In the ongoing battle over redistricting efforts by the Republican-controlled Legislature in Texas, top state officials were dealt a setback in their efforts to compel Democrats to return to the Lone Star State.
On Wednesday, an Illinois court rejected a request by Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows and state Attorney General Ken Paxton to enforce arrest warrants against those Democratic lawmakers who fled Texas, and in the process, denying the House chamber the ability to pass new congressional maps aimed to garner additional GOP seats in Congress.
The Legislature’s last day of this special session is due to expire tomorrow, with Gov. Greg Abbott vowing to call an immediate second special session.
The fight over mid-census redistricting has, at this point, gone national, with states led by Democratic majorities vowing to get in on the mapping game. But it’s also playing out here in Texas in other ways.
The primary race between incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and his challenger, the aforementioned current Texas AG, Ken Paxton, has been heating up. With the issue of redistricting now front and center, the response to it has become a campaign issue for the Senate seat – and not just on the Republican side.
J. David Goodman has been writing about all this as Houston bureau chief for the New York Times. He joined Texas Standard to discuss. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Let’s start with the Republican response to this battle over redistricting. Explain Cornyn and Paxton’s strategy here. I guess they’re both trying to look toughest on the issue.
J. David Goodman: That’s exactly right. I mean, almost from the moment that the Democrats left the state to deny a quorum, you’ve seen both the attorney general and Sen. Cornyn really try to one-up each other. They’re almost falling over each other to try and be the hardest on – or seem the hardest, anyway – on these absent Democrats.
And both of them have really stretched the sort of bounds of what they’re able to do in their offices to try and force these Democrats to come back to the state from where they’ve gone, which is Illinois. But we’ve also seen kind of the limits of that strategy as the attorney general, his efforts to get them to get a court in Illinois failed this week.
The senator, Sen. Cornyn, has tried to get the FBI involved and he got Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, to say they were going to help locate these Democrats, although everyone knows where they are – they’re in the suburbs of Chicago. And so far, the FBI has not gone and tried to wrangle them up and bring them back.
So a lot of this is posturing and it’s provided a lot a fodder for each to attack the other, as Senator Cornyn said of Ken Paxton, doing some “impotent acts,” as he told me.
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On the Democratic side, some individuals being talked about running for U.S. Senate are former congressman Beto O’Rourke. Who else and how have they used this issue as a potential campaign talking point?
Well, one of the more prominent Democratic lawmakers who has not announced, but is very publicly mulling a run is a State Rep. James Talarico.
And he’s been all over the press during this walkout, talking about what the Democrats are doing, trying to frame their fight as one for democracy in the whole country. He got a lot of attention before the walkout for appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and that led a lot people to think he was about to announce.
He told me this week he’s going to wait until after the walkout is completed, whenever that takes place, to make a decision here. But it’s very clear that he would like to get into that race. He’s really considering how that would work for him.
You also have Colin Allred, who is the U.S. rep who ran last year and lost to Ted Cruz. He’s back in. He’s the only declared candidate of these major candidates that we’re talking about. There’s a few others who’ve gotten into the race, but Colin Allred has also tried to really grab that spotlight that’s on the Democrats. And he went and testified in the Capitol over the maps, when they had hearings a couple of weeks ago.
Of course, then you have Beto O’Rourke who’s been attacked by Ken Paxton. It’s beneficial to both of them to have this fight. It’s great for Beto O’Rourke about raising money and getting prominence when he’s attacked by Paxton, and likewise attacking Beto O’Rourke is great for Paxton’s primary voters. It looks great in that part of the state to have Paxton really going after this boogeyman for folks on the right.
So this is all working politically for everybody involved. It just so happens that none of this is actually resulting in the Democrats coming back any earlier where they are.
I mean, yeah, and let’s get to that. Is this a foregone conclusion? Gov. Abbott has said he’ll call special session after special session until maps are redrawn. But you know, clock is ticking for them to get done for the midterms and the 2026 primary campaign. How do you see this all ending?
You know, the Democrats, when they left the state, a lot of them did so really planning to stay out through this first special session. And with the first special ending on Friday, it’s becoming more of a challenge, it sounds like, from folks I’ve talked to, to hold that coalition together – all these 50 or so Democrats who left the state, getting them to continue the walkout.
Some want to stay up, some are talking about wanting to come back. And so I think we may see some movement on that in the coming days, if not by next week.
So we’ll still have to watch out for it, but I don’t see, and I haven’t heard, any promises of staying out through this next special session. So we may get a vote on the map in the next session that’s been called by Abbott or that will be called by Abbott.
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And how much does the timing matter with the maps?
You know, it does matter when it comes to this legal case. And the Democrats have been aware of that from the start.
Their planning, it’s always been the sort of understanding that this would eventually end up in front of a court, that there’d be a lawsuit challenging the maps. And they do need to get into court sooner than later so they can have that process play out in time for the 2026 midterms.
And so, you know, that has been a calculation. They don’t wanna stay out too long, but they wanted to stay out long enough to make a point and to get other states galvanized about the issue here. And they feel like they’ve done that with California. They feel like that with Illinois and New York, and they can kind of claim victory on that.
And so that has taken some of the pressure off some of these Democrats and made them a little bit more willing to say, “we got what we needed, and now we can go back and watch the Republicans pass these maps.”
