Democratic members of the Texas state legislature announced a conditional plan on Thursday to return to the state. If they were to return to the state, the Democratic lawmakers would restore the quorum in the Texas House of Representatives needed to advance legislation.
The Democrats say that they will return as long as Texas Republicans end the special legislative session that included a controversial redistricting plan that would move five additional U.S. House seats in the GOP’s favor in upcoming elections. They also said their return was conditional on California releasing its own proposal to redraw congressional districts.
Both of these developments were expected to occur on Friday, although Texas Governor Greg Abbott still plans to pursue the Republicans’s redistricting plan even after the special legislative session concludes. The Democrats did not announce which day they would return if their conditions were met, but a source told ABC News that they “loosely plan on returning this weekend.”
In a statement, the Texas Democrats said that they were returning to the state to prepare for a legal battle over the Republican redistricting plan after the legislature adjourned this Friday as scheduled. The Republican speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, Dustin Burrows, indicated on Thursday that he would adjourn the House the following day if a quorum cannot be reached.
Gene Wu, the chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, provided the statement on behalf of his colleagues. “Texas House Democrats broke quorum and successfully mobilized the nation against Trump’s assault on minority voting rights,” he said. “Now, as Democrats across the nation join our fight to cause these maps to fail their political purpose, we’re prepared to bring this battle back to Texas under the right conditions and to take this fight to the courts.”
Democrats’s strategy, devised with the advice of legal counsel, is likely to involve a lawsuit challenging the redistricting plan. Numerous previous redistricting fights — including over Texas’s 2011 congressional and state legislative maps — have seen redrawn districts be immediately blocked by courts as litigation proceeded. In many of those cases, courts ultimately found the redistricting efforts to be unconstitutional either in part or in whole.
Governor Abbott has said in a statement that he intends to call a second special session of the Texas legislature “immediately” after the current session ends on Friday. Special sessions can last for a maximum of 30 days. Abbott maintains that he is willing to call as many special sessions as necessary to pass the Republicans’ redistricting plan.
In line with the Texas Democrats’s conditions for returning, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he would move forward with plans to redraw the state’s congressional districts in response to the Texas proposal. He called on California’s Democratic-controlled legislature to approve a ballot measure for this November’s election that would allow lawmakers to shift U.S. House seats in Democrats’s favor.
The bill that Newsom is advocating for, called the “Election Rigging Response Act,” would allow state legislators to circumvent California’s independent redistricting commission. That commission was created after voters approved a law in 2008 to take the redistricting process for the state assembly and state senate out of lawmakers’s hands. In 2010, voters approved a second law that extended the independent commission’s authority to U.S. House districts as well.
A Politico-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll finds that a large majority of California voters oppose returning redistricting power from the independent commission to the state legislature. The survey found that 36 percent of Californians favor doing so, whereas 64 percent are opposed.
Texas’s redistricting proposal, at the national level, is also unpopular. A YouGov poll finds that 30 percent of Americans support the state’s plan to create five additional U.S. House districts that favor Republicans. Meanwhile, 48 percent disapprove of the redistricting plan. Opinion is sharply divided by party affiliation, with Republicans overwhelmingly supportive and Democrats overwhelmingly opposed, but independents polled are far closer to the Democrats’s position.
Various Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives, mostly from red or competitive districts in blue states, have also criticized the Texas redistricting plan. Representative Doug LaMalfa (R., California) said that the proposal could “start a grass fire across the country” of tit-for-tat redistricting. House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris, the sole GOP House member from Maryland, said that Republicans “should probably shy away from mid-cycle redistricting.”
While some governors have embraced mid-cycle redistricting for their states in the wake of Texas’s proposal, others have been more cautious. The Republican governor of Missouri, Mike Kehoe, seems poised to call a special session for his state’s legislature to redraw districts to the GOP’s benefit. In contrast, the Republican governor of New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte, has publicly ruled out redistricting for her state. Mike Braun, the Republican governor of Indiana, has remained non-committal about pursuing redistricting even as President Trump has pushed him to embrace it.