Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called on lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional maps when they convene in a special session later this month, in a bid to gain Republican seats and help the party keep control of the House in 2026.
Mr. Abbott announced the request in a legislative agenda released on Wednesday. He also called on lawmakers to improve how the state prepares for and responds to floods, like the ones that ripped through Texas Hill Country last week and have killed more than 100 people.
President Trump’s political team has pushed Texas to redraw its maps in hopes of creating new Republican seats. But the idea has not been well received across the current congressional delegation in the state, which The New York Times first reported last month.
Texas currently has 38 seats, 25 held by Republicans, 12 by Democrats and one vacancy in a solidly Democratic district. Current members of Congress would very likely see some of the Republican voters in their districts shifted to new districts.
In his call to draw new seats, Mr. Abbott’s order cited “constitutional concerns” that he said had been raised by the Justice Department about the existing lines.
In a letter to the governor on July 7, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general in the civil rights division of the Justice Department and a former Trump campaign lawyer, wrote that there had been “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders” in Texas in four districts.
All four districts — Texas’s 9th, 18th, 29th and 33rd — are currently held by Democrats in the Dallas and Houston areas. One of the seats, the 18th Congressional District in Houston, has been vacant since March, after the death of Representative Sylvester Turner. Despite calls from Democrats to schedule a special election over the summer, Mr. Abbott set November as the date for the vote.
Mr. Abbott called for the new special session to begin on July 21. It would address legislation to improve early warning systems and better emergency communications after the Texas floods. It would also address a range of other issues, such as regulating intoxicating hemp products and cutting property taxes.
Democrats have attacked Republicans for focusing on new maps amid the tragedy in Texas.
Representative Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat who served in the Texas Legislature, called it a “blatant partisan power grab” that was coming at an unconscionable moment as the search and recovering operations were still continuing.
“I’ve been disappointed in this governor before. but I’ve never been so thoroughly disgusted,” Ms. Hinojosa said. “The governor is so heartless as to do this right now?”
Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader in the U.S. House, scolded Mr. Abbott on social media on Wednesday. “They should be modernizing emergency response — not rigging maps,” he wrote.
Democrats are still frustrated that a Republican remapping in North Carolina ahead of the 2024 election carved out three new Republican seats, helping the that party secure their current majority in the House. They are afraid Texas could do the same in 2026.
Mr. Abbott’s call for redistricting comes as a panel of federal judges in El Paso is currently weighing a constitutional challenge by Black and Hispanic groups to the state’s maps, drawn in 2021, that argues that the maps illegally disadvantage their communities.
The state’s population grew substantially from 2010 to 2020, in large part because of an increasing number of Hispanic residents, who are now the largest bloc of residents in the state. The plaintiffs in the case argued that the resulting maps did not reflect those changes.
The Justice Department under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had originally brought the suit over the 2021 maps, but the department dropped its challenge after Mr. Trump took office this year. A ruling in the case is expected later this year.
Instead, the department said in its July 7 letter that the four districts it identified were “nothing more than vestiges of an unconstitutional racially based gerrymandering past” and that it “must now be corrected by Texas.“
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
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