Texas Democrats have successfully blocked the state’s Republican-dominated House of Representatives from taking the first steps to redraw the state’s congressional map after fleeing the state to derail a vote.
GOP lawmakers in the state fell well short of reaching a requisite quorum to move forward with official business in the state Capitol, but House Republicans voted to track down and arrest more than 50 Democrats who were not present during Monday’s vote.
Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows said he would immediately sign civil warrants for those missing Democratic members, giving the greenlight to the chamber’s sergeant-at-arms and state troopers to make arrests and bring them to the state Capitol.
Those Democrats will not face civil or criminal charges, and the warrants only apply within state lines, making the legislative threats a largely symbolic maneuver as Texas Democrats head elsewhere to condemn the GOP’s partisan-fueled plans to redraw the state’s congressional map to boost the number of Republican seats.
“This is not a decision we make lightly, but it is one we make with absolute moral clarity,” Democratic state Rep. Gene Wu said from Illinois on Sunday night after leaving the state with several Texas Democrats.
Rather than hold a legislative session that supports mourning families and communities in the wake of devastating floods that rocked the state last month, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has “used them as hostages in a political game,” Wu said.
“The tool they’re using is a racist gerrymandered map, a map that seeks to use racial lines to divide hard-working communities that have spent decades building up their power and strengthening their voices,” he said.
Wu said that Abbott is moving ahead with the plan so “Donald Trump can steal these communities’ power and voice” ahead of 2026 midterm elections, facing the likelihood that Republicans will lose control of Congress at the halfway point in Trump’s four-year term.
“We will not be complicit in the destruction of our own communities,” Wu said.
Abbott accused Democrats of “truancy” and launching 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.”
Each absent Democrat could face a fine of $500 a day.
At least two-thirds of the Texas House — 100 of 150 members — must be present for lawmakers to move ahead with business, meaning that 51 of the state’s 62 Democratic members can block the GOP agenda by staying away from the Capitol in Austin.
Democrats said 57 members have left the state. One group headed to Chicago and another arrived in New York, where Governor Kathy Hochul blasted Abbott for what she called a “blatant power grab.”
“This will have implications not just in Texas but for our entire nation and its future,” she said in remarks on Monday. “They know they’ll lose the elections, but to subvert the will of the people, they’re hellbent on rigging the system.”
Hochul and other state-level Democratic officials across the country — including California, which holds a whopping 52 seats in the House of Representatives — have signaled that they’re prepared to redraw their own congressional maps to compete with the proposed map in Texas, which would create at least five Republican-led districts next year.
Texas Democrats intend to wait out the threats for another two weeks, when the 30-day special session is expected to come to an end.
Abbott could call more special sessions, and Democrats have not said whether they intend to stay out of the state past the expiration of the current special session.
Texas Republicans tried a similar move in 2021, when a majority of Texas Democrats headed to Washington, D.C., to protest GOP threats to voting rights.
While congressional Democrats were pushing to renew the Voting Rights Act and ban partisan gerrymandering, Texas Democrats launched a protest against Abbott’s proposals that voting rights advocates warned threatened to undermine ballot access and embolden partisan poll watchers to intimidate election workers.
