(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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Can Democrats Fight Back Against Trump’s Redistricting Scheme? [1]
['Jonathan Blitzer']
Date: 2025-08-18
The Texas legislature meets every two years for a hundred and forty days, but there’s an old joke that the state’s governors, who never object to less legislative deliberation, would prefer that it meet for two days every hundred and forty years. Early last month, Greg Abbott, arguably the most powerful governor in Texas history, called a special session of the legislature and added an agenda item at the behest of the only Republican who’s more dominant in the state than he is. Donald Trump wanted his party to gain five seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections, and he had a plan: Texas legislators should redraw the state’s congressional maps. “We have a really good governor, and I won Texas,” Trump said. “We are entitled.”
Trump and congressional Democrats are alike in one conspicuous respect: the public roundly disapproves of them both. But the party of a sitting President usually suffers losses in the midterms, and Democrats need to flip just three seats to retake a majority in the House. Divided government, painful to any President, would be especially treacherous for Trump, who, in his second term, has routinely flouted judges’ orders and the Constitution’s checks on using the office of the President for personal enrichment. “Democrats would vote to impeach him on their first day,” Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, recently predicted.
Redistricting generally happens once a decade. Only four years have passed since Texas Republicans last completed the process, and it’s difficult to imagine how they could possibly do more to stack elections in their favor. Twenty-five Republicans from the state currently serve in the U.S. House, compared with twelve Democrats. Their overwhelming advantage—itself the result of years of gerrymandering—led many Republicans to privately question the President’s demands. At an emergency meeting in the U.S. Capitol, in June, members of Texas’s Republican delegation in Congress expressed concern that their own districts might become less safe as a result of another gerrymander. According to the Texas Tribune, Abbott had told them that he was reluctant to add redistricting to the legislative agenda in Austin. Then Trump picked up the phone.
On July 7th, the Department of Justice sent a letter to Texas legislators informing them that four of the districts that were redrawn in 2021, all of which were now represented by Democrats, needed to be overhauled for legal reasons. Experts called the claim baseless, but it gave Abbott a pretext for adding the issue to the special session, which he did two days later. A Republican from Corpus Christi was ready with a new congressional map. Three districts in Houston, Dallas, and Austin would lose Democratic strongholds, diluting the Party’s base, and two districts in South Texas would become more conservative. Every Republican incumbent in the state, meanwhile, would be in a district that Trump carried by at least sixty per cent of the vote in 2024.
Democrats have been in the minority in Texas for two decades; their tools of resistance are limited. On August 3rd, some fifty of them met in secret and left the state on a chartered plane. A hundred legislators are necessary for a quorum. If Democrats couldn’t change the outcome of a vote, they could at least prevent it from taking place. They’ve made such moves before—in response to a redistricting fight, in 2003, and a voting-rights bill, in 2021—but this time the national stakes of the Republican power grab were particularly stark. Earlier this summer, when White House officials began speaking with Abbott about padding Republican margins in the House, the idea was that Texas would be the first state in which to pursue the strategy, but not the last. One aide told the Times that the goal was “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”
Historically, when Democrats have absconded, Republicans have issued state arrest warrants—a symbolic gesture, since the lawmakers had already left Texas—and imposed fines to compel them to return. Abbott has threatened to remove the Democrats from office and to investigate them for fraud. Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, has already launched an investigation of the former House member Beto O’Rourke, whose grassroots political operation is reportedly helping to pay the Democrats’ expenses. Paxton is currently running in a tight Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat against John Cornyn, the state’s senior senator. Last Tuesday, Cornyn escalated his party’s response by announcing that he’d asked the F.B.I. to “locate and investigate” the Democrats who’d fled the state. The F.B.I. agreed, though no one could say which legal authority the Bureau might legitimately invoke to justify its involvement. As Justin Levitt, a redistricting expert at Loyola Law School, put it, “ ‘Because the President said so’ is not a statute.”
The spectre of a redistricting war is now spreading across the country, with Democratic governors in California and New York vowing to retaliate by redrawing their own states’ maps. So far during Trump’s second term, the Democratic Party’s governing logic, largely set by its congressional leadership in Washington, has appeared to be that a House majority in 2027 is its to lose. Thanks to Trump and Abbott, that complacency might finally be laid to rest. Eric Holder, the former U.S. Attorney General, who’s spent years opposing partisan gerrymandering, made a telling statement to the Times. “It’s like the Germans have invaded France,” he said. “When confronted with this authoritarian, anti-democracy effort, we have to take up arms.”
Holder was referring to Democratic states that might be willing to offset lost seats in Texas with gains elsewhere, something Republicans, in turn, are threatening to do in Ohio, Missouri, South Carolina, and Florida. In a battle like this, it’s far from clear what kind of firepower the Democratic Party has. In California, voters would have to support a ballot measure to change state redistricting rules. In New York and New Jersey, the state constitution would need to be changed. Maryland has only a single seat to flip, and Illinois, where congressional maps already heavily favor Democrats, is unlikely to yield many more. The Democratic holdouts in Texas may be staging a doomed effort, but it has served as a rallying cry for a party that, too often, seems overly risk-averse. The current special session in Texas ends on August 19th. “Democrats act like they’re not going to come back,” Abbott said. “I’m going to call special session after special session after special session.” ♦
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[1] Url:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/18/can-democrats-fight-back-against-trumps-redistricting-scheme#:~:text=On%20July%207th%2C%20the%20Department,Texas%20would%20become%20more%20conservative.
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