Texas Showdown

Democrats successfully denied a quorum in the Texas House to stop Trump’s redistricting plan that would hand him five more House seats. But now what?

It’s unfolding like only a Texas-sized political drama could.

On Sunday, Texas Democrats made good on their promise to deny a quorum in the legislature by leaving the state and camping out in Illinois. This effectively shut down efforts by the GOP-controlled body to redistrict congressional lines and to hand Trump and the Republicans five more seats and possible control of the House of Representatives.

Reaction by Texas authorities was swift. As soon as the Democrats left, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he supports the “immediate arrest of these rogue lawmakers who’ve fled their duties.” Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) echoed this, saying that “51 Texas House Democrats are engaging in a selfish dereliction of duty preventing state business” and that he approves of “any and all measures taken by Governor Abbott and state leaders to end this charade.”

Abbott took up the cause next, saying in a statement that he would “remove the missing Democrats from membership in the Texas House” and then “swiftly fill vacancies,” warning that Democrats “may also have committed felonies by fundraising to pay for the costs of their boycott. He promised to attempt to extradite “any potential out-of-state felons.”

Then on Monday, the Texas House voted to track down and arrest the Democrats who had boycotted the body and denied the quorum.

What should we make of these latest moves by the Texas Dems and the threats to remove them from office and have them arrested? And while the denial of quorum and the courage of the Democrats is laudable, could it actually achieve anything?

Texas Dems respond to the saber rattling

CBS News apparently still has some life in it, despite Trump’s best efforts to control and censor it. The network interviewed three of the Texas Democrats—including Reps. Ann Johnson and James Talarico—from their new location in Illinois. In response to charges from Republicans that the Democrats are running away from the fight, running away from their jobs by not being in Austin, Rep. Johnson masterfully set the record straight:

“Abandoning your job is goin’ to Cancun in the middle of a deadly freeze,” she responded. “Abandoning your job is cutting health care when people need access. Abandoning your job is cutting public education when we already have one of the worst education systems in the nation.”

“What we are doing is the fundamental protection by our Founding Fathers in the Texas Constitution,” she continued, referring to the section that allows a minority to deny a quorum if attendance is below two-thirds of the chamber.

Then the banger: “When Donald Trump called Georgia Republicans and said, ‘I just need you to find me 11,000 votes,’ they said ‘No, sir. That’s a step too far.’ But when he called Texas Republicans and said, ‘I need you to steal me five seats,’ they said, ‘Does July work for you?’ Well it doesn’t work for us as Texas Democrats.”

Forcing a vote in the House may take longer than Abbott has

While Gov. Abbott may believe he is on a roll, political and legal analysts have pointed out that his options to force Democrats to return or to remove them for abandoning their offices face significant obstacles.

As Kyle Cheney of Politico noted, the clock is ticking:

Abbott and other Texas Republicans face a hard deadline as they are preparing to adopt maps that could net the GOP five seats in the U.S. House, potentially cementing the party’s majority in Congress. Maps need to be completed before the end of the year so that election officials can prepare for the state’s March 3 primaries.

In other words, to force a vote on the proposed maps, Abbott would have to either haul the Democrats back in for a vote through some kind of extradition effort or remove them from office and have their seats filled by new members.

Neither of these options appears very straightforward.

While Texas AG Paxton has called for their arrest and the Texas House dramatically voted on Monday to issue arrest warrants for them, these are civil arrest warrants, not criminal ones. Breaking quorum, simply put, is not a crime. That means the civil arrest warrants are only enforceable by Texas law enforcement within the state’s boundaries. Nor will extradition efforts succeed here. Federal laws only permit Texas to demand extradition of criminals in other states. No crime, no extradition.

What about removing them from office? This can happen under the state law, which allows Texas courts to determine that a public official has “abandoned” their office and declare it vacant. Should that happen, the governor could set a date for an election to fill the empty seats.

But the criteria for whether a member has “abandoned” a seat hasn’t been determined in state law cases before. And efforts to remove state House members would have to proceed in individual courts, meaning it could get tied up well past the deadline to approve the maps.

Even if Abbott managed to remove enough House members from districts through court battles, and elections for replacement were somehow held this year, there is no guarantee that Democrats wouldn’t get elected to those same positions again and continue to break quorum.

That leaves one last option: charging them with a crime and demanding extradition. So far Abbott hasn’t gone this far, only declaring that they may have committed the crime of “bribery” if they turned to outsiders to fundraise to cover the cost of their fines. But even if he levels this charge, Illinois may and probably would refuse to agree to extradite the lawmakers, setting up more lengthy court battles and running out the clock.

Will the Dems’ quorum break strategy work?

Preventing a quorum from forming is not easy, especially when the personal fines run so high. In 2021, the pressures from the fines and the threats of lawsuits eventually brought back enough Democrats, who’d broken quorum to fight the 2021 Texas redistricting maps, to hold a vote.

Will this time be different? We don’t know yet. The Dem legislators have a powerful champion on their side, Gov. Pritzker of Illinois, whose office has helped coordinate logistics including housing for the group. And the entire Democratic leadership in D.C. is focused on the battle, while Democratic governors from Gavin Newsom in California to Kathy Hochul in New York are threatening to retaliate should Texas’s power grab succeed.

As democratic election law expert Marc Elias noted, the bold move by the Texas Dems does do something important: It buys time for democracy. And for that, these legislators are heroes we should all applaud and lift up. Writes Elias,

These legislators stand to receive no benefit and reap no reward for their act of bravery. The map they are opposing affects only congressional districts; it has no impact on their own elections.

Their decision to risk removal, arrest and even more financially devastating fines comes with zero upside to them personally:

These men and women are paid only $7,200 per year to represent the nearly 200,000 people in their districts. Their decision to leave the state means being away from their homes and families and risking losing their full-time jobs, which remain in Texas.

Their lives are now highly uncertain over the next few months as Gov. Abbott and State AG Paxton try everything they can to force them back home. Elias again:

The Texas legislators are heroes precisely because of this uncertainty. They are not promising that their actions will ultimately succeed in halting a new round of redistricting in Texas. They cannot predict what havoc Abbott and his lawless Attorney General, Ken Paxton, will wreak.

It is entirely possible that Texas will find a way to pass a new map—perhaps even a worse one. It’s possible this will set off a chain reaction that leads other Republican-controlled states to follow suit. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in recent years, it’s that when it comes to Republican deceit and depravity, anything is possible.

All the brave Texas legislators can do is buy time for democracy to be saved through the political process. They can create the conditions for Democrats to rally behind them and chart their own courageous path forward. They can cause Republicans to have second thoughts and pressure their party to retreat.

That retreat may already be happening. California Republicans are panicking that they may lose their seats through a mid-decade redistricting should the Golden State retaliate against the Lone Star one. There is now legislation proposed to forbid all mid-decade redistricting—and that would be a welcome check on abuses.

Meanwhile, Democratic legislators in California and Gov. Newsom may need to convince voters to amend the state constitution to permit the retaliatory strike. The Texas Dems could become strong symbols of defiance and courage to help pass such a measure.

When people ask, “But what are Democrats actually doing to save our country from MAGA fascism?” point them to the brave men and women of the Texas state Democratic House caucus. They are risking their political careers and even their personal freedoms, not to preserve their seats and their power, but to preserve our right to a fair and representative system.