A Texas showdown could reshape Congress

Dozens of Texas Democrats have secretly left the state in a dramatic effort to stop Republicans from holding a vote that could determine the balance of power in the US Congress.

Republican Governor Greg Abbot has issued orders that they be arrested on sight – and fined $500 a day. He has also threatened to expel them from office.

The Democrats left because at least two-thirds of the 150-member legislative body must be present to proceed with a vote on re-drawing Texas’s electoral map. The plan would create five more Republican-leaning seats in the US House of Representatives.

This high stakes battle may seem both bizarre and confusing – but it is one that could spread to other states in advance of next year’s national midterm elections. At its heart, it’s a bare-knuckle fight over political power, who can wield it most effectively and who can keep it.

The US House of Representatives is made up of 435 legislators who are elected every two years. They represent districts with boundaries determined in processes set by their state governments.

Who draws the lines and how can go a long way in shaping the ideological tilt of the district and the likelihood that it elects a Democrat or a Republican.

At the moment, the House rests on a knife edge with 219 Republicans and 212 Democrats. There are four vacancies likely to be filled by three Democrats and one Republican in special elections later this year.

It wouldn’t take much of a shift in the political winds for Democrats to take back control of the House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections. And the party that controls the lower chamber of Congress has powers that extend far beyond simply setting the legislative agenda for the next two years, as important as that may be.

House leaders can launch sweeping investigations of presidential actions, as Democrats did in the second half of Donald Trump’s first term and Republicans did in Joe Biden’s final two years. They can also dig in on policy issues and trigger government shutdowns. They can even vote to impeach a president, as Democrats did in December 2019 and Republicans contemplated during Biden’s presidency.

Trump appears focused on taking steps to improve his odds of avoiding a similar fate in his second term. He is reportedly fixated on the midterm races and encouraging Texas lawmakers to draw new congressional maps that could increase the likelihood of Republicans winning more House seats from there.

District lines are typically redrawn every 10 years, after a national census, to reflect shifts in the population within and between states. The most recent regularly scheduled redistricting took place in 2021.

In some states, the process is set by independent commissions but in others the state legislatures are responsible for line-drawing – and the results can frequently be crafted by the party in power to give their side a distinct advantage.

In North Carolina, for instance, Republican-drawn lines gave their party 10 of the state’s 14 House seats in last year’s national elections even though Trump only won the state by a slim margin.

Democrats in Illinois hold 14 of the state’s 17 House seats, while former Vice-President Kamala Harris won the state with 54%. If Trump has his way, and the maps lead to a five-seat gain next year, Republicans would control 30 of the state’s 38 seats. Last year, he won Texas with 56%.

The Republican push in Texas has leaders in Democratic-controlled states calling for a response, which could set off a redistricting “arms race” that spreads across the country.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, for example, has asked legislators in his state, where Democrats control 43 of the 52 seats, to find ways to increase their advantage. Governors Kathy Hochul in New York and JB Pritzker in Illinois have issued similar calls.

“Everything’s on the table,” Pritzker wrote in a post on social media. “We’ve got to do everything we can to stand up and fight back – we’re not sitting around and complaining from the sidelines when we have the ability to stop them.”

Grassroots Democrats, many of whom have been frustrated by the inability of their party’s national political leaders to block the Trump administration’s policy agenda, may welcome such confrontational language. States like California and New York have laws that mandate congressional districts be drawn by a bipartisan commission to create constituencies that are compact and fair.

Such efforts were the result of a push to remove political considerations from the redistricting process, but now some Democrats view those moves as unilateral disarmament that gave Republicans an advantage in the fight for a House majority.

“I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” Hochul told reporters at the New York Capitol in Albany on Monday. “With all due respect to the good government groups, politics is a political process.”

She said the “playing field” has changed dramatically during Trump’s second term and Democrats need to adjust.

Democrats may not have the final say, however. Republicans are already looking beyond Texas for more places to pick up seats. Vice-President JD Vance is reported to be considering a trip to Indiana later this week to push for new district lines in that state. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently said his Republican-dominated state may undertake a similar process.

Despite its explicit political designs, all of this is fair game under the US Constitution – at least the way a narrow majority of the US Supreme Court interpreted it in a landmark 2019 case.

Partisan “gerrymandering”, as the process is sometimes called, has a long tradition in US politics – one that frequently creates oddly shaped constituencies that stretch for miles to include, or exclude, voters based on their political affiliations, all with the goal of giving one party an electoral majority.

The Republican move in Texas isn’t even without precedent. In 2003, Republican leaders redrew their congressional maps to boost their electoral advantage.

The state’s Democrats even responded in a similar way – leaving the state to delay the legislative proceedings. The redistricting ultimately passed after enough Democrats returned.

There is a risk in all of this, even for the party doing the line-drawing. While the goal is to maximise the number of seats where victory is probable, in an election where one side outperforms expectations even seemingly safe seats can flip sides.

Texas, and other redistricting states, could create an electoral map that does not survive a political deluge, leading to otherwise avoidable losses at the ballot box.

In a close election, however, every seat counts. And if next year’s midterm elections continue the recent trend of narrowly decided political battles, what happens in state legislatures over the next few months could have dramatic political consequences in Washington DC – and, consequently, across America.

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