A Texas Showdown with National Consequences

Threatened with expulsion, Texas Democrats flee the state.

The Texas House of Representatives is set to convene this afternoon to vote on a proposed congressional map that Republicans hope will net them five more U.S. House seats in the 2026 midterms.

Graphics by the New York Times

It’s a rare act of mid-decade redistricting, and it threatens to set off a gerrymandering arms race that could spiral nationwide.

But first the Texas map has to pass.

And in order for it to pass, the Texas Constitution requires the state House to have a two-thirds quorum. The chamber has 150 members, which means a vote cannot be held without at least 100 of them present. Republicans only control 88 seats in the state House; as long as 51 of the chamber’s 62 Democratic members stay away, a quorum is impossible.

As of this writing, 57 Democrats have left the state in a bid to prevent the new map from being voted on. Most of them have fled to Illinois; others are in Boston or New York.

(2028 note: The Democratic legislators went to Illinois at the invitation of Gov. JB Pritzker, who has planted himself in the middle of the redistricting fight. Pritzker doesn’t exactly bring a lot of moral authority to this debate — a panel of experts rated Illinois’ congressional map as one of the most gerrymandered of the 2020s — but he’s clearly trying to boost a potential future presidential campaign by hosting the Texas lawmakers.)

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker with the Democratic legislators who have fled Texas. (Photo by Pritzker’s office)

Under a 2023 rules change, the Democratic lawmakers are set to be fined $500 for every day they remain out of state while the state House is in session.

But Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) announced plans this morning to up the ante even further — and a showdown could be only hours away.

In a letter sent to the state House members, Abbott threatened to remove any members from office who are not back at the state Capitol by 3 p.m. Central Time today.

Abbott said that he would invoke a provision in the Texas Constitution that allows the governor to call special elections to fill state legislative seats “when vacancies occur.” The governor cited a 2021 legal opinion by state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-TX) which argued that such language includes a vacancy by “abandonment of office,” although Paxton also said that it would likely be up to the courts to determine whether “a legislator has forfeited his or her office due to abandonment.”

Such a ploy has never been tested in the modern era, and in any attempt by Abbott to remove the Democratic members in the coming hours would surely spark a legal fight.

In his letter, Abbott also accused the Democratic legislators of violating bribery laws by raising funds to pay their $500 daily fines. “Real Texans do not run from a fight,” Abbott wrote. “But that’s exactly what most of the Texas House Democrats just did.”

This is not the first time Texas legislators have left the state to deny a quorum. As the Texas Tribune notes, the tactic dates all the way back to 1870; in the 21st century, this is the third time it has been used.

In both of the previous quorum-breaking efforts, Democrats eventually folded. In 2003, Democratic state senators holed up in New Mexico in an attempt to block another mid-decade redistricting attempt, this one the brainchild of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX). After a month, then-state Sen. John Whitmire (D-TX) — who is now the mayor of Houston — returned to Austin, which was enough to create a quorum.

Whitmire said that he returned to ensure that the two-thirds quorum rule wouldn’t be done away with entirely. “If there’s one thing that I could point to, it is to protect the two-thirds rule for future matters. If sixteen senators can pass bills, a lot of progressive groups are in trouble,” he said at the time. “Redistricting is real important, but a lot of other issues are important, too, like higher education, and school finance, and criminal justice.”

His fellow Democrats branded him as “Quitmire.”

In 2021, Democratic members of the state House fled to Washington, D.C. to prevent new voting restrictions from passing. They camped out for 38 days, but eventually, three Democrats returned to Texas, providing a quorum. In a statement, they cited the need to bring the state legislature back to order to address the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

As with Whitmire, other members of the party lashed out in anger. “This is how Texas Democrats lose elections,” one state legislator tweeted at the time.

This time, the dispute comes with even higher stakes, both if the Democrats return (a potential acceleration of gerrymandering across the country) and if they stay away (their potential removal from the state legislature).

So far, the state lawmakers aren’t budging. The Texas House Democratic Caucus released a four-word statement in response to Abbott’s letter threatening to remove them from their seats: “Come and take it,” they said.