A gerrymandering struggle reveals how far Trump will go to keep away from electoral accountability.
Members of the Texas Division of Public Security contained in the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on Monday, August 4, 2025. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the arrest of Democratic lawmakers who left the state to dam a controversial vote on new congressional maps.
(Sergio Flores / Bloomberg by way of Getty Pictures)
The small-d democratic logic of an argument made by Texas state Consultant Ann Johnson—who, together with her Democratic colleagues within the state legislature, has left Texas with a purpose to forestall Republican legislators from finishing up President Trump’s order to radically gerrymander its congressional maps—is past debate.
“If Republicans are afraid of Texas voters, they need to alter their insurance policies—not rig our maps,” says Johnson, a prime Texas lawyer and three-term legislator, who flew out of the Lone Star State on Sunday as a part of a tactical transfer supposed to forestall Republican Governor Greg Abbott and Republican legislators from implementing a plan to redraw district maps with a purpose to flip 5 of the 12 seats Democrats at the moment maintain to the GOP.
Particularly, Texas Democratic legislators are breaking quorum—a tactic that successfully denies Republican legislative leaders the power to proceed with Trump’s gerrymandering scheme. “I’m asking all people to do not forget that Quorum Break is a software that the founding fathers of Texas put in place for when a minority occasion is aware of that almost all occasion has gone off the rails and is doing one thing towards the pursuits and can of the voters,” explains Johnson. “Hundreds of you’ve come out to say that you simply do need your seats stolen by Trump. The Large Ugly Invoice handed by one vote—one vote—and he’s afraid of you going to the polls in November of 2026. He has requested Governor Abbott to interrupt the principles and get him 5 new Republican seats. You all spoke up [in opposition]. They pushed it. They put it on the ground. And, so, please know that this extraordinary step of a Quorum Break is in order that your voices might be heard. If they don’t seem to be going to be heard right here in Texas, then we’re breaking quorum to go to the nation and say: ‘That is it! You have to cease Trump’s takeover!’”
Abbott is apoplectic. He has threatened to cost the Democrats with felonies and take away them from their elected positions. Savvy authorized specialists say he lacks the standing to take action. And the Democratic governors of a number of blue states have signaled that, if Abbott finds a approach to override the Texas Democrats and go forward with the brand new gerrymander, they might look to counter his strikes by redrawing maps in their very own states.
The more and more chaotic wrangling over congressional district maps illustrates simply how excessive the stakes are for Texas, and the entire of the US.
The all of a sudden nationalized struggle over gerrymandering in Texas goes to the essential premises of consultant democracy, which the most effective of the founders of the American undertaking understood as an experiment in giving energy to the folks. The experiment has by no means labored completely. However, at its finest, it has supplied a test and a steadiness on government overreach and authoritarian abuses by DC elites.
Present Problem
Previously, when American presidents and their events skilled the type of collapse in ballot numbers that Trump and the GOP have been hit with since they determined to intestine Medicaid and anti-hunger packages with a purpose to fund tax cuts for billionaires, and on the identical time despatched the economic system reeling with ill-conceived tariff insurance policies, these leaders adjusted their insurance policies.
Or they misplaced their positions, and their congressional majorities, on the subsequent election.
This precept of electoral accountability has tended to be a strong corrective in American politics. In its mildest type, it requires presidents and members of Congress to clarify their selections and to attempt to win the American folks over to their factors of view. In additional excessive circumstances, it has led to epic political shifts, as occurred in 1932, when Individuals rejected the Wall Road–aligned Republicans whose insurance policies had accelerated the Nice Melancholy, and changed them with Franklin Roosevelt and the coalition of Democrats and left-wing allies who would usher within the New Deal.
Now Trump needs to upend the accountability calculus by having his allies rework the already extremely skewed maps of Texas in a means that might give Republicans an opportunity to carry on to the Home, where they currently occupy 219 seats, only one greater than is required to assert a transparent majority within the 435-seat chamber. However, as at all times, he additionally needs to check how a lot authoritarianism he can get away with. If the Texas gambit goes ahead, different Republican-controlled states will certainly comply with the Lone Star GOP —and if the US Supreme Courtroom permits them to take action, by gutting what stays of the Voting Rights Act—Trump and the GOP might retain full management of the federal authorities in 2026, even when voters in Texas and nationwide give a majority of their votes to Democrats.
That’s what makes what’s been occurring in Austin greater than only a Lone Star battle. “Their struggle is our struggle!” explained Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, when he welcomed lots of the Texas legislators to Chicago on Sunday. And it isn’t merely a struggle over warped congressional district traces and rigged elections.
This can be a life-and-death battle for the way forward for consultant democracy as Individuals have understood it—and for the people-centered insurance policies that, in the most effective of circumstances, have traditionally prolonged from not less than fairly free and honest elections. “Individuals want to concentrate to what’s occurring in Texas proper now as a result of Donald Trump needs to unfold this type of ploy throughout America,” says US Consultant Greg Casar, the Texas Democrat who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “Trump is aware of he can’t win the upcoming midterm elections, so he’s attempting to rig them. And the way in which he’s attempting to do it [Trump] is attempting to do it’s to dismantle the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as we all know it. He’s attempting, for instance to attempt to dismantle Hispanic and African-American alternative districts. I signify a district overwhelmingly of Latinos right here within the Austin space. If Donald Trump is ready to suppress the votes of Latinos right here in Austin, quickly sufficient he needs to try this throughout America. And he might do this and, in the end, attempt to get extra complicit and corrupt Trump Republicans to defend his agenda even because it turns into much less well-liked.”
On this second of disaster, we want a unified, progressive opposition to Donald Trump.
We’re beginning to see one take form within the streets and at poll bins throughout the nation: from New York Metropolis mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s marketing campaign targeted on affordability, to communities defending their neighbors from ICE, to the senators opposing arms shipments to Israel.
The Democratic Celebration has an pressing option to make: Will it embrace a politics that’s principled and well-liked, or will it proceed to insist on shedding elections with the out-of-touch elites and consultants that received us right here?
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