At least one Texas Republican is blaming his own party for not getting ahead of Democrats who skipped town on Sunday to prevent a vote on new congressional districts.
Dozens of state House lawmakers fled to Illinois, New York and Massachusetts so that Republicans wouldn’t be able to make quorum and hold a vote on the districts, which have been gerrymandered at President Donald Trump’s request to help Republicans pick up five seats in the 2026 midterms.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened to arrest the lawmakers and try to strip them of their seats if they’re not back by Monday for a special legislative session. But at least one Texas state representative told Politico that he blamed him own party for letting Democrats thwart the special session.
“If the elected Republican leadership of Texas wanted to have had redistricting already done by now, it would have been done by now,” said state Rep. Brian Harrison, who sometimes appears on Steve Bannon’s show War Room. “This is not a success of the Democrats as much as it is a failure of elected Republicans.”
Generally speaking, it’s up to each state’s legislature to decide how the state will draw its own political map. Some states keep the process in the hands of lawmakers, while others have created special commissions to draw political districts.
The maps, however, cannot violate the Constitution or the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and usually they’re redrawn after each census—not in the middle of the decade.
Nationwide, Republicans already enjoy a 16-seat advantage in Congress, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. That means Democrats need to win far more votes just to hold the same number of seats in Congress as Republicans.
But the Republicans House majority is razor thin, and lawmakers will face a restless electorate in next year’s midterms.
Those dynamics prompted Trump to call for “a simple redrawing” of Texas’ political map that would allow Republicans to pick up as many as five seats in a state where they already enjoy a five-seat advantage, according to the Brennan Center.
In a statement Sunday, Texas Democrats accused Abbott of using the special session to make relief for victims of last month’s catastrophic floods contingent on the controversial new political maps.
“Governor Abbott has turned the victims of a tragedy into political hostages in his submission to Donald Trump,” they wrote. “We will not allow disaster relief to be held hostage to a Trump gerrymander. As of today, this corrupt special session is over.”
Abbott responded by issuing a letter Sunday saying that if Democratic lawmakers didn’t return for Monday’s vote, he would consider their absence an “abandonment or forfeiture” of office, and would try to remove them from office and personally appoint replacements.
He also accused the Democrats of potentially violating the state’s anti-bribery laws by soliciting or accepting donations to cover the $500 daily fines that Texas lawmakers incur for missing days in session.
“I will use my full extradition authority to demand the return to Texas of any potential out-of-state felons,” Abbott wrote.
“Come and take it,” Texas House Democrats responded in a statement.
It’s not clear how long they can hold out, considering Abbott can keep calling new sessions until the lawmakers are finally forced to return, Politico reported. In the past, similar efforts delayed votes but didn’t prevent them.
This time, Republicans are facing threats of retaliation from Democratic governors—including Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California—which the Texas state lawmakers hope will give the Republicans pause, according to Politico.
Abbott’s letter cited an opinion from the state’s scandal-plagued attorney general Ken Paxton saying that a court could potentially conclude that a legislator has forfeited their office by intentionally breaking quorum.
The opinion, however, is not binding, and it doesn’t actually say that lawmakers who break quorum can be removed, nor does it say that breaking quorum violates the state’s constitution.
Instead, Paxton wrote that it would be up to a court to decide whether the facts surrounding the breaking of quorum showed an “actual or imputed intention” for the lawmaker to fully relinquish the office.
The post Republican Turns on Texas Gov Over Dems’ Redistricting Foil appeared first on The Daily Beast.
