Texas Democrats learned a lot from their melodramatic walkout over an election integrity bill in 2021. But unfortunately for the party of deserters, so did Republicans.
This time around, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) not only has the support of the White House but a wealth of tools at his disposal that, four years later, he’s even less afraid to use. While the Lone Star fugitives hole up in the leftist bastions of Massachusetts, Illinois, and New York, plotting their resistance like the second coming of Charles de Gaulle, the cold, hard reality is one even the media can’t ignore: eventually, the Democrats will have to go home.
The AWOL Texans, whose stunt to stop the legislature from redrawing the state’s congressional districts is in its second week, admit that the spectacle — not the end game — is what they really care about. “We’ve only done this a couple of times,” Rep. John Bucy told CNN. “We don’t have a good plan all the time.” What comes next, another freely admitted, “we don’t know.” While some of them dramatically promise to do “whatever it takes” to keep the statehouse in complete paralysis, the truth is that they’re running out of options.
Not only has the FBI agreed to lend a hand to Abbott, but Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has begun the process to remove the first wave of absent leaders from office. “These cowards deliberately sabotaged the constitutional process and violated the oath they swore to uphold,” Paxton argued. “I have asked the Texas Supreme Court to declare what has been clear from the beginning: that the runaway members have officially vacated their offices in the Texas House.”
Adding to the Democrats’ woes, Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R) issued civil arrest warrants for the more than 50 missing members. That means, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky pointed out on “Washington Watch,” “you can be arrested. You can be brought back to Texas. And you can be fined. They just can’t put you in jail for it. So, if they can find these folks, they can bring them back to Texas.” And it’s not just the FBI who may be hot on their trail, he continued, “but the very legendary Texas Rangers, who also are now involved in trying to find these folks.”
And the fines are nothing to sneeze at. At $500 a day, these legislators are taking a healthy bite out of their modest $7,000 a year salary. “Many of the Democrats have caregiving roles or full-time jobs,” CNN points out. “Their caucus includes small-business owners, realtors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, grandmothers, a deacon, and a masonry contractor. Soon, the $500-a-day fines for absent lawmakers enacted after the 2021 protest will outpace the salary they are paid all year. They cannot use campaign or official funds to pay the fines.”
In fact, a court just slapped down Beto O’Rourke’s sly attempt to fundraise the Democrats’ way out of this mess. Late Friday, Tarrant County District Judge Megan Fahey agreed with the state attorney general that the idea was unlawful, “because Defendants are raising and utilizing political contributions from Texas consumers to pay for the personal expenses of Texas legislators, in violation of Texas law.”
Paxton framed it as O’Rourke and his organization “[taking] advantage of uninformed donors by directing them to explicitly political fundraising platforms, all while intending to use the funds for purposes they understood to be constituted as personal expenditures. Texas law prohibits organizations from engaging in false, misleading, and deceptive acts, such as the fundraising scheme operated by O’Rourke and Powered by People.”
Even if Democrats succeed in running out the clock on Abbott’s special session, which is set to end August 19, the governor has threatened to use his power to bring the legislature back until the issue is settled. “As soon as this [special session] is over,” he told Fox News Sunday, “I’m gonna call another one, then another one, then another one, then another one.” Under the Texas Constitution, the state needs at least two-thirds of lawmakers present to move ahead with business. That quorum was disrupted when Democrats fled the state.
At the heart of the issue are Texas’s congressional districts. As von Spakovsky explained, “These were drawn up in 2021 after the 2020 census. But the reason this is going on now, five years later — after the 2020 census — is, frankly, because … the Justice Department has warned Texas that it has got to fix problems with four current congressional districts in the state of Texas — which unconstitutionally [and] illegally used race as a predominant factor when they were drawing the lines. And you can’t do that.”
Essentially, Lone Star state leaders were trying to create “coalition districts,” which happens when two different racial minority groups, combined together, make up more than 50% of a district’s voters. That was what the Fifth Circuit court had demanded more than 40 years ago in a separate case about the Voting Rights Act. But last August, in another case, von Spakovsky points out, the judges changed their mind. “The Fifth Circuit said, ‘You know what? We made a mistake when we decided that these kinds of political alliances between different racial groups [are] not now protected by the Voting Rights Act.’”
So if Democrats decide to sue, it would be pretty ironic. “Like I said, all of this is being done to comply with a new decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.” So if they file a lawsuit, “They’re going to lose,” the Heritage expert predicted. “I don’t think the Fifth Circuit is going to say that somehow this new plan was wrong when in fact the legislature drafted [it] up in order to comply with a decision of the Fifth Circuit.”
Of course, Americans wouldn’t know that from the media, which is portraying this circus as a righteous stand against the GOP’s election-stealing plans. Far from it. If anything, Republicans are righting some major wrongs — one of which was inflicted by the Biden administration four years ago when it ordered the Census to include illegal immigrants in the count. Some of you are probably wondering, what’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is that Biden gave millions of people who broke the law a voice in the political process.
Every 10 years, our country uses those population numbers to redraw congressional lines. And when you include illegal immigrants, as Biden did, you’re rewarding the states where most of the undocumented people live. Red states, after all, don’t knowingly harbor illegal immigrants — so the congressional districts are siphoned off to states that do, affecting everything from House seats to the Electoral College. The last thing any congressman wants to see, Rep. James Comer insisted in 2021, are the blue, liberal states “that are completely turning their nose up at the Constitution [and] doing things on a daily basis to attract illegals into this country, get rewarded with congressional reappointments, and we get punished. It’s just not fair.”
If America went back to counting the citizen population instead of total population, von Spakovsky told guest host Jody Hice, “it would very much change the political boundaries of many congressional districts, particularly in places like Texas and Florida.”
Another reason Republicans are trying to redistrict, von Spakovsky underscored, is because the Census Bureau itself admitted in 2022 “that it had made serious errors in the 2020 census. They had overcounted eight states [and] had undercounted the population of six states — and those errors were so large that Texas was actually cheated out of an additional congressional seat it should have gotten. Florida was cheated out of two. The Census Bureau didn’t count more than half a million residents of the state. Those errors and those mistakes are another, frankly, good reason why we ought to do another census.”
Which is exactly what President Trump called for last week in the middle of Texas’s made-for-TV drama. In von Spakovsky’s opinion, it’s a great idea. “The Constitution says you have to have a census at least once every 10 years. But there’s nothing that prevents the federal government from doing one more often,” he reiterated. “This is actually justified, doing a mid-year census.” First, because of the mistakes in the last count. Secondly, he reminded people, “[W]e are one of the most highly mobile societies of any Western democracy. People move a lot. That is such a factor in Texas, for example, that since the 2020 census, the Census Bureau itself estimates that more than two million new residents have moved to Texas. [A] huge number.” So if the president wants another census, they should move forward, von Spakovsky agreed. “That’s the only thing that’s fundamentally fair to citizens who get to vote in our representational republic.”
Meanwhile, the question on everyone’s minds is just how long the Texas Democrats can hold out. In 2021, they lasted five weeks. But that was before the full force of the administration was on the chase and lawmakers were staring down thousands of dollars in fines. In this instance, as in the last, Republicans will almost certainly prevail in their plans. Whether they’ll also win the messaging war remains to be seen. Already, the optics of liberal members abandoning their jobs while the state’s flood victims wait for aid aren’t exactly flattering.
At the end of the day, state Rep. Mitch Little (R) predicted, “They will come back. It’s just a question of when,” he emphasized. “They do not have the will to make this go away.” He paused before adding, “We want these seats — and we’re going to have them.”
Originally published at The Washington Stand.
Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer for The Washington Stand. In her role, she drafts commentary on topics such as life, consumer activism, media and entertainment, sexuality, education, religious freedom, and other issues that affect the institutions of marriage and family. Over the past 20 years at FRC, her op-eds have been featured in publications ranging from the Washington Times to The Christian Post. Suzanne is a graduate of Taylor University in Upland, Ind., with majors in both English Writing and Political Science.
