Democrats are ready to fight dirty over Texas

0:02A political battle is erupting right now over Texas and its congressional map. This is not the Democratic Party of your grandfather, which would bring a pencil to the knife fight. This is a new Democratic Party. We're bringing a knife to a knife fight, and we are going to fight fire with fire. That was Ken Martin, the head of the National Democratic Party. He was flanked by Democratic members of the Texas legislature at a press conference outside Chicago on Tuesday. Martin accused Republicans of trying to cheat in the next midterm election. They've decided to cheat, and we're going to respond in kind.

0:37And listen, listen, none of us wanted to be here. Make no mistake about it. The Democratic Party didn't start this fight, but we're not going to roll over. They want to fight, we're going to give it to them, and we're going to put every option on the table. Texas Republicans are trying to redraw their state's congressional districts. The new map would make it easier for Republicans to stay in power in Washington after the 2026 midterms. They are acting on the wishes of President Donald Trump, who told CNBC on Tuesday he wants more Republican seats. We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats.

1:12We have a really good governor and we have good people in Texas. And I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know. And we are entitled to five more seats. Over the weekend, dozens of Texas Democratic lawmakers literally fled their state to try and stop these Republican efforts. From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Kolbie Echowitz. It's Tuesday, August 5th. Today, we take a look at how this fight over the congressional map of Texas is threatening to unleash an even more cutthroat era in American politics. I'm talking with my colleague Patrick Marley.

1:51Patrick is an expert on gerrymandering. This is the idea that a political party redraws districts to stack legislatures in their favor. He'll explain what's happening with Texas and why some Democrats are now saying they need to gerrymander their states too.

2:12Patrick, hi, welcome. Hi, Colby. So, Patrick, you're in Chicago right now, and Texas Democratic lawmakers, they fled to that city over the weekend to stop Republicans from redrawing the state's congressional districts to their advantage. Let's first kind of unpack how all of this started. This started when President Donald Trump said he wanted more seats in Congress, presumably to preserve the Republican majority in the House after the 2026 midterms. So he urged Republicans in Texas to redraw their map, to strengthen their majority and give them five additional seats in the midterms. Governor Greg Abbott agreed to do that and called a special session last month, bringing the lawmakers back to Austin so they could redraw these maps.

2:58And why Texas? Texas is a place where they can get the seats and they don't really have many rules on redistricting. So it's a pure opportunity. So why does Trump think this is necessary? Why does he feel like he needs to, you know, get these five more seats out of Texas ahead of next year's, you know, 2026 midterms? The margin in the House is very tight. It's right now 219 to 212. So Democrats don't have to win much to get the House of Representatives. And in midterm elections, it's usually not great for the sitting president. So the environment is not good for the Republicans at the moment. And if they add seats in Texas and possibly other states, they could shore up that majority and potentially protect the control of Congress they have.

3:46Obviously, with control of Congress, they can continue to advance Trump's agenda and they can prevent investigations by the House. And on the flip side of this, Democratic lawmakers in Texas are like, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not going to let this happen. So they took the pretty dramatic step of actually leaving the state, right? So what does that do? Them leaving the state, why did they feel like they had to flee? So first of all, this is a way for them to at least stall what the Republicans are doing in under the Texas Constitution. You have to have two thirds of the members of the House present to take any action.

4:20and the Democrats have more than a third of the seats. So 56 of them left the state. That pretty much ties the House up in knots. They can't do anything and they can wait out this special session, which is set to expire on August 19th. Democrats came to Chicago in part because the governor, J.B. Pritzker, has been so welcoming to them. He met with them weeks ago to talk about what's happening down there. Pritzker, of course, is the billionaire governor of Illinois. potential 2028 candidate for president. And he has been welcoming these Texas Democrats with open arms. You know, Patrick, mid-cycle redistricting, which is what this would be, is fairly rare unless it's like the court kind of mandates it, right?

5:05Unless a court steps in and says, OK, these maps are unfair. You need to redraw them. But this is a politician's deciding, no, we're going to redraw the maps in the middle of the cycle. I mean, how rare is this? This is very unusual. You're right. Normally, states just draw their maps after the census. You know, every year ending in a zero gets a census, and that tells us the changes in population. So you can see within a state how people have moved around, and you need to redraw the district so that each district has an equal number of residents in it. But where you draw those lines can greatly affect who has a majority, and politicians from both sides have drawn maps to their favor.

5:44This happens every decade. But to do it just four years after having passed maps after the census is really unusual. So how would these maps, these new maps that they're proposing, benefit Republicans? How exactly does it achieve this? We know that it would probably, they hope, give them five additional seats in Congress. But what specifically? How does it change the lines in Texas? Well, it is really remarkable how they're able to get such solid seats. Already the Republicans have 25 of the 38 seats in the state. This would put them at 30. These new five seats are ones that Republicans should be able to get.

6:20I guess we wouldn't know for sure until we hold some elections whether they can actually win them. The changes affect seats in the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth area and then along the border, which is an area where Republicans performed well in 2024. We should note here that the way redistricting is done in different states is different, right? Some states, it's the state legislatures that draw it. Some states have these independent commissions. But in Texas, it is, in fact, the elected state officials that decide what the boundaries are of these districts. And though there is a lot of gerrymandering that happens across the country, they often couch it, right?

6:59They don't say that quiet part out loud that they're trying to do it for political advantage. But in this case, it kind of sounds like Trump and other Republicans are saying, yeah, this is for political gain. Like we want to make sure that we keep the House in 2026. Is that right? That's right. I mean, both parties gerrymander and typically both parties deny gerrymandering. They say, no, we're doing a fair map. We're just better at campaigning. But in this case, and we've seen this in a couple other places, the Republicans are just flat out saying now we're doing this for political purposes. We want to increase our power.

7:35We want five more seats, and that's why we're doing this. So you have these Democrats. They're currently kind of hiding out in Chicago. I guess they're in some other blue cities, Democratic cities as well. How long can they just not go back to Texas? Well, in the short term, they've, I think, got this pretty well in hand.

7:59The special sessions last for 30 days. Abbott called it in July, and so it expires on August 19th. And so if they hang out for two more weeks, they're okay. They can even go back a couple days before August 19th because there's a lot of ways to stall bills on the floor. The problem for Democrats is that the day after the session expires, Greg Abbott can call another special session, and if they leave again, he can call another one. He can call another one after that. And so they could be in a spot where they have to leave the state over and over again for many months. And this is obviously disruptive to people's lives if they've got young kids, if they have private sector jobs.

8:39And so whether the Democrats have the wherewithal to stay out for more than these two weeks is extremely unclear. And they have not committed to doing that. They're also getting fined, right? Like they have to pay money every day that they're gone. Yeah, presumably they will. The Republicans have the power to charge them$500 each day. These lawmakers in Texas make$600 a month. So those fines add up. To serve in the Texas legislature, you only make$600 a month? That's right,$7 ,200 a year. And so you could get your whole salary wiped out in two weeks, right? Because$500 a day, that adds up fast.

9:20And also what I'm hearing, the governor is making some threats, right? Well, he's making a lot of accusations against them. The House on Monday voted to issue civil arrest warrants, and Greg Abbott has said he will assist with that if he can. Now, that civil arrest, what that means is if they found a Democratic lawmaker, they could grab them and take them back to the state capitol and get them into the chamber to force them to participate in the debate. Really? They could, like, march them back and police could march them back into the capitol? That is the theory, and that's why they left the state, because the law enforcement doesn't have jurisdiction outside of Texas.

10:02So by leaving the state, they've sort of protected themselves from that happening. Now, there are a handful of Democrats who are still in Texas. They came to the floor on Monday. But if a Texas lawmaker didn't show up at the Capitol but stayed within Texas, yeah, I think they'd be at risk of arrest and being taken to the Capitol. Separately, Greg Abbott has alleged that the Democratic lawmakers could be committing some kind of bribery violation if they are fundraising to pay their fines. The fines have to be paid personally and not through a campaign account. This$500 a day you're saying has to be paid personally.

10:41Now, there's no evidence that anyone has produced to say that they are actually violating the law, but Abbott has raised the specter that they could be. Could a very rich benefactor like a governor of Illinois cover those costs, even if it's not through a fundraiser? So the Democrats have said that, you know, obviously beyond the fines, there's other costs, right? They got to stay in hotels. They got to travel around. They had to get on their plane. So they've got a bunch of costs beyond the fines. Democrats, I'm sure, are fundraising like mad because a segment of the base is going to love this fighting attitude that they've taken.

11:16And the Democrats say everything they're doing from a financing point of view is legal. We don't know the ins and outs of that. J.B. Pritzker, who is very rich and the governor of Illinois and on their side, has indicated that so far he has not been financially backing them, but he's also seemed not to have ruled it out.

11:42After the break, we talk about how national Democrats are trying to fight back. with some gerrymandering of their own. We'll be right back.

11:57When it comes to the big questions, who you ask matters. From breaking news to politics that impact your life to advice you can trust. Get answers you don't have to question with Ask the Post AI, trained exclusively on post journalism

12:26So Patrick, ever since Texas announced that they were going to try and redraw their maps, you've seen Democratic governors in some of the big blue states pushing back and saying, well, if you do it, we're going to do it. What have those efforts looked like? So I think the prime example of that is California, where the governor, Gavin Newsom, has said he wants to draw maps in favor of Democrats to counterbalance what the Texas Republicans are doing. California will not sit by idly and watch this democracy waste away. We'll fight fire with fire, we'll assert ourselves and we'll punch above our weight.

13:03And it will have profound impacts on the national outcome, not just here in the state of California. So he says he supports nonpartisan redistricting. In fact, California is a state that has nonpartisan redistricting, but that he'll change course if the Republicans do this. And he's talking about moving as soon as this month. I was wondering about that, Patrick, because I know that California has nonpartisan redistricting. They have like an outside group that draws the lines for them. Can the governor just like be like, no, never mind. We're going to ignore that and do it ourselves. It doesn't look like the governor can do that.

13:39He's definitely got more hoops. And this is why Democrats have a disadvantage when it comes to these redistricting wars. In California, voters have approved an amendment to the state constitution that says they have to have this independent commission draw the lines. And so what Newsom is proposing is coming up with maps, telling voters what he's doing and why he's doing it, then holding a special election this November that would say we're going to put these new maps that are more favorable to Democrats in place for 2026, 2028 and 2030 to react to the Texas Republicans and then revert in 2030 to their nonpartisan system of drawing maps.

14:24Whoa. So they would bring that question to the voters of California? They would. And it will be very interesting to see what voters think of that. They voted to end gerrymandering in their state, and now they would be asked explicitly to allow it at least for a short window. That's fascinating. And so the same is kind of true in New York, right? I mean, New York voters also decided that they wanted to end gerrymandering and have an independent commission draw the lines. It's been complicated in New York for a variety of reasons that we don't we won't get into. But how is the governor of New York talking about this?

14:58So that's exactly right, that they've got this same challenge in New York. And I would say the challenge is even greater in New York, where Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, this week said at a news conference that Democrats are at war. But here in New York, we will not stand on the sidelines with the timid souls on the sidelines who don't care, will not invest their heart and soul into this battle. This is a war. We are at war. And that's why the gloves are off, and I say, bring it on. But it takes longer to change the state constitution in New York. And so one of the proposals wouldn't change the rules until 2027, after the midterm election.

15:39Hochul said this week that she would be for getting rid of or changing in some way the nonpartisan redistricting commission they have. So things are in flux in that state as well. So this is such an interesting shift in messaging for Democrats because, you know, in 2010, when Republicans were able to dramatically gerrymander in a lot of swing states, Democrats came out and said, we need fair maps. We need to take the politics out of this. We need independent commissions drawing these lines so that there's no kind of partisan consideration. But now you have people like Gavin Newsom, who we should note is also a potential 2028 presidential contender.

16:19Governor Hochul in New York saying, well, maybe we need to fight dirty. That's right. That's exactly the sort of messaging conundrum they've found themselves in, though they seem pretty comfortable with it. They say, look, we continue to support nonpartisan redistricting, but we can't unilaterally disarm. I've spoken to some of the Democrats from Texas who are in Chicago. One of them was Representative Gina Hinojosa, who made the argument that nonpartisan redistricting is the way to go. But the reality of politics right now is that Democrats have to fight Republicans. We believe that the politicians should not be drawing these lines.

16:58But look, if Trump is going to get Abbott to work against his own constituents to take away their voice and their power, this is what happens. Is it ideal? No, it's not ideal. It's a lot of the same rhetoric you heard over campaign finance reform with Democrats saying, you know, we don't like the Citizens United decision, but if it's the law and the Republicans are going to use it, we're going to create our own super PACs. Of course, Citizens United is the decision from the Supreme Court that allowed a flood of cash to come in in an unlimited fashion into politics. So now they're saying, well, if the Republicans are going to play this game, we're going to get down in the mud and play it too.

17:44I mean, when you talk to voters, generally, and you can just look at how these, you know, referendums on gerrymandering have gone in recent elections, they don't like it, right? Some people say it takes away choice. It's the reason why we have so few swing districts across the country. It's also a reason some people say that we have such extremes on either side because the real fight ends up happening in a primary. If you have like a super Republican district and then you have super Democratic districts, the fights play out in primaries instead of if the general election is already predetermined.

18:19So is this what voters want? I mean, voters clearly hate gerrymandering. They've pretty consistently voted against gerrymandering at the ballot box. And reform has almost always happened from citizen-led initiatives rather than politicians leading the charge. And, you know, with gerrymandering, it's very hard to affect change for voters because if lawmakers or members of Congress introduce legislation that's unpopular, voters can have something to say about it at the next election and say, you know, you passed X. We don't like X. We want to throw you out and bring in the other party. But with gerrymandering, voters might not like it, but now they're drawn into a new district where they don't have the voting power that they would to express their will, express their opposition to gerrymandering.

19:12Yeah. And if you're, you know, a Democrat drawn into a district that is already predetermined to vote Republican, in some cases you don't even have someone to vote for. Like in some cases a Democrat might not even run in that district. That's right. It begs a larger, you know, small D Democratic question. Like, is this how our democracy is supposed to work? Well, it's, I mean, it's inherently anti-democratic when you have politicians deciding who their voters are. The notion of elections is that when you cast a ballot, it means something. And in a gerrymandered district, it usually doesn't mean anything.

19:52Well, Patrick, thank you so much. Thanks for taking the time. Thank you, Colby. Patrick Marley reports on democracy issues for The Post. That's it for Post Reports. Thanks for listening. If you appreciated this conversation, please subscribe to The Washington Post. There's a new offer for premium subscribers. It's a way for you to share Post journalism with other people in your life. A premium subscription now comes with three extra accounts. three accounts that you can give to friends or family members. If you subscribe now, there's a great sale happening. You can get your first year for just$3 every four weeks.

20:32Three bucks every four weeks. After the first year, the price is$17 every four weeks, and you can cancel anytime. There's also an even better deal if you pay for the whole year up front. To see that and to sign up now, go to WashingtonPost.com slash subscribe. That's WashingtonPost.com slash subscribe There's also a link in our show notes Today's show was produced by Arjun Singh It was mixed by Sam Baer and edited by Reena Flores Thanks to politics editor Sean Sullivan I'm Colby Echowitz We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from The Washington Post

21:19When it comes to the big questions, who you ask matters. From breaking news to politics that impact your life to advice you can trust. Get answers you don't have to question with Ask the Post AI. Trained exclusively on post journalism with clear sourcing. And if we don't know the answer, we'll tell you. Ask the Post AI. Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app.