Texas Democratic lawmakers end walkout, setting stage for vote on redrawn map
Texas House of Representatives Minority Leader Gene Wu, chairperson of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, said in a statement that Democrats returned because they had achieved their two main goals.
The first was to block a vote on new congressional maps in a first special legislative session that ended Friday. The second goal was to prompt California and other Democratic-led states to consider redrawing their own maps to offset any seats Republicans might gain in Texas.
"We're returning to Texas more dangerous to Republicans' plans than when we left," Wu said. "Our return allows us to build the legal record necessary to defeat this racist map in court, take our message to communities across the state and country."
Speaker of the House Dustin Burrows, a Republican, gaveled in the session at 12 p.m. local time on Monday, with enough Democrats present to have a quorum.
"We are done waiting. We have a quorum. Now is the time for action," Burrows said on opening the session.
Burrows said that the Democrats who had left the state but whom were present on Monday would only be allowed to leave the House chambers if they agreed to be released into the custody of an agent from the Texas Department of Public Safety, who would ensure they are present at House sessions going forward.
More than 50 Texas House Democrats left the state on August 3 and most headed to Illinois, aiming to deny Republicans enough lawmakers in attendance to hold a vote on redistricting legislation - a tactic used several times in the past, mostly without success.
Republican leaders in Texas issued civil arrest warrants for the Democrats, which could only be acted on within the borders of the state, and sought their extradition from Illinois, which a judge in that state rejected.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Friday called a second special legislation session in another attempt to rework the state's congressional maps in an effort to give Republicans another five seats in Congress.
With Republicans dominating the Texas House and Senate, quick passage of the new maps is almost certain. Abbott didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the Democrats' return.
Trump believes redistricting would help maintain Republicans' slim control of Congress in midterm elections next year. But Democrats are threatening retaliation, launching what could build into an all-out national redistricting war across several states.
Gavin Newsom, California's Democratic Governor, on Thursday unveiled his own redistricting plan that he said would give Democrats there five more congressional seats. Legislation that would allow California voters to approve new maps is expected to be introduced on Monday.
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Reuters
25 minutes ago
- Reuters
Russia expects India to keep buying its oil and seeks China-India-Russia talks
NEW DELHI, Aug 20 (Reuters) - Russia expects to continue supplying oil to India despite warnings from the United States, Russian embassy officials in New Delhi said on Wednesday, adding that Moscow hopes trilateral talks will soon take place with India and China. U.S. President Donald Trump has announced an additional tariff of 25% on Indian goods exported to the U.S. from August 27, as a punishment for buying Russian oil, which constitutes 35% of India's total imports compared with a negligible 0.2% before the Ukraine war. "I want to highlight that despite the political situation, we can predict that the same level of oil import (by India)," Roman Babushkin, the charge d'affaires at the Russian embassy in India, told a press briefing. He predicted India and Russia would find ways to overcome Trump's latest tariffs in their "national interests". Trade talks between India and the U.S. broke down over the opening up of India's vast farm and dairy sectors, as well as its purchases of Russian oil. The total tariff announced on Indian goods entering the U.S. is 50%. The Indian foreign ministry did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment. It has previously said the U.S. decision to single out India for Russian purchases was "extremely unfortunate". Russia's Deputy Trade Commissioner Evgeny Griva on Wednesday said buying oil from Russia is "very profitable" for India, which will not want to change its supplier. On average Russia gives a 5%-7% discount to Indian buyers, he said, adding that Russia has a "very, very special mechanism" to continue oil supplies to India. In addition, he said Russia had started accepting Indian rupee payments for its goods after the resolution of issues that had trapped billions of dollars worth of funds in Indian banks. As tensions between Washington and New Delhi rise, high-profile visits from New Delhi and Beijing in recent weeks have raised hopes on the part of the Asian neighbours that ties damaged by a 2020 border clash can be repaired. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans to visit China for the first time in over seven years later this month. The planned visit was reported by Reuters last week, even as other high profile exchanges, including Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's two-day visit to New Delhi, concluded. At the same time, Russia is trying to revive long-standing plans for a trilateral meeting with India and China to help them forge a "greater Eurasian partnership". "As far as the trilateral is concerned, we are quite hopeful that this format will be resumed sooner rather than later because its importance is not questioned," Babushkin said. "This is closely linked to the Russian initiative of the establishment of the greater Eurasian partnership," Babushkin said. Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Modi in New Delhi by the end of year, he said. Putin, Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping are also expected to all attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation starting August 31.
The Guardian
25 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Trump-fueled gas boom has Gulf coast communities on edge: ‘We will keep fighting'
This story was originally published by Floodlight, a non-profit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action For more than a decade, Rebekah Hinojosa has fought the build-out of liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals near the Texas border with Mexico. She wants to save the pristine land fronting the Gulf of Mexico from massive terminals and the hulking ships that would carry billions of cubic feet of gas all over the world. Using what they call a 'death by a thousand cuts' strategy of opposition, Hinojosa, a founder of the environmental non-profit South Texas Environmental Justice Network, and her fellow advocates have traveled the world. They've pleaded with banks, politicians, insurers and companies to drop their support for the LNG terminals in the overwhelmingly Hispanic community near Brownsville on the edge of the Laguna Atascosa national wildlife refuge. They have notched some David-versus-Goliath victories. Some insurers and investors have severed ties with Rio Grande LNG. One of the three proposed LNG projects there was canceled in 2021. The most significant legal win came a year ago, when the US court of appeals for the DC Circuit vacated Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approval of Rio Grande and Texas LNG, citing the agency's failure to fully consider the terminals' environmental justice impacts, among others things. But then Donald Trump was elected for a second time. The day he was inaugurated, Trump declared an energy emergency and rolled back rules on environmental justice and protections that had helped groups in Texas and Louisiana fight back. Eight months into his second term, at least six projects that had been awaiting crucial federal approvals – including those that Hinojosa has fought – are moving forward again. And residents along the Texas and Louisiana coasts, from which the vast majority of the nation's LNG flows, are facing a different kind of emergency. Fisher Tad Theriot has seen his yearly income from shrimping in the water near the LNG facilities drop from $325,000 in 2021 to $87,000 last year. This year he estimates the income from his catch will be less than half of that. 'If … you don't get away from Cameron, you're not catching shrimp,' Theriot said of the small Louisiana community that already hosts three LNG terminals and where at least two others are planned to be built. The United States has been the world's largest LNG exporter since 2023. Along the Gulf coast in Texas and Louisiana, six terminals are operating, six are under construction and another six are proposed. The amount of LNG exported – last year it was 11.9bn cubic feet a day – is expected to double by 2028. The growth is fueled by the nation's vast reserves of natural gas that can be forced out of the ground by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Fracked gas is sent by pipeline to an LNG terminal where it is superchilled until it's a liquid and then shipped around the world. While a million British thermal units (MMBTU) of natural gas can be purchased in the United States for about $4, after it's superchilled and transported across oceans, countries such as Japan and Germany pay $12 to $15 per MMBTU for that gas. Even after the cost of producing and shipping the LNG, companies that export LNG stand to make billions of dollars in profits. Billions more are made by the middlemen who buy and sell the fuel. A US Department of Energy study finalized in May said LNG creates jobs, expands the US gross domestic product and helps close the trade gap. 'President Trump was given a mandate to unleash American energy dominance, and that includes US LNG exports,' the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, said in the report. 'The facts are clear: expanding America's LNG exports is good for Americans and good for the world.' Developers promise jobs and economic benefits to the areas that host the plants – although studies show those promises aren't always kept. In exchange, LNG facilities in Louisiana receive billions of dollars of local property tax breaks. Louisiana's Cameron parish alone would forfeit nearly $15bn between 2012 and 2040 if all proposed terminals were built. Several companies that produce LNG along the Gulf coast did not respond to requests for comments for this story. Local residents, such as James Hiatt, founder of the regional environmental and community advocacy group For a Better Bayou, say the communities do not benefit. Pointing to houses abandoned in Lake Charles after Hurricane Laura five years ago, Hiatt said: 'If they have so much money, why don't they actually pour that money into the communities where they operate? They give little peanuts. [It's] nothing to the amount of money that they have been given by the government and the people here.' They do get one thing, activist Roishetta Ozane, founder of the Vessel Project, an environmental justice organization, says: pollution. While families struggle to pay for their own energy, Ozane said all the local community gets from the methane build-out is 'more health problems'. The production and transportation of LNG also generates significant greenhouse gas emissions, including methane and carbon dioxide. John Allaire, a retired oil and gas engineer, owns land adjacent to the Commonwealth LNG site in Cameron parish, one of the terminals that has received conditional approval from the federal government. And across the Calcasieu ship channel from his property, he can see Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass 1 LNG, and the site of its expansion, called CP2. He has watched 90 meters of his shoreline disappear in the past 27 years because of rising sea levels and subsidence caused by the climate crisis. Burning more fossil fuels, including LNG, will speed the rise of the waters around the terminals – and around the globe. While the terminals themselves will be protected by 26ft-high seawalls, Allaire's land – and that of others around the terminals – will not. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion 'These are the estuaries that supply the seafood that Cameron parish and Louisiana's so famous for,' Allaire said, pointing to wetlands near his home where crabs and shrimp lay their eggs. 'But that'll all be backfilled [with] concrete and sheet pilings and tanks … It'll change this environment forever.' LNG is sometimes promoted as a 'bridge fuel' because it burns cleaner than coal. But Cornell scientist Robert Howarth warns that its full lifecycle emissions – including methane leaks during drilling, liquefaction, shipping and regasification – is 33% worse for the climate than coal. That claim is disputed by the industry, which has produced its own study claiming LNG is more environmentally friendly than coal. The International Energy Agency has warned that any new fossil infrastructure jeopardizes global climate goals. The LNG industry says its fuel is helping by replacing coal in countries such as India. But a recent analysis from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that India is turning toward renewables, not LNG, to replace coal. Others are questioning whether demand for the fuel will support the boom in the production of LNG. Export terminals require gas prices of around $8 per MMBTU to break even – far more than the $3 to $5 per MMBTU equivalent of energy that countries like India can afford. Despite these analyses, developers are touting a booming market. Trump has extracted promises from Asian countries, including Japan and Vietnam, to purchase more LNG, but not all of the deals are binding – or even new. Allaire has seen such promises fail in the past. Golden Pass LNG in Texas, Allaire notes, was originally built as an import facility, but is now being refashioned as an export terminal after a pause caused by the bankruptcy of the construction firm building the project. 'They spent billions of dollars, took out hundreds of acres of wetlands, and they imported seven loads of LNG,' Allaire said, predicting that 'these places will go out of business, and they will be stranded resources'. In the meantime, new numbers from the Energy Information Administration, the Department of Energy's statistical agency, indicate the rapid increase in LNG production is increasing the cost of natural gas – the country's main fuel source to generate electricity. 'The high demand for gas exports is … pushing up the price of the gas that supplies 40% of US electricity – a cost that will be passed on to consumers,' predicted the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Despite Trump's aggressive promotion of LNG, Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program for Public Citizen, said there are still grounds to fight the build-out, even if the environmental and justice arguments have been removed by his administration. 'These additional exports are going to expose Americans to higher gas prices,' he said. 'You can't declare an energy emergency where you claim domestic shortages of energy at the same time you're going to greenlight a bunch of export terminals.' For residents such as Roishetta Ozane, adding more LNG facilities is not an abstract energy debate. It's a lived experience of cumulative harm, environmental erasure and political abandonment caused by the petrochemical industries around Lake Charles, 30 miles (50km) north of the epicenter of the LNG development. 'Our community is already surrounded by pollution,' she said. 'It makes absolutely no sense to approve two or three new LNG facilities here in south-west Louisiana when we already have as much industry as we do. 'It's just like a death sentence.' Still, both Ozane and Rebekah Hinojosa refuse to give up. In late July and early August, Ozane was among roughly 70 Gulf coast advocates who protested outside the headquarters of companies in New York City that are financing and insuring the LNG boom. 'We will still keep fighting and speaking up to do everything we can to stop these projects, because our community doesn't want these projects,' Hinojosa said. 'I mean, for us, it's about continuing to exist here.' Floodlight is a non-profit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight's newsletter here.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Trump is ready to ‘crush' the Russian economy if Putin doesn't meet with Zelensky, says Lindsey Graham
Sen. Lindsey Graham has said that Donald Trump is ready to 'crush' the Russian economy if Vladimir Putin refuses to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky in the coming weeks to discuss an end to the Ukraine war. Graham has reportedly been pressuring Trump for months to support a sweeping sanctions bill designed to punish the Kremlin by placing massive tariffs on any country that continues to buy Russian oil and gas, thereby indirectly helping to bankroll its invasion of its western neighbor state. The legislation would most obviously hurt rival superpowers China and India, who currently account for 70 percent of Russia's energy exports and would face 500 percent U.S. tariffs if it were to be enacted. The Independent 's Owen Matthews has argued that Zelensky's European allies have already missed their opportunity to hold Putin to account by starving Russia of fossil fuel revenues. However, the senator believes there is still time. 'If we don't have this thing moving in the right direction by the time we get back, then I think that plan B needs to kick in,' Graham told the Associated Press in a phone interview this week. His bipartisan bill has been endorsed by 85 of his fellow senators to date, but does not have the expressed support of the White House. Graham argues that its moment may come when the upper chamber of Congress reconvenes in September following its summer recess. Graham said he had spoken to Trump on Tuesday, a day after he hosted several European heads of state and senior officials at the White House, including Zelensky, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, Giorgia Meloni, Ursula von der Leyen and Mark Rutte. 'Trump believes that if Putin doesn't do his part, that he's going to have to crush his economy. Because you've got to mean what you say,' Graham told reporters in his home state after his call with the president. 'There will come a point where if it's clear that Putin is not going to entertain peace, that President Trump will have to back up what he said he would do. And the best way to do it is to have congressional blessing.' Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat in support of Graham's bill, has warned against excessive optimism regarding the prospects of a peace deal, given that the Russian leader emerged from his Alaska summit with Trump last week without making any definite commitments, suggesting he could be employing 'rope-a-dope' tactics. 'The only way to bring Putin to the table is to show strength,' Blumenthal told the AP. 'What Putin understands is force and pressure.'
