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Wall Street Journal
5 days ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Texas Democrats Skip Town to Block a GOP Gerrymander - Opinion: Potomac Watch
Full Transcript This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated. Speaker 1: From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Kyle Peterson: Dozens of Texas Democratic lawmakers flee the state to stop Republicans from passing a new US House map that the GOP hopes could help it win up to five new seats in the 2026 midterms. But how long can these fugitives from politics hold out, and how credible are the Democratic threats to gerrymander California, New York, and other states in response? Welcome. I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We are joined today by my colleagues, Columnist Kim Strassel and Editorial Board Member Mene Ukueberuwa. The gerrymandering wars have typically been a once a decade phenomenon in the United States when states redraw congressional districts using new census data. But given these polarized political times and the narrowness of the House, Speaker Mike Johnson holding his majority there with only a handful of votes, the battle lines are now being drawn here in 2025 for a bit of mid-decade gerrymandering kicked off by Texas. But at the moment, Kim, that plan is on hold after dozens of Democratic lawmakers left the state to deny the legislature a two-thirds quorum that it needs. On Monday, the Texas House voted to track down those errant lawmakers with civil arrest warrants. Let's listen to the House Speaker Dustin Burrows in the session on Monday. Hose Speaker Dustin Burrows: I am prepared to recognize a motion to place a call on the House and any other motions necessary to compel the return of absent members. Should such a motion prevail, I will immediately sign the warrants for the civil arrest of the members who have said they will not be here. As Speaker, I will do everything in my power to establish quorum and move this body forward, by any and all means available to this office. To those who are absent, return now. Show the courage to face the issues you were elected to solve. Come back and fulfill your duty, because this House will not sit quietly while you obstruct the work of the people. Kyle Peterson: The difficulty with that civil arrest warrant is that many of these lawmakers have left the state for that purpose of denying jurisdiction, getting away from any Texas police authorities that might be able to tame them and bring them to the legislative chamber there. Many of these Democrats are hanging out in Illinois with Governor JB Pritzker who has vowed to protect them. Kim, what do you make of this? Denying quorum to a legislative chamber is an old tactic. It's one that's been used before usually when the minority party feels like it has no other option, and what the majority party is doing is pretty egregious. They think they can win the public relations battle if they leave the state. Kimberly A. Strassel: In some ways this story is getting a lot more attention than it probably deserves because there's no news right now, right? It's the summer, news doldrums, so we're all going to get a TikTok of all the Texas legislators hanging out in Illinois. Gerrymanders are as old as dirt and so are state walkouts. In 1870, I was looking this up, 13 Texas senators walked out to protest giving the governor powers like martial law. And they were arrested, some of them were held in custody, others were required to provide quorums so that what was left of the Senate could pass this legislation. You had quorum breaks in Texas in 1979, in 2003, in 2021. And here's the thing, too. They usually end with a whimper. Texas back in 2021 tried to stop a Republican voting bill. That was not successful in the end. If you look in Wisconsin back in the 2010, 2011 era, there was a walkout there to protest Governor Scott Walker's Act 10, which was limited collective bargaining rights for public sector unions. That walkout, it generally failed. And all the focus of course, as you know Kyle, is on these threats that are now being made, civil arrest warrants. Those are not likely to go anywhere, most of them, because as you say, it's limited. You have to be within the state. They could apply to try to extradite these members, but that is unlikely to succeed, given the states that are harboring them would fight it pretty hard. The process also takes a lot of time. The lawmakers are getting fined, but Texas actually has some pretty loose ethics rules. So in theory, they can drum up money from benefactors to help cover those fines. Abbott is warning them not to do that, claiming that they could face ethics violations, but they have done this before in the past. Another threat you're hearing is that Abbott is saying he might declare their seats vacated on grounds that they have abandoned office. It would then be up to a judge to take action and say whether or not that was a case and vacate their seat. That too could take a very long time. And in theory you could reduce the number of legislators you needed to reach a quorum by vacating their seats. But again, a complicated and judicial process that is going to eat up time. So the far more likely thing that happens here is the way that most walkouts end, which is that they're probably going to come back in a trickle. Right? Here's something very few people know. Texas legislators are part-time legislators. They earn only $7,200 a year and then a per diem for when they are in office, the days they're in office. Most of them have other jobs, jobs that they need to actually maintain. They have families. There's also a lot of political pressure on them because they're currently missing some other votes to give aid to flood victims for the horrible floods that just happened in Texas. So there's some political pain. And that's how this ended in 2021, they slowly trickled back. There are 150 House members, you need 100 to have a quorum. There are 88 Republicans, so you only need 12 of those Democrats to get back. Not all of them left in the first place. So you're talking about maybe a half a dozen or so that need to return for a quorum to commence. And it might take a bit of time, but Abbott has the ability to continue calling special sessions. So probably in some headline on page 23 a month or so from now, we'll find out how this ended. Kyle Peterson: It is something of a waiting game for now. The fines that these absent legislators face are $500 a day, which adds up, given the number of them that have fled and the number of the days that they are considering being absent to block this redistricting proposal. But as Kim says, I think they will probably not have much trouble finding Democratic donors who are happy to help pick up that tab. Abbott is saying, threatening that he will try to get a judge to rule that these legislators have abandoned or forfeit their offices. Here is part of what he's saying, Governor Abbott, "Democrats hatched a deliberate plan not to show up for work for the specific purpose of abdicating the duties of their office and thwarting the chamber's business. That amounts to an abandonment or forfeiture of an elected state office." But I agree with Kim, that at the very least that would take some time getting that through the court process. I assume that the legislators would not show up in court for those hearings to defend themselves, but would find somebody on the ground who is not subject to being detained and hauled off to the House or the Senate chamber to defend those actions and appeals. I don't know how long that might take. But the timeline here is part of the story because I'm reading some story, some reporting that is saying that in order to take effect for the 2026 midterms, a new map would have to be passed and in place maybe by December. And so, we're talking about four months. And that is a long time to be absent from home, from a job, from family, living out of a suitcase in a hotel eating the same continental breakfast every morning. And so, to Kim's point about how these walkouts normally end with a whimper, that does seem to be the history, is that at some point enough of these legislators will get sick of doing this. They'll feel like they've made their point. Abbott can continue to call a special session after special session even after this one expires. And so, it's not clear whether they can get any sort of concessions in a way that often walkouts are looking for something that they can say, "We got something." And it's harder to see what that might be when you're talking about not a piece of legislation that can be tweaked around the margins one way or another, but a zero-sum kind of redistricting map. On the other hand, if I had to bet one way or the other, my bet is that they do not all hold out there in Illinois and Massachusetts and wherever until the middle of December. Mene Ukueberuwa: Yeah, I think that I would benchmark the beginning of the trickle for about two weeks from now when we have the end of the current special session. I think for the least determined Democrats, those who are just going along with the flock and not necessarily the ones who were motivated to begin this walkout in the first place, they will believe that they have made their point once we get to the end of this session and they can say that we at least slowed the process. I do think that this gambit makes a certain amount of political sense for Democrats because they're drawing national attention to the issue of this mid-decade redistricting, which otherwise might be below the radar for a lot of people who don't follow politics and particularly the process of redistricting as closely as others. And so, I think that that has helped to put this story on the map. I think also going to these other blue states, New York, Illinois, California, et cetera, and trying to build that alliance is something that is helping to push along that process, which we'll get into in these other states which are trying to see whether they're going to retaliate against Texas. So having these members fleeing from Austin and go to the other states, I think helps to show that they're building a national coalition to try to resist what President Trump is asking Texas to do. And I think also in the middle of the summer, in the first year of Trump's term, Democrats are searching for ways to show that they're fighting what the Trump administration is doing. Obviously, President Trump has majorities, Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. They were able to pass their One Big Beautiful Bill without as much difficulty and as much resistance as Democrats feared. They are making progress on a whole variety of fronts, immigration, what have you. And a lot of the Democratic base is extremely frustrated to see this and that Democrats haven't managed to throw sand in the gears of the Trump administration's project. And so, just to take a few weeks and show that they're willing to go to extreme lengths to stop the Trump administration's agenda because again, this is something that President Trump has asked Texas to do, I think is something that's going to galvanize a lot of Democrats. But in the end, I totally agree that all it's going to take is a small number to come back for each chamber of the Texas legislature to have its quorum. And there is no way between the personal concerns that these legislators have that they could afford to stay out of the entire state and continue living in hotels indefinitely. Some of them are going to come back and they will instead of conceding defeat, they're going to say that, "We made our point. We slowed this down. We drew attention to this cause. And now the ball is in the court of New York and California and other Democratic controlled states to see what they can do to counterbalance the effect that the redistricting Texas is going to have." Kyle Peterson: Hang tight, we'll be right back in a moment. Welcome back. The spectacle of the walkout does seem to be raising the pressure on those Democrats in other states to figure out how to respond to Texas if Texas does redraw this map in a way that Republicans think will help them win maybe three, maybe up to five more House seats next November. Let's listen to a couple of Democratic governors at news conferences on Monday. First here is California's Gavin Newsom and then New York's Kathy Hochul. Governor Gavin Newsom: Whatever they are doing will be neutered here in the state of California, and they will pay that price. And we believe public opinion is with our approach. And I appreciate the growing recognition in other states of other governors of like mind and the people of this country recognizing what's at stake. Governor Kathy Hochul: History will judge us on how we respond to this moment. But here in New York, we'll 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. Kyle Peterson: Kim, what do you make of those threats? Here's an Associated Press news story in recent hours. It's talking about a plan that is now circulating in California that could boost the Democratic margin to 48 of California's 52 congressional seats. Currently, 43 are held by Democrats. So to repeat those numbers, that would be a flip of five from 43 Democratic out of 52 to 48 Democratic out of 52. And to Gavin Newsom's point, if Republicans in Texas pick up five and lose five in California, then it's a wash. Kimberly A. Strassel: I just have to note that the outrage and the high dudgeon from Democrats is just amusing, because of course gerrymandering is as old as dirt and they have done it very aggressively in their states too. It's not as if what Texas Republicans are doing is outrageous if you look at what they have done. And by the way, this is going to be part of their problem because they've gerrymandered the heck out of their own states already, so it's going to be very difficult to squeeze even more seats out. I'll give you an example of California just to show you how both sides does this. In the last election, Donald Trump won about a third of California voters. So more than 33% of them voted Republican, and yet Democrats hold 83% of all the congressional seats there, so 43 out of 52. Trump won 46% of New Jersey. Democrats hold 75% of the seats there. If you look around a number of the different states where they have debated gerrymandering further in order to combat what Texas is doing, they have a bit of a problem. Right now for instance in Illinois they have all but three seats. In Oregon, they have all but one. New York, they squeezed that state pretty hard. California, you're right, they can do more. And now Gavin Newsom has come up with this quite complex plan that is going to have to involve him getting a super majority of his legislature to agree to a new map and to putting that new map on the ballot because California has an independent redistricting commission which is supposed to set these borders. So what they want to do is a supposed one-time thing where the legislature steps in, draws new lines, and then puts it to the voters. That could be more complicated than he's making it sound, in that California about a little more than a decade ago passed its proposition by about 60% to create this independent redistricting commission, and they would essentially be sidelining it. That may not sit well with some voters. You've already got some of Newsom's what you would think of allies, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters pushing back against this. They don't want to see it happen. You've got Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger saying he'll run a big No campaign if that's what they try to do. So there's going to be some upheaval in their states if they attempt to gerrymander. They can, and it could well be that they could wash out any Republican gains in Texas. This gets to the broader issue with gerrymandering, though, as it's kind of a fight to the bottom. And we've already done some extraordinary gerrymandering across the country. It's why we have very few competitive races anymore. So the gains are really on the margins here. And to a certain point, these governors are going to have to decide if it is worth the political difficulty of getting through a new map and also the potential voter discontent with all of it. Kyle Peterson: Similar hurdles potentially in New York. In 2014, New York voters amended the state constitution to ban partisan gerrymandering. And in 2022 when the legislature tried to do what I thought was a pretty obvious and flagrant gerrymander, that was struck down by the courts. What they ended up passing was slightly less of a gerrymander. But Mene, if they are going to overcome that hurdle, maybe they have to go back to the voters and undo that state constitutional amendment, maybe pass some kind of override so that they don't have to abide by whatever this independent commission says. And that is a clear hurdle. I do think that Democrats are exercised enough, Kathy Hochul is angry enough about this that maybe they are all for that. Maybe they would go in on taking that argument to the voters and saying, "We can't have unilateral disarmament in the gerrymandering wars." But it is a hurdle if you have to go to the voters and get their approval because voters generally dislike this stuff pretty across the board. Mene Ukueberuwa: Yeah, I think it's a fascinating case in New York because they have tied their hands over the course of a little more than a decade by outsourcing their redistricting process to this independent commission, which they adopted in 2014. And I do think that there's a little bit of cynicism behind New York and a lot of other Democratic controlled states' move to these commissions because I think that they do believe that these independent commissions tend to lean a little bit to the left in the same way that a lot of ostensibly neutral regulators, arbiters, experts, etc, tend to move to the left. And so, I think that they figured they could have their cake and eat it too by saying, "We're removing politics from this process," but also a little bit of a wink wink because they believed that these independent commissions would always be able to give them a slight advantage at the end of the day and that courts would uphold those maps that tilted a little bit toward a Democratic advantage. But because Republican controlled states generally have always maintained what I think is the accurate viewpoint that redistricting is a fundamentally political process, there are limits to what is a reasonable map that you can propose, but this should be kept in the hands of legislatures, they are free to much more quickly and even in mid-decade at certain points, redraw their maps if they think that it suits their advantage. And now that Texas is vowing to do this at the largest Republican controlled state, the large Democratic controlled states have to see if they're able to retaliate, but are going to have to undo the laws that mandate these independent commissions in order to do that. So because of the specifics of New York state law, it would take a pretty long multi-step process to be able to get to a new map. They need to pass the idea of taking it out of the hands of the independent commission twice in two consecutive sessions. They can't just do it a single time. And then, once they do that, they have to then refer it to the ballot, as you mentioned, for voters to approve it. And so, it seems as if there's almost no chance, and I think it may be completely impossible, that they would be able to get this change done in time for them to have a new map before the 2026 midterms. So when Kathy Hochul says, "We're going to war with Texas," basically what she's saying is, "We are retaliating by imposing a cost down the road, not that we're going to be able to produce new Democratic seats that would offset what Texas is able to gain in 2026." But I do think that New York voters are not necessarily going to go along with this because they've been listening to the arguments that Democrats have been making for the longest time; the idea that this should be in the hands of independent experts, the idea that gerrymandering is necessarily bad thing. And I think there's going to be a lot of pushback in the form of a No campaign. And so even if they do it, it's going to come too late to affect the outcome in the midterms, but it isn't a given that they're going to be able to do it at all. Kyle Peterson: Hang tight. We'll be right back after one more break. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker, "Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast." Speaker 1: From the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Kyle Peterson: Welcome back. If the difficulty with states binding their own hands is neither side wants unilateral disarmament, then Kim, the other alternative is some sort of arms control treaty to use the analogy. And Congress could do that. Congress, under the Constitution, the Elections Clause has pretty broad authority to regulate the manner of the holding of House elections. The last time we talked about this, listener Stu wrote in, and he said this, "In this era of powerful computer mapping and computational power, it should be possible for Congress to agree on some broad limitations to gerrymandering. Both partisan sides and voters are rightly disgusted by our current melee system." He floats some possibilities. Some of them are substantive, like some kind of measure of compactness or this idea just once per decade or once every five years redistricting. And that's the limit on states. Kim, I know you're skeptical that Congress would ever agree to that kind of thing. And I tend to agree on the point about substantive limits. There's all sorts of mathematical formulas that political scientists have talked about, about a partisan fairness gap, efficiency gap, whatnot. The difficulty with compactness is, the basic idea is that all districts should be big squares and roughly the same size, then you have some difficulty in geographic areas where there are communities of interest. If there's a coastal area that all kind of has the same leaning and political interests, it does make sense for that to be in a single district, even if it is not a particularly compact district. And so, there are reasons that some of these districts have odd shapes, even apart from gerrymandering. But I'm drawn again to this idea of once a decade. And notably, Congressman Kevin Kiley, if I'm saying his name right, is one of these California Republicans who could be squeezed out under this Gavin Newsom plan. And he said yesterday that he is planning today to introduce a bill to prohibit mid-decade redistricting nationwide. Here's a quote from the Congressman. "Gavin Newsom is trying to subvert the will of voters and do lasting damage to democracy in California. Fortunately, Congress has the ability to protect California voters using its authority under the Elections Clause of the US Constitution." So Kim, again, I'm not predicting that this is going to happen, that we are going to have some broad bipartisan agreement to disarm the gerrymandering wars and go back to the what has been a pretty norm in recent years to do this once every 10 years, but it's something that could happen. Kimberly A. Strassel: Let's be clear, gerrymandering is a huge problem. It is continuing to erode competitiveness in our elections, and you can see that not just in how few seats are actually litigated every two years in our House elections, but how close the majority has come to be. Right now I think what, Mike Johnson's got a four-seat majority. That's it. He can't hardly lose anybody. And the Democrats, we're seeing this on both sides, whoever is in control. And that is a function of gerrymandering. I think there are other problems with it too. Some people say it leads to more partisan members. I don't know if I'd say that as much as it leads to a lot of lazy members. If you never have to worry about being reelected, you don't have much of an incentive to work hard in your job. And so, mostly you go to Washington and showboat and don't get a lot done. And I think that that's an issue. But what we found over time is that the fixes are all hard. We just sat and talked about the supposedly independent redistricting commissions, which aren't independent at all, and just add a layer of unaccountability to this. And it's like proxy partisan redistricting, where the legislators are still controlling it, but they get to keep their hands clean and pretend as though independents are actually doing it. Maybe something from Congress? I don't know. I am still in the camp I'm not entirely sure it is constitutional. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. You are right. The Constitution does give Congress the ability to have some say in the manner and the holding of elections. Would a court say that that's different from setting lines? Possibly. We could certainly try it because nothing else is working, and maybe that once a decade would be good. There are other ideas out there. My son was talking to me about this. There's a movement out there that believes you should only redistrict by zip codes, because that is something that makes sense to people and it's established blocks, and you would certainly take a lot of partisanship out of it. I think what might happen more likely, and you're right, I don't see any path to this happening in Congress, which is probably the bigger issue; is that if there's one thing members never vote for, they don't vote on most things anyway, but they never vote for something that will disadvantage their party. And you could argue that a straight across the board, you only get to do this once thing, is a pretty straightforward way of doing it. But I can promise you that different parties will come up with different reasons why this might hurt or help them, and it just seems unlikely that Congress will come together to do this. I think in the near term or in the longer term, more likely what you end up having is a diminution of some of this by population shifts, people moving to new areas. Sometimes you have entire political shifts, like never forget that Ronald Reagan was such a charismatic candidate that he managed to win in 1984 all but one state. Sometimes you can rally a country together and it sort of changes the way a lot of this works and reshuffle the decks. We don't have anyone on the scene like that right now, so I don't expect that to happen, but I think some of this can change. But then, of course, the problem is that it might change in the 10 years in between a census and then it begins all over again once you have a census and the redistricting wars are back. So I think it's something that we really need to be starting to put some more big thinking attention into, but it's going to take time to figure out what is doable and what is constitutional. Kyle Peterson: Thank you, Kim and Mene. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast@ If you liked the show, please hit that subscribe button, and we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch.
Wall Street Journal
5 days ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
WSJ Opinion: Texas Democrats Skip Town to Block a GOP Gerrymander
Dozens of Texas lawmakers flee the state, denying a legislative quorum that Republicans need to enact a new U.S. House map that could gain them five seats in the 2026 midterms. But how long can the absent Democrats stay away, since Gov. Greg Abbott can keep calling special sessions? And will Democrats really retaliate by redistricting California, New York or Illinois?
CTV News
6 days ago
- Politics
- CTV News
Texas Democrats flee state to block vote on redrawn House map backed by Trump
Watch Texas Democrats left their home state to prevent the redrawn House map that favour Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections. Joy Malbon reports.
Associated Press
30-07-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
Texas Republicans propose new US House map with more winnable GOP seats
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas Republicans proposed a new U.S. House map Wednesday with more winnable GOP seats as Democrat-led states weigh what they can do to counter the effort. Republicans currently hold 25 of the state's 38 seats, and the new map ups the total they could win to 30. All of those new 30 seats were won by Trump in November by at least 10 percentage points, leading to conservative optimism they can hold them even in what's likely to be a tough midterm environment for the party. The new seats come from making two Rio Grande Valley seats that have been narrowly won by Democrats recently slightly more Republican, collapsing two seats held by Democrats Lloyd Doggett and Greg Casar in the Austin and San Antonio area into a single liberal district and turning two Democratic-held seats in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area into GOP-majority ones.
Washington Post
30-07-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Texas Republicans propose new US House map with more winnable GOP seats
AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Republicans proposed a new U.S. House map Wednesday with more winnable GOP seats as Democrat-led states weigh what they can do to counter the effort. Republicans currently hold 25 of the state's 38 seats, and the new map ups the total they could win to 30. All of those new 30 seats were won by Trump in November by at least 10 percentage points, leading to conservative optimism they can hold them even in what's likely to be a tough midterm environment for the party.
