrats first started mulling over another walkout, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said his office was prepared to “hunt down” lawmakers who vacate their seats for “cheap political theater.”
He doubled down on Sunday, writing on X that the Democrats should be “found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately.” He added, “We should use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law.”
On the likelihood of arrest, Wu said at Sunday’s press conference that it’s “a topic of serious concern,” adding: “We know the governor has no authority to send state troopers over here but we don’t know what Donald Trump’s going to do.”
What’s more, Texans jumped into Paxton’s comments on X to remind him that he himself fled his home to avoid being served a subpoena in 2022. (Paxton was also facing securities fraud charges before prosecutors agreed to drop them in exchange for community service.)
“I support the immediate arrest of these rogue lawmakers who’ve fled their duties,” Paxton wrote Sunday on X. “These radical Democrats are spitting in the face of every Texan they swore to represent. This is cowardice and dereliction of duty, and they should face the full force of the law without apology.”
“Real Texans do not run from a fight. But that’s exactly what most of the Texas House Democrats just did,” Abbott wrote in a Sunday press release.
Republican state Rep. Dustin Burrows, speaker of the Texas House, said “all options will be on the table” if his Democrat colleagues are not on the House floor by the time the chamber convenes at 3 p.m. CT on Monday.
If the missing lawmakers don’t return to the Texas Capitol by the time the House reconvenes, Abbott said he’d pursue legal action to “swiftly fill” their vacancies.
The Democrats’ response?
“The Republican governor of Texas is out of his mind,” U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN on Monday. “There is no basis to charge these House Texas Democrats, who have refused righteously to vote on an extraordinary map that would hurt their constituents that they are privileged and sworn to represent.”
“Governor Abbott,” Jeffries continued, “is making idle threats. He is all hat, no cattle.”
