In redistricting clash, Texas GOP flexes power to shut down Democrats' last tool of resistance

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

---

For Jim Dunnam, the last few weeks have felt like déjà vu. The Waco attorney led the Texas House Democrats in 2003 when they walked out over Republicans’ mid-decade redraw of the state’s congressional map. Then, it was U.S. House Majority Leader Tom Delay pushing Texas legislators to eke out a few more seats for the Republicans.

“This is exactly the same fundamental issue,” Dunnam said. “It’s got nothing to do with Texas, or helping Texans. This is pure strong arm from Washington.”

At that time, Republicans held a fragile majority in both chambers of the Legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. They had recently won full control of every statewide office and were tentatively flexing their newfound authority after decades on the sidelines. When the Dems skipped out for Oklahoma, Republican House Speaker Tom Craddick sent state troopers to politely ask them to cross back into Texas and return to work.

“There really wasn’t any pressure,” Dunnam said. “They sent DPS up there to Ardmore [Oklahoma] and the members were just heckling them. There was no intimidation, not really.”

What a difference 22 years can make.

Now, Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton have asked the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court to expel House Democrats, a long-shot legal bid before a court filled with Abbott’s appointees. Paxton, alongside the House speaker, is shopping for friendly Illinois courts to extradite missing members, threatening to “hunt [them] down,” as Texas’ senior senator called in the FBI.

This unprecedented response is the result of Republicans confidently and completely controlling every arm of Texas government. The governor has an $86 million war chest that he’s used to unseat insufficiently loyal incumbents, part of a larger right-wing push to eviscerate the last vestiges of bipartisanship in the bright-red Legislature. The attorney general has become a national battering ram for Republican causes. State courts are stacked with legal warriors eager to prove their conservative bona fides. GOP lawmakers have drawn sharply partisan maps, tightened voting laws, poured billions into the game and turned one of the youngest, most diverse states into a conservative Camelot.

Even amid infighting, all this power has remained remarkably unified by the Texas GOP’s loyalty to one man: President Donald Trump.

So when Trump asked Texas lawmakers to deliver him five additional congressional seats, they unleashed the full force of decades of pent-up political dominance on the project. They swiftly drew a new map, ardently defended the process and, when Democrats used the one tool left to the minority party, they tested the limits of traditionally accepted democratic norms to force them back.

In that regard, 2025 is a sharp departure from 2003, Dunnam said.

“DeLay didn’t have this power over them like Trump does,” he said. “They’re just going to do whatever he says, and they have the tools to do it now.”

Amassing power

In 1994, Texas elected its first Republican governor since Reconstruction. The state Senate flipped in 1996, and the GOP consolidated its hold on every statewide office two years later. The House was the last piece to fall into place, in 2002.

None have yet returned to Democratic control.

After the delayed DeLay redraw of 2003, Republicans also got the chance to craft new maps after the 2010 and 2020 U.S. census surveys, snapping up additional red seats and packing Democratic voters into blue districts. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which grades states based on how polarized their maps are compared to other versions that could have been chosen, gives Texas an F for its congressional map, a D for the state Senate and a C for the House.

This isn’t just Texas, nor is it just red states. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states can draw maps for partisan gain and states across the political spectrum have taken them up on the offer. Blue states like Illinois, Michigan and Oregon also get failing grades.

With Texas Republicans drawing maps to extend their reach, the primary has become the determinative race, encouraging candidates to play to the further reaches of the party. Big money has come to dominate these races, from politically minded billionaires interested in influencing policy — and promoting ideological purity — in the second-largest state in the nation.

“Polarization is at epic levels in the Texas primaries,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “Which means that legislative decisions are being made more by the base-rattlers than the moderates we still saw from both parties in 2003.”

By 2015, contentious primaries and campaign spending had started moving Republican candidates to the right. The House strengthened its Republican majority, both in sheer numbers and ideological bent. Dan Patrick began his iron-fist reign over the Senate by getting rid of a rule that required a two-thirds vote to take up a bill, revoking one of the few tools the minority party had to stall legislation.

“All of this is just cutting Democrats out of the process, more and more, and growing Republicans’ power, especially as the new [candidates] coming up are just so much more strident,” Rottinghaus said.

And then came Trump.

Flexing the power

Five years before Paxton found himself suing to remove sitting lawmakers, he waged another boundary-pushing legal battle on behalf of his political ally in the White House.

It was January 2020. Trump had just lost the presidential election, but Paxton asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, a gambit legal experts said set a terrifying precedent.

Paxton was laughed out of court, but it didn’t matter. Trump was thrilled with the effort and Texas Republicans rallied to Paxton’s side, with more than a dozen signing on in support of the lawsuit, despite its reliance on discredited claims of election fraud.

Four years of Trump had taught Texas Republicans that subservience to the former president’s agenda, and his style, would be rewarded by the base, even if it fueled political division.

“There’s no question the tone is entirely different,” former state Sen. Kel Seliger, a moderate Republican and critic of Trump’s, said of the party since the president assumed power. “It’s more bombastic, more bullying.”

In filing more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration, Paxton crowed about blocking the Democrats’ agenda. Impeached by his own party, Paxton alleged that the conservative members who opposed him were “RINOs,” Republicans In Name Only, and after he was acquitted by the Senate, he rallied his right-wing base against those who had opposed him.

This scorched-earth campaign extended beyond pro-impeachment House members. When the all-Republican Court of Criminal Appeals ruled he couldn’t independently prosecute election fraud cases, Paxton successfully unseated three long-time incumbents who were up for reelection. Two more have decided not to run again this time.

“We see what happens when the courts don’t agree with Republican priorities. They run someone against them and get the changes they want, and over time it contributes to the consequences of polarization of the judiciary,” Rottinghaus said.

Abbott, having faced down primary challengers in 2022, also began to more aggressively insert himself into the conservative ecosystem.

When rural Republicans blocked a voucher program to allow students to use state dollars to pay for private school in 2023, he funded their primary challengers, replacing long-time incumbents with freshman insurgents. He played hardball to get the legislation over the finish line in 2025, patching in Trump the morning of the House floor vote to rally support and, perhaps, remind members of the firepower awaiting them if they fell out of line.

“Being a mini-Trump of some proportion seems to be the value set for Republicans right now,” said Seliger. “To one degree or another, to be successful as a Republican, you have to emulate Trump’s speech, his attitude and take directions from the White House.”

Complete power?

When Texas Democrats left the state to protest state voting restrictions in 2021, Paxton indicated there were limited options to remove them from office. The Texas Supreme Court ruled the state Constitution “enables” lawmakers to leave the state to prevent the Legislature from conducting business. Eventually, the Democrats returned and the legislation passed.

This time, the stakes are different: Trump’s agenda hinges on retaining the GOP’s razor-thin hold on the U.S. House, and he has said he feels “entitled” to five additional Republican seats from Texas to maintain that lead.

State leaders are feverishly trying to outdo each other in the quest to deliver. Abbott and Paxton, both members of the executive branch, are feuding over who can ask the judiciary to remove a sitting member of the Legislature. Sen. John Cornyn, not typically a flamethrower, is taunting Paxton, his primary challenger, for not doing more to drag the Democrats back.

“Republicans are kicking into a bigger net than they were in 2003. They’ve got control of every level of government and are unimpeded by any electoral constraint,” Rottinghaus said. “Those things can give Republicans a lot of hubris.”

The all-Republican Supreme Court is expected to rule in the coming weeks on whether Abbott, or Paxton, can remove Democrats from office. Hardline conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan posted on social media that the high court has “2.3 million Republican primary voters eyeing their actions closely this week” and suggested that the justices “should ask the former members of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals about how the GOP base responds to unpopular rulings…”

On Monday, the court appeared to punt its decision past the end of the current special session, setting deadlines for briefings into early September.

If the court does eventually agree that breaking quorum is equivalent to abandoning one’s office, it will permanently eliminate one of the few remaining tools Texas Democrats’ have to block legislation.

For Republicans, that’s long overdue. Rep. Cody Vasut, the Angleton Republican chairing the House redistricting committee, said it doesn’t make sense to “give a minority that hasn’t earned the vote of the people power to prevent the [majority party’s] agenda from being enacted.” He argued that Democrats’ primary voters were inflaming the polarization by pushing their lawmakers to stake out a more extreme position by breaking quorum.

After 2021, Vasut filed a bill to lower the quorum threshold to a simple majority, which would bring Texas in line with 46 other states. The legislation, which would require a two-thirds vote because it is a constitutional amendment, didn’t get heard in committee.

“Maybe you could say that lowering the threshold wasn't seen as necessary at that time, because there hadn't been a quorum break since 2003 and it was so rare,” Vasut said. “But I think the attitude is a little different this time around, because here we are just four years later, with another quorum break.”

Abbott echoed that concern in his Supreme Court filing, saying allowing a quorum break means that “a minority posse” would be able to “neutralize every function of state government,” including bankrupting the state by refusing to pass a budget.

Dunnam, who left the Legislature in 2011, said for all the tough talk, legal precedent protects Democrats’ ability to break quorum to protest legislation their constituents oppose.

“I would say this whole thing is a joke, but for the pressure we’ve seen that Trump has been able to exercise across the nation, and certainly among Texas Republicans,” he said

However things shake out, Democrats’ latest decampment — and the GOP’s no-holds-barred response — promises to change Texas politics. Republicans are expected to revoke any remaining shreds of power Democrats still hold, having suggested removing them as committee vice-chairs and subcommittee chairs. Some are threatening new legislative maps to draw Democrats out of their jobs at the state Capitol. Those who remain will likely find a less-than-hospitable environment for their priorities.

Texas has been on a long, slowly accelerating descent into polarization since 2003, Rottinghaus said. Twenty-two years later, this episode has brought the state to the cliff face, and flung it right off.

“The bad blood from this will stain the institution forever,” he said.

Disclosure: University of Houston has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

---

Shape the future of Texas at the 15th annual Texas Tribune Festival, happening Nov. 13–15 in downtown Austin! We bring together Texas’ most inspiring thinkers, leaders and innovators to discuss the issues that matter to you. Get tickets now and join us this November.

TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.