Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened to arrest state Democrats if they obstruct the plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps. President Donald Trump reportedly said the GOP will attempt to secure five new Republican seats in the U.S. House of Representatives through redistricting.
Redistricting Texas
Republicans currently hold an eight-seat majority in the House, with three seats vacant. The president’s controversial plan drew immediate pushback from Democrats nationwide.
“We have to be crystal clear about what this is, and the White House and Donald Trump are trying to fix the 2026 election now,” John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said on The Bulwark. “In July of the year before the election happens, they’re trying to gerrymander a state to an absurd degree to steal seats.”
Gerrymandering is defined as “the practice of drawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage over its rivals.”
Texas usually votes on new maps every ten years, following the census and a subsequent process called reapportionment, which splits congressional seats according to the latest population ratios between states. It’s not common to redistrict in the middle of a decade.
“Let me be clear: this is not just about Texas. This is about power, control, and rigging elections before a single vote is cast,” Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett said on X. “They’re trying to redraw the maps, and rewrite the rules.”
Partisan pushback
To fight back, some national Democratic leaders have floated a plan to encourage Democratic Texas lawmakers to leave the state. That would leave the legislature without enough voters to approve the new maps.
Democrats unsuccessfully tried to stop a 2021 GOP voting bill. Paxton said this plan will end with lawmakers in jail.
“If Democrats ignore their duty to their constituents by breaking quorum, they should be found and arrested no matter where they go,” Paxton said on X. “The people of Texas elected them to do a job, not run away and hide like cowards. Lawmakers must answer the special session call and pass the important priorities that the Governor has put forward. My office stands ready to assist local, state and federal authorities in hunting down and compelling the attendance of anyone who abandons their office and their constituents for cheap political theater.”
Lawmakers in other states have tried this tactic, including in Oregon and Wisconsin, but they were ultimately unsuccessful.
The plan has worked in Texas before, back in 2003, over the same issue of redistricting. That’s when 51 Democratic lawmakers headed into Oklahoma for a week in order to avoid a vote.
It’s unclear if Democrats would be able to get enough lawmakers out of state to avoid the vote this time. A special session kicks off on Monday, July 21, to discuss the new maps, among other items.
Racial concerns
One factor that led to redistricting becoming a major topic of that special session was a letter from the Department of Justice under Trump. That letter argued that several districts in the state are unfairly drawn.
Those districts were drawn in 2021 and immediately challenged in court, with plaintiffs arguing the new districts discriminated against Black and Latino voters.
That case went to court in May and has yet to be decided.
At the time, members of the GOP claimed the state’s maps were race blind, but they now believe some of those districts are discriminatory against white people.
“They contended that what they drew was completely satisfactory, so now that they are acquiescing in some concocted allegation of illegality from the Trump administration is astounding,” Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the Texas Tribune.
Meanwhile, Republican Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said at a news conference covered by The Houston Chronicle that “I’ll just say that if we can pick up Republican seats in Texas to make Congress stronger, after what the Democrats did to our country in the last four years … I want more Republican congressmen.”
