Democrats are decrying Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s move to redraw the state’s congressional maps to help President Donald Trump and Republicans maintain their powerful majority in Washington, D.C.
Next week, the Republican-controlled Texas state legislature will begin a special session called by Abbott. The redistricting of Texas’ congressional map is a top item on their legislative agenda. This comes after Trump’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Harmeet Dhillon, sent a letter to Gov. Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton expressing “serious concerns regarding the legality” of four of Texas’s congressional districts.
The Trump official characterized the four districts as “unconstitutional ‘coalition districts’” and urged the state of Texas to “rectify these race-based considerations from these specific districts.”
On Tuesday, Trump said he wanted the Texas legislature to do a “simple” redrawing of the map to give congressional Republicans, who currently have a tight majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, at least five additional seats.
Maintaining a majority after next year’s midterm elections is crucial for Trump to finish carrying out the legislative agenda of his second and final term. Democrats taking control of the House would stymie those plans and potentially lead to politically damaging investigations of the Trump administration.
During a press conference on Tuesday with Democratic leadership and the Texas delegation, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, pointed out that all four of the districts targeted by the Trump administration—congressional districts 9,18, 29, and 33—are represented by Black and brown lawmakers.
“We only have four seats that are represented by Black folk, where the vast majority of the people [who] get to decide who they have represent them are Black. They decided to attack three of the four seats that we have in the state,” explained Crockett of the districts represented by Reps. Al Green, Marc Veasey, and another seat left vacant after the death of former Rep. Sylvester Turner.
She continued, “They [also] decided to go after a Latina [Rep. Sylvia Garcia]. They are specifically deciding to splinter the communities of common interest, as well as just blatantly say we are going to dilute minority voices.”
Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, states have been federally prohibited from drawing maps that do not allow Black voters, who were historically disenfranchised, particularly in the Jim Crow South, to elect candidates of their choice. However, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 5 of the VRA, which required federal approval for states to pass voting rights legislation, there has been an explosion of restrictive voting laws and gerrymandering maps that give Republicans significant advantages.
“The courts, ever since we’ve had a Voting Rights Act, have always found this state to be intentionally discriminatory,” said Crockett.
Despite Texas being a majority-minority state, the popular Democrat chastised the Republican-led legislature for doing what she says it has always done historically: “Dilute the voices of people of color.”
Crockett added, “I need people of color to understand that the scheme of the Republicans has consistently been to make sure that they mute our voices so that they can go ahead and have an oversized say.”
During the same press conference, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said he anticipates Texas Republicans to serve as “political punks” who will “bend the knee to Donald Trump’s extreme agenda.” He also noted that Democrats are already in litigation challenging Texas’ current congressional map, accusing it of being a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
As Congresswoman Crockett explained, 95% of Texas’ population growth, per U.S. Census data, was a result of increased Black and Brown voters.
“[Republicans] went out of their way to make sure that we got zero new seats for people of color. So that’s exactly what they’re going to do this time,” she said.
As for potential legal challenges to whatever map Republicans draw in Texas, Jeffries, who would become the first Black speaker of the U.S. House if Democrats win back the majority next November, told reporters on Tuesday, “All of our legal options will continue to be on the table.”
