Texas Senate Republicans passed a GOP-friendly congressional map on Tuesday, despite objections from their Democratic colleagues, most of whom walked out ahead of the vote.
Texas House Democrats, many of whom left the state earlier this month, are meeting to determine how long they will remain out of state.
The map passed after two Senate Democrats didn’t walk out in protest with the nine other members of their party.
For the map to go into effect, both chambers must pass it.
The current special session to discuss the map and other issues ends on Aug. 19, but Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows has said that his Democratic colleagues have until Aug. 15 to return to the state.
If they don’t return, Burrows said that he’ll end the special session and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott will immediately call a new one.
Dozens of Texas House Democrats fled to Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts on Aug. 3. They hope that their absence will deny the chamber the quorum it needs to conduct business and, as a result, block the proposed map, which is designed to aggressively favor the Republican Party in the 2026 midterm elections.
Texas House Republicans approved a motion on Aug. 4 granting authority for civil warrants to be issued for the lawmakers who left the state. They could face fines of nearly $400,000.
On Aug. 5, Abbott asked the Texas Supreme Court to remove Democratic state Rep. Gene Wu from office. Abbott argues that Wu led several of his colleagues out of the state and that Texas House Democrats have “abandoned their duty” to their constituents.
Some legal experts say that Abbott’s legal reasoning — that breaking quorum amounts to abandoning duties — is “inconsistent” with the state constitution.
Advocates have criticized the new map, unveiled just days before the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, for potentially chipping away at the political power of Texans of color.
Texas state Rep. Jolanda Jones is one of the Democrats who left the state.
“The districts that are targeted overwhelmingly are Black districts [that are represented by Democrats],” Jones said at a press conference earlier this month. “They’re pitting [U.S. Rep.] Jasmine Crockett against [U.S. Rep.] Marc Veasey. And they’re pitting [U.S. Rep] Al Green against [the vacant] CD18, where there was a Black representative.”
For instance, in Green’s current district, which includes a portion of the Greater Houston area, the Black voting-age population would drop from 39% to 11%. Similarly, the Black voting-age population of Veasey’s district, based in Forth Worth, would drop from 25%.
Here’s more information about the latest developments in the Lone Star State — and beyond.
Why did Texas House Democrats flee the state?
For months, President Donald Trump has been pushing his allies in Texas to redraw district lines. Doing so could give the Republican Party five additional seats in the U.S. House in next year’s midterm elections.
Historically, midterm elections haven’t been kind to the party of the sitting president. Trump is attempting to build on Republicans’ 219-212 majority in the House, where four seats are vacant. It wasn’t until after Trump called Abbott this summer that the Texas governor put redistricting on the agenda for a special legislative session, according to The Texas Tribune.
The 30-day session began on July 21. Its agenda includes 18 items, from national disaster preparation and property taxes to redistricting.
Texas House Democrats have slammed Abbott for putting items related to this summer’s deadly flooding on an agenda that they say is filled with partisan priorities. The lawmakers hope to run out the clock on the session by leaving the state, though additional sessions could be called.
Yet the battle over map-drawing is expected to have ramifications across the U.S. And some say that it could possibly trigger a redistricting arms race.
Democratic leaders in a number of other states — including California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York — have vowed to retaliate if Texas House Republicans continue with the unusual move to redistrict in the middle of the decade instead of after the next census in 2030.
And according to some legal scholars, the U.S. Supreme Court likely won’t provide a way out of the crisis.
“The court determined in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering presented a non-justiciable political question, so federal courts couldn’t intervene and hear those cases,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University, told Capital B. “The only avenues for relief would be state courts or redistricting commissions.”
What are politicians saying about the Texas map?
Crockett, a vocal Democratic critic of the Trump administration, blasted state Republicans on Aug. 3, but said that the issue is “bigger than Texas.”
“This isn’t just about the five seats in Texas,” Crockett told MSNBC. “This is about a power grab. It’s about basically setting the tone for what Donald Trump will try to do throughout the country so that he can suppress the voices of Black and brown folk just so that he can stay in power.”
Texas state Rep. Ron Reynolds, one of the Democrats who left the state, echoed some of these thoughts, saying that he and his colleagues won’t “relent to an authoritarian president that wants to steal and racially gerrymander our Black and Brown districts.”
Trump has also pressured Republican state lawmakers in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Ohio to redraw their maps. Some Democratic leaders have vowed to use every tactic at their disposal to prevent any mid-cycle redistricting.
“Everything is on the table,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has met with the Texas Democrats, said on July 30. “We’ve got to preserve democracy.”
Maryland House Majority Leader David Moon, also a Democrat, went even further.
He told The Associated Press on Aug. 1 that he would introduce a bill permitting mid-cycle redistricting if Texas continues down its current path because “we can’t have one state, especially a very large state, constantly trying to one-up and alter the course of congressional control while the other states sit idly by.”
Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who runs the Democratic Party’s redistricting efforts and has traditionally pushed for a nonpartisan approach, seemed to give the green light — at least for now — to Democrats exploring map-drawing outside the census period.
“We have to understand that the nature of the threat that has been put upon the country through what they’re trying to do in Texas has really increased the danger to our democracy,” he told ABC News on Aug. 3. “As a result of that, we’ve got to do things that, perhaps in the past, I would not have supported.”
“I think that responsible Democrats in other states have to take into account the threat to our democracy, the need to preserve our democracy, so that we can ultimately try to heal it,” he added. “And I would hope that they will take steps that are, again, as I said, temporary but responsible.”
What does the walkout say about the Voting Rights Act?
Texas state lawmakers board a bus following an Aug. 3 press conference at the DuPage County Democratic Party headquarters in Carol Stream, Illinois. The group of Democratic lawmakers left Texas so that a quorum could not be reached during a special session called to redistrict the state. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
To many advocates, the redistricting battle illustrates the precarious state of voting rights.
In a recent statement, Texas state Rep. Gene Wu, who’s the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, condemned the proposed map as being “intentionally racist” because it would “steal the voices of millions of Black and Latino Texans, all to execute a corrupt political deal.”
This latest controversy erupted on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, which some legal scholars say is standing on its last leg.
Over the past decade, the Voting Rights Act has been scaled back through various legal challenges. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a section of the act that required jurisdictions with histories of discrimination against Black voters to secure federal approval before changing its election laws.
“If we don’t know our history, we don’t know nothing,” Khadidah Stone, who was a plaintiff in a major 2023 Supreme Court case, recently told Capital B. “Especially if you aren’t a white man, you need to be putting yourself on the line fighting for voting rights just as much as anybody else.”
What’s the next move for Democrats?
Though many Democratic leaders are exploring retaliatory measures, not all of them can move as quickly as Texas House Republicans.
That’s because different states have different procedures for redrawing maps.
In Texas and a number of other Republican-controlled states, state legislatures handle redistricting. This means that in these states the task of redrawing maps is simpler and faster and that the party in power can almost guarantee that its lawmakers will be reelected.
Meanwhile, in many Democratic-controlled states, including California and New York, redistricting is done through an independent commission. This is meant to minimize partisan influence and maximize competitiveness, though reliance on this model also slows down the speed with which maps can be redrawn.
It remains to be seen how Democratic leaders’ countermoves will play out.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has indicated that, if Texas House Republicans redraw their map mid-cycle, she’s prepared to do the same.
“All’s fair in love and war,” she said at a recent event. “We are following the rules. We do redistricting every 10 years. But if there are other states that are violating the rules and trying to give themselves an advantage, all I say is I’m going to look at it closely with [U.S. House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries.”
This story has been updated.
The post Texas GOP Map Aims to Erode Black, Latino Voting Power Ahead of 2026, Critics Say appeared first on Capital B News.
