U.S. House Rep. Greg Casar posted plans for a rally to Facebook Monday afternoon, as word raced around the country that Texas Democrats had stopped Donald Trump’s redistricting plan dead in its tracks. Three hours after the post, Casar was outside the Texas Governor’s Mansion, explaining the redistricting effort to 200 supporters circled around him.
“Imagine for a moment, in another country, if there was a corrupt president that was trying to drastically change the election laws right before an election, and then his political ally threatened to remove all the elected officials from an opposition party in order to get it done,” Casar said, speaking through an old-fashioned megaphone with fellow House Rep. Lloyd Doggett at his side. “We would say that in that other country, democracy was on its last legs. But that’s not happening in another country. That’s happening right now in America.”
Twenty-four hours earlier, 56 Democratic members of the state’s House of Representatives had boarded planes for Illinois, California, and New York to deny their Republican counterparts the quorum necessary to gerrymander five new U.S. House districts.
The maps for the proposed House districts, Casar told the crowd on Monday, were not created in Texas but in Washington, D.C., at the direction of Donald Trump. The president had commanded Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in early July to call a special session to push the maps through the Legislature in an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting. Trump’s goal: to keep Republicans from losing control of the U.S. House in the 2026 election, which is looking dicey with his approval ratings in the crapper.
Texas Democrats have denounced the Trump/Abbott redistricting maps as racist. The maps redraw the districts of some of the most effective Black leaders in the country, including U.S. House Reps. Jasmine Crockett, Marc Veasey, and Al Green. They cram Austin’s 35th and 37th congressional districts into one, meaning that if they are approved, either Casar or Doggett will no longer represent the city. They also threaten to reduce the number of Democrats representing the Rio Grande Valley.
The new maps were supposed to get a floor vote in the Texas House Monday. But sure enough, when the House met, there weren’t the 100 members necessary for a quorum to let the process proceed. As the leader of the House Dems, Gene Wu, told reporters that morning, “This corrupt special session is over.”
“We’ve got to be ruthlessly focused on it. If we do that, then we have a chance of avoiding the worst possible outcome, which is Donald Trump stealing the 2026 election now, in 2025.” – Former U.S. House Rep. Beto O’Rourke
Republicans got very angry and have remained so. Abbott threatened on Monday to unilaterally remove the entire opposition party in the Texas House, claiming the Dems had committed felonies and calling for their arrest. “The derelict Democrat House members must return to Texas and be in attendance when the House reconvenes at 3:00 PM on Monday, August 4, 2025,” he said in a statement. “For any member who fails to do so, I will invoke Texas Attorney General Opinion No. KP-0382 to remove the missing Democrats from membership in the Texas House.” On Tuesday, Abbott asked the Texas Supreme Court to expel Wu, in particular. Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running against Senator John Cornyn in next year’s Republican primary, announced that he will ask the court to expel any Democratic quorum breaker who doesn’t return by Friday. Trying to match Paxton, Cornyn asked the FBI to track down and arrest the quorum breakers. Donald Trump said the FBI “may have to get involved.”
Republicans in the Texas House did vote to have the quorum breakers arrested but the DPS troopers who would carry out the arrests don’t operate outside state lines. So the Dems responded to the Republican threats with a yawn. They dismissed Abbott’s attorney general opinion in a series of press conferences, saying it has no force of law. “There is no felony in the Texas penal code for what Abbott says, so, respectfully, he’s making up some shit,” Houston Rep. Jolanda Jones said to reporters in New York. “He has no legal mechanism and, if he did, subpoenas from Texas don’t work in New York – so he’s gonna come get us how?”
As Jones denounced the maps on Monday, news of the quorum break was already national. Reporters repeatedly asked the Texas reps and other Democratic leaders whether they supported retaliatory redistricting efforts in blue states like New York, Maryland, and particularly California, where preparations for such a redistricting are already underway. The Democrats had a lockstep response: They usually oppose gerrymandering, they said, but the current moment requires new tactics.
“This is just an all-out bare-knuckle brawl,” former U.S. House Rep. Beto O’Rourke told MSNBC. “And we’ve got to be ruthlessly focused on it. If we do that, then we have a chance of avoiding the worst possible outcome, which is Donald Trump stealing the 2026 election now, in 2025. If that happens, no longer will we have a check on his lawlessness or accountability for his corruption and crimes. We will see a Republican majority in Congress roll out the royal red carpet for a third Trump term. Those are the stakes.”
Austin Reps. John Bucy, Gina Hinojosa, James Talarico, and Donna Howard echoed O’Rourke, calling on leaders in Democratic states to begin their own redistricting projects now. Howard said it was a difficult decision for her, because she files legislation every session to create an independent redistricting commission. “But what I also understand at this point in time is that if the Republicans are going to break the rules and cheat and we don’t meet them head-on, then we are going to be on a very unlevel playing field,” Howard said. “We will be following the rules, but playing against somebody who cheats. And we are talking about democracy being on the line. We are talking about rights and freedoms being taken away from us. We are talking about silencing the voices of voters, and especially voters of color.”
Reporters also repeatedly asked the quorum breakers how long they were willing to stay away from their homes, their families, and their jobs. After all, reporters noted, Abbott can simply call another special session on redistricting when the current session ends in two weeks. The Dems responded that they are taking the fight day-by-day.
“I’ve got a kid at home, I’ve got a husband at home, it’s disrupting to be here,” Rep. Gina Hinojosa told the Chronicle. “But this fight is a gift. We get to take it directly to Trump, right to his face. Most of America would love to do that.
“And yeah, everyone wants to know how this ends, tie it up with a bow. But there’s a great Ann Richards quote: ‘The here and now is all we have. And if we play it right, it’s all we need.’ That’s the lesson. You don’t know what tomorrow brings. You’ve got to fight for today.”
This article appears in August 8 • 2025.
