Texas Democrats have a message for all American voters: You’re in the redistricting fight, whether you know it or not.
“This is a real stress test for democracy, and if they get away with it in Texas, then it’s likely to come to a state near you,” said Rep. Rafael Anchía, a Democratic member of the Texas House, in an interview with The Barbed Wire from Chicago, Illinois.
Anchía and more than 50 other Texas House Democrats have decamped to Democratic-led states — namely Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York — to break the quorum needed for the special session of the Texas Legislature to advance an explicitly partisan redistricting bill.
The measure, introduced at Trump’s demand, would disenfranchise minority voters and carve up majority Democratic areas — creating five new Republican-leaning districts, which President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Republicans were “entitled” to. With few options left to stop the bill from becoming law, Texas Democrats chose to flee the state for the third time in thirty years, deploying a tactic that Texas politicians have utilized since 1870.
One question since their departure on Sunday has been: What will it accomplish?
There are a few possible outcomes. One is for the bill to be killed — an unlikely scenario. It could also end in a compromise — though that seems unlikely, considering the escalations and arrest threats already in motion from Texas Republicans. What does that leave?
A public throwdown that has thrust Texas into the national spotlight for what it is: The beginning of a high-stakes fight for Democratic representation across the country, which will very likely lead to federal lawsuits and trigger new maps in California, Illinois, and New York, which could in turn trigger right-leaning states to do their own redrawing.
Texas Democrats Can Delay, But They Can’t Kill the Bill
“A quorum break can significantly delay passage of a bill, but it doesn’t change the numbers in terms of who’s in the legislature,” Rep. Chris Turner, one of the quorum-breakers, told The Barbed Wire in a phone interview from St. Charles, Illinois.
Turner was a part of the prior quorum-breaking attempts and knows firsthand that Texas Democrats have thus far failed to use this strategy to actually stop Republicans in the Texas Legislature from passing conservative legislation. Previous attempts to kill a redistricting bill in 2003, and an election law bill in 2021, only delayed the inevitable.
“When the legislature does eventually have a quorum, the legislative outcome is known,” Turner said. “Everyone understands that Abbott’s going to call another special session. For a quorum break to stop passage of any bill, that means you have to break quorum indefinitely, for months or years, even. That’s obviously not realistic.”
Texas’ House Democratic Caucus may have the 51+ necessary commitments from lawmakers to stay out of the state through the end of this special session, but for months? Many of them have families and children. To halt the passage of the bill, enough of them must remain out of state indefinitely — but Turner told The Barbed Wire that the quorum-breakers had only made a commitment to remaining out of state for the current special session.
Negotiation Is Unlikely
Another possible outcome is a negotiated bipartisan compromise on redistricting.
“We are all for bipartisan redistricting bills that respect the Voting Rights Act,” Anchía said. “But when Donald Trump calls Greg Abbott out and says, ‘Get me five more seats out of Texas,’ there’s absolutely no way to do that without trampling on the voting rights of people who are already underrepresented — so protected by the Voting Rights Act.”
Passed in 1965, the Voting Rights Act established protections intended to undo racially discriminatory Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised Black voters after the abolition of slavery and ensure that states follow 15th Amendment’s promise that the right to vote not be denied because of race. Since 2013, Supreme Court decisions made by conservative majorities have weakened the law’s protections.
Despite that dreamy prospect, compromise frankly seems unlikely. For their part, Texas Republicans have only escalated the redistricting fight, exploring options to fine the quorum-breaking Democrats, arrest them, charge them with felony bribery (despite a lack of evidence), and even remove them from office.
The Texas House does have authority to direct State Troopers and the Sergeant at Arms to conduct civil arrests and bring the quorum-breakers to the House floor, they do not have authority to order arrests out of state. It is possible that Gov. Greg Abbott could seek to remove the quorum-breakers from office, but there is no legal precedent for him to do so. And even if he attempts it and the courts were to side with Abbott, it is still a time-sensitive strategy that would require Republican candidates to win special elections — an unlikely feat in districts currently controlled by Democrats.
But the quorum breaking effort in 2021 did succeed in one respect: It raised the national profile of election issues in Texas. In doing so, it spurred the U.S. House of Representatives to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would have superseded Texas’ electoral reforms had it not died in the Senate. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act aimed to restore a requirement for states with a history of voting rights violations to seek preclearance from the federal government before altering election laws — something that had been struck down in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision.
Using the Spotlight
Although Democrats are unlikely to convince the Republican-controlled U.S. House to consider legislation to quash the ongoing redistricting attempts, the strategy deployed in 2021 points to a third possible outcome: Texas Democrats can once again use the current moment to encourage a larger, national redistricting fight to change how Democrats draw up electoral maps across the country.
“We’ve been sending delegations to meet with governors to talk to them about what’s happening in Texas,” Anchía, who has served on the redistricting, said. “States like California and New York and Illinois and others are prepared to hold the line against Donald Trump’s illegal redistricting in Texas.”
Leaders such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom have come out swinging, promising redistricting of their own if Texas Republicans plow ahead with their plans. Newsom has floated a redistricting plan for California that would create five new Democratic seats, canceling out the proposed Republicans gains in Texas.
“Governor Newsom said he’s been meeting with legislative leaders to do this as soon as November,” Anchía told The Barbed Wire.
Illinois Lt. Gov Juliana Stratton sent a similar message during a recent press conference.
“In Illinois, we don’t sit on the sidelines,” said Stratton, who is running for Senate next year. “In Illinois, we don’t take kindly to threats, and in Illinois, we fight back. If Trump and Texas Republicans won’t play by the rules, we will look at every option available to stop their extreme power grab, and nothing will be off the table,”
Texas typically redraws its electoral district boundaries every 10 years, but this mid-cycle effort came after Trump, whose approval ratings have cratered in recent months, pushed Texas Republicans to create five more Congressional seats favorable to his party. Last month, the Texas GOP issued a statement that laid bare the explicitly political motivations behind the redistricting effort, calling it “an essential step to preserving GOP control in Congress and advancing the President Trump’s America First agenda.”
In more than 30 states, legislatures draw up both national and state level electoral district lines. Nine states utilize commissions — some featuring politicians — to draw congressional district lines, while two states have hybrid systems, in which legislatures share redistricting authority with commissions. The remaining states do not have to deal with redistricting because they only have one congressional district each.
In states where partisan legislatures draw the maps, they’re more likely to favor the party in power. This is what political scientists call “gerrymandering.”
Many large Democratic states use independent, non-politician commissions to draw their maps — a practice that some liberal critics and Democratic politicians argue provides an unnecessary advantage to Republicans, who have aggressively gerrymandered in states where they have the power to pass redistricting legislation without Democratic votes.
One way to challenge gerrymandering is in court.
“The battle on this map is not over,” Turner told The Barbed Wire. “Once this front in this war is done in however many weeks, then the next front is in front of some federal judges and I think whenever that happens, Republicans behind this plan are going to have a lot of difficult questions to answer.”
To Turner’s point, the sooner the maps pass, the sooner Democrats can sue in federal court.
But there is reason to temper hopes that the judiciary will save the day.
Majority conservative Supreme Court decisions in the last two decades have made political gerrymandering easier. Meanwhile, a looming Supreme Court case could upend longstanding Civil Rights-era protections against the sort of racial gerrymandering being proposed in Texas, shutting down the potential for judicial challenges and opening the door for all sorts of political chicanery.
The Texas GOP’s unabashedly political attempt at gerrymanding, in this national context, has cast a spotlight on the Texas Democrats who seek to stop it — and other Democratic politicians across the nation are watching closely. If Texas Republicans choose to plow ahead with their plans, Texas Democrats told The Barbed Wire they will continue to push other liberal lawmakers to set off a wave of retaliatory Democratic redistricting around the country in order to cancel out the gains Republicans would make in places like Texas.
“There’s one way for this stuff to end tomorrow,” Anchía said. “And that’s for Donald Trump to say: ‘Yes, this is bad for democracy. I’m not going to try to pass an illegal gerrymander,’ and to recognize that this will start a domino effect that isn’t particularly good for the country.”
Since Trump isn’t particularly known for considering the consequences of his ideas and thinking better of them, Democrats are preparing themselves for a nationwide fight.
“I’m for independent redistricting commissions,” Anchía said. “But we can’t unilaterally disarm, regrettably.”
Thus, Democrats have one real remaining strategy: To fight fire with fire.
“You don’t show up to a gunfight with a butter knife,” said Anchía.