California escalates Texas redistricting fight with November ballot measure
Texas Republicans have drawn a new congressional map aimed at flipping five Democratic seats in the November 2026 midterm election, with the battle for control of the U.S. House of Representatives expected to be closely fought.
Governor Gavin Newsom and other California Democrats on Friday characterized their latest effort as an "emergency," a temporary strategy to neutralize Republican moves they see aimed at gaming the system.
"We are trying to defend democracy, as opposed to seeing it destroyed district by district," Newsom said during a news conference in Sacramento. He was flanked by Democratic leaders of the California legislature and members of the state's congressional district, including former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The Democrats said they expected to have a newly agreed-upon map, based on previous plans reviewed by the state's independent redistricting commission, ready for public scrutiny next week, three months before it would go to voters.
The Democratic-majority legislature would first have to vote in favor of a special election, to be set for the first week of November 2025.
Newsom was joined by half a dozen of the more than 50 Democratic Texas lawmakers who collectively left their home state to prevent the legislative quorum required for Republicans there to win adoption of a Texas redistricting plan championed by Trump.
Newsom and California's Democrats insisted they remain committed to the independent redistricting process enacted by state voters more than 15 years ago.
Republican leaders sought on Friday to ramp up pressure seeking to force the wayward Texas Democrats, holed up in such Democratic-led states as California, Illinois and New York, to return to the legislature and punish those who refuse.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit with the Texas Supreme Court seeking a declaration that the seats of 13 absent Democratic lawmakers are vacant.
In another tactic, Texas House of Representatives Speaker Dustin Burrows put the absent Democratic lawmakers on notice that they can only collect their paychecks by appearing in person at the capitol in Austin.
Republicans now hold a narrow 219-212 majority U.S. House of Representatives.
Texas Republicans' new redistricting map was the first salvo in trying to secure their party's majority on Capitol Hill. Trump has that with the redrawing of congressional district lines Republicans can expect to pick up as many as five additional U.S. House seats.
Friday's response by Newsom and his fellow California Democrats may not be the last move in the redistricting game.
Other Democratic governors have threatened to follow suit, while Republican leaders in other states have said they may do likewise.
Texas state Representative Ann Johnson, one of the Democrats appearing in California on Friday, said she and other legislators staging the walkout were employing rare but legitimate tactics to keep Republicans from "rigging" the next election.
"We are running from nothing," she said. "We see the danger that is coming and we are running straight for it."
Speaking on the Texas House floor on Friday, Burrows also said the legislature would withhold 30% of absent members' paychecks to ensure that daily fines will eventually be covered. He said missing lawmakers would not be allowed to send newsletters to their constituents or seek travel reimbursement.
"Each one of you knows that eventually, you will come back, and we will pass the priorities of the special session," he told Democrats.
Burrows previously signed civil warrants for the Democrats and said the Texas Department of Public Safety was "working to track down absent members." Those warrants are not enforceable beyond Texas' borders.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott has threatened to seek to remove the missing Democrats from office, though legal experts have expressed skepticism about such a maneuver.
Republican U.S. Senator John Cornyn of Texas said on Thursday that the FBI had agreed to his request to assist in tracking down absent Democrats, but it was unclear precisely how, or whether, federal agents would become involved.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
23 minutes ago
- The Independent
Bill Maher and Dr. Phil spar over the TV personality going on Trump's ICE raids: ‘Literally separating families'
HBO talk show host and comedian Bill Maher confronted Phil McGraw, known as the TV personality Dr. Phil, about McGraw's participation in raids with Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Friday night's edition of Real Time. 'Why are you going on these ICE raids?' Maher asked. 'I don't understand that.' 'You're a guy who we know for so many years who has been working to put families together,' he added. 'To bring families who are apart and heal them. And now you're going on raids with people who are literally separating families.' Dr. Phil, a former clinical psychologist, responded, 'Well, now that's bulls***.' 'Look, if you arrest somebody that's a citizen, that has committed a crime or is DUI'd with a child in the backseat, do you think they don't separate that family right then, right there?' Dr. Phil asked. 'Of course they do!' 'But that's not what's going on,' said Maher. Dr. Phil is reported to have taken part in ICE raids twice, in Chicago in January, and in Los Angeles in June, the New York Post noted. However, the TV personality has denied being embedded during the ICE raids in Los Angeles, which prompted protests. But Dr. Phil's camera crews did take part. 'MeritTV news crews were on the ground during the recent ICE operations in LA ... In order to not escalate any situation, Dr. Phil McGraw did not join and was not embedded, as he previously was in Chicago,' a spokesperson for McGraw told The Independent in June. Before the confrontation began on Friday night, Maher had argued that the deportation raids were 'another thing' that President Donald Trump is doing while he's 'doubling down on unpopular.' Dr. Phil went on to reference Maher's monologue in which he had criticized ICE agents for wearing masks. Dr. Phil argued that agents are masked because legislators are doxxing them. He claimed that legislators are 'putting their names, their pictures, their addresses of their families on the internet, they're putting them on telephone poles.' 'So, of course, they're wearing masks so they don't get outed, so people can do violence against their families,' he added. Dr. Phil argued that he had seen information that justified the raids he had taken part in. 'They've got a rap sheet, 12, 14 different cases long of child predators that they're taking off the street,' he said. 'These are the worst first that they're taking off the streets. Who would want them back in their communities?' Another guest on the show, ESPN commentator Stephen A Smith, said he backs 'closing the borders,' but argued that the actions taken by the administration haven't matched their promises. 'When you're going to Home Depot, when you're going to people's jobs, when you've been given authorization to enter churches and to enter other properties … who they have been targeting has been different than what they originally advertised,' said Smith. Maher agreed, noting that ICE is entering places where people are 'already working.' 'If you can't go to work because you're hiding, what other recourse is it for [illegal immigrants] except crime?' asked Maher.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
What is going on with Marjorie Taylor Greene?
Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write: Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right conspiracy theorist and bigot who also happens to be a Republican congresswoman, has suddenly started to speak (a small amount of) sense. It's unclear what exactly precipitated it, but the Georgia congresswoman has declared war on her fellow Republicans. 'The course that [the Republican party] is on, I don't want to have anything to do with it,' Greene told the Daily Mail last week. Greene went on to complain that her male colleagues treat their female peers badly, referencing the Trump administration pulling Elise Stefanik's nomination for United Nations ambassador in favor of Mike Waltz. To refresh your memory, just a couple of months before getting confirmed as US ambassador to the UN, Waltz was ousted as national security adviser after it was revealed he had mistakenly added a journalist to a private Signal chat used to discuss strikes in Yemen. Weird how some people – and by 'people' I mean well-connected white men – have a way of always failing up. '[Stefanik] got screwed by the White House,' Greene told the Mail. 'I think there's other women in our party that are really sick and tired of the way men treat Republican women.' Which is interesting wording: Greene doesn't seem to care about how Republican men treat women in general, just the ones in the party. Still, baby steps and all that. It's certainly amusing to see Greene suddenly have a revelation that a party led by a legally defined sexual predator may have some disturbing views about women. Greene seems to be having a lot of revelations lately: she recently became the first Republican lawmaker to say that there is a genocide happening in Gaza. She also criticized the Florida representative Randy Fine for dismissing a report about Israel's forced starvation in Gaza as propaganda and writing 'starve away' on social media. Fine, by the way, has previously said Gaza should be nuked and posted that Palestinians are 'demons that live on Earth … they only deserve death.' There's always very little outrage from lawmakers, or media coverage, about his hateful remarks because anti-Palestinian racism is a bipartisan position in the US. To be clear, I don't think Greene's comments about Gaza have anything to do with empathy for Palestinians. Unfortunately, I also don't think her comments were prompted by an analysis of the growing consensus from respected experts that a genocide is under way. Rather, it's more likely that Greene, a Christian nationalist who has a history of promoting Islamophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories, is motivated by antisemitic impulses here. Let me be unequivocal about this: while she may occasionally be making more sense recently, Greene is no friend to the Palestinian cause specifically or progressive issues more generally. Nevertheless, it's still fun to watch the congresswoman sow discord in the Republican party by calling for a release of the Epstein files, criticizing US strikes in Iran and denouncing Fox News. On Wednesday, for example, she took aim at the Fox News personality Mark Levin, who called the congresswoman a 'lunatic', by calling Fox News irrelevant. '[M]ost of the people that watch Fox News are very much up in age, the baby boomer generation, who I love … but that's their biggest audience. That's not the future of America,' the congresswoman said. That statement echoes comments she made to the former Florida Republican lawmaker Matt Gaetz in June, when she called Fox News and the New York Post 'propaganda' and 'neocon network news'. In that same conversation she said: 'We have propaganda news on our side, just like the left does, and the American people have been brainwashed into believing that America has to engage in these foreign wars in order for us to survive, and it's absolutely not true.' Keep going, Marjorie! While I can't stress enough that MTG is no ally, that doesn't mean she's not an accidental asset when it comes to destroying the Republican party. I've lost any hope that the Democrats, a party that largely consists of self-interested careerists who don't believe in much other than their own advancement and are happy to help fund a genocide, will mount any sort of meaningful fight against the worst instincts of Trumpism. When Maga eventually collapses it will be from infighting, not Democratic opposition. Lawrence Taylor, a former New York Giants linebacker and registered sex offender has been appointed to a council that will advise on matters including youth sports. I can't wait to hear from all the anti-trans 'feminist' writers who declared Trump a 'feminist hero' and 'feminist icon' after he used an executive order to 'protect' women by ensuring trans women couldn't compete in women's sports. 'The dildo is a weaponized farce,' writes Lee Escobedo in the Guardian. 'It's thrown not just to interrupt but to dominate the narrative, to remind players that their gender, their careers and their stage remain vulnerable to mockery.' It's not just basketball that has a major misogyny problem. And of course it's going viral. Arizona state senate hopeful Mylie Biggs, the daughter of Republican representative Andy Biggs, told a podcast last year that she wouldn't 'vote for any female [and] I don't know if females should be in office'. Musk once offered to impregnate Swift. Not exactly surprising that his company's chatbot, which has also praised Hitler in the past, would digitally undress her. According to Bill Gates, his foundation is now the primary funder when it comes to researching the vaginal microbiome. It would be nice if we didn't have to depend on the largesse of billionaires for women's health funding. Yet more evidence that the 'pro-life' crowd, who have little to say about this, are not 'pro-life' they are simply pro forced birth. In a column this week, I argued the 60,000 figure is a major undercount. Responding to my column, Rachel Taylor, executive director of Every Casualty Counts, an international NGO that works to document casualties of armed violence, pointed out the following: 'The Gaza population register is managed by the Israeli ministry of interior – they certify all births and deaths in Gaza. The Israeli authorities could immediately dispel all doubts about the number of deaths in Gaza by releasing the registered fatality figures from the past two years. But they choose not to. Why?' Domínguez and her husband were found dead earlier this year and, while it's not clear who killed them, her family believe her murder was tied to her feminist activism in Oaxaca. 'Oaxaca is the most dangerous state in Mexico for activists,' the Guardian writes in a piece about Domínguez. 'Since 2018, 58 people have been murdered and six more are missing.' I know, I know: hard to believe that Meta would be doing something dodgy with people's sensitive data. A real shocker. It's been another unbearable news week, so please enjoy this paw-late cleanser of a tiny Pomeranian called Scout chasing a large bear out of its house. Scout may only be six pounds but it's clear who is top dog.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
William H Webster, former director of FBI and CIA, dies aged 101
William H Webster, the former FBI and CIA director whose troubleshooting skills and integrity helped restore public confidence in those federal agencies, has died, his family announced on Friday. He was 101. Webster led the FBI from 1978 to 1987 and the CIA from 1987 to 1991, the only person to guide the nation's top law-enforcement agency and its primary intelligence-gathering organization. By the time he came to Washington, at age 53, Webster had practiced law for nearly 20 years, had served a stint as a federal prosecutor and had spent almost nine years on the federal bench in his native St Louis. Those who opposed him in court or disagreed with his rulings acknowledged that his honesty was beyond question. 'Every director of the CIA or the FBI should be prepared to resign in the event that he is asked to do something that he knows is wrong,' Webster said after he agreed to lead the spy agency. Former Republican president George W Bush said in a statement on Friday night that Webster's 'passion for the rule of law and for the greatness of America made him a model public servant'. Late Democratic president Jimmy Carter selected Webster, a Republican, for a 10-year term as FBI chief as the bureau sought to improve an image tarnished by revelations of domestic spying, internal corruption and other abuses of power. Demanding but fair in his treatment of his agents, he was generally credited with developing the agency's ability to handle new challenges such as terrorism. Republican president Ronald Reagan chose Webster to replace CIA chief William J Casey, who had been criticized for being too political, ignoring Congress and playing a part in the arms-for-hostages scandal known as Iran-Contra. Webster, again in the role of outsider with no political agenda, quickly sought to ease tensions with Congress. He reported regularly on the CIA's activities to lawmakers charged with intelligence oversight and avoided the appearance of trying to shape policy. Retiring from federal service in 1991, he joined a Washington law firm but still served on a variety of policy-related boards and commissions. In 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) selected Webster, on a partisan vote, to lead a board created by Congress to oversee the accounting profession in the wake of scandals involving Enron and other corporations. Before the board's first meeting, however, Webster resigned amid questions about his role as head of the audit committee of US Technologies, a company itself accused of fraud. The controversy over his role in Webster's appointment contributed to the resignation of SEC chair Harvey Pitt.
