Special Episode: Will Democrats Be Arrested? On the Ground Reporting from the Texas Capitol
Redistricting and Political Turmoil in TexasIn this special edition of Straight White American Jesus, host Brad Onishi interviews Forrest Wilder from Texas Monthly to discuss the ongoing political upheaval in Texas. The conversation focuses on the Democrats' strategic exodus to break quorum in response to the Texas GOP's redistricting efforts, driven by Trump's demand for a more favorable playing field for Republicans. The episode delves into the humanitarian crisis ignored by the legislature, the potential consequences on both state and national politics, and the broader implications for democracy.
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Welcome to a special edition of Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad O'Nishi, the author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, and the founder of Axis Moody Media here with Forrest Wildler, senior writer at Texas Monthly, to talk about what is happening in Texas.
And there's a lot happening, so we'll cut right to it, Forrest.
The Democrats have left the state.
They've broken quorum.
What started this whole maelstrom?
Well, Trump basically asked the Texas GOP control Texas legislature to do him a big favor.
2026 midterms coming up.
And I'd say it's pretty far out, but in general, they don't necessarily look super favorable for Republicans.
He wants to have a more favorable playing field and has basically asked or ordered Texas Republicans and the legislature to convene a special session or added this agenda item to the ongoing special session to do redraw the maps for congressional seats in Texas that were already drawn and frankly pretty seriously gerrymandered in 2021.
To say this is highly unusual.
It's not unprecedented to have a sort of mid-decade redistricting here that happened in 2003, but the stakes are much higher now.
And needless to say, this is not a normal political event, even in Texas, where we do lots of crazy stuff.
Just to put this in context, there were obviously devastating floods in the Hill Country in your state recently.
And to my knowledge, the GOP-led and dominated legislature has not put forth a bill or passed any legislation regarding those floods regarding anything, whether it's safety, whether it's response.
They seem to have spent the entire session on tactics like this one to, in a surprise move, redraw the districts.
Is that a fair assessment or am I missing something as somebody who's not in your state?
Well, the hearings are starting on legislation.
There's one today in the House on flood-related bills, but also the issue is crowding everything else out.
I mean, that, and it, you know, it is necessary for, let's just say, humanitarian reasons to address the significant problems that were identified in this latest round of flooding that killed 130-something people in Kerr County and elsewhere in central Texas.
Redistricting is not necessary from, well, certainly not from a humanitarian perspective.
And it's just a lot to juggle in a 30-day special session.
Now, this isn't necessarily of national interest, but we have another huge issue that's being heard, which is a matter of this kind of backdoor cannabis legalization that we have in this state.
The governor vetoed a bill that would have essentially killed off this multi-billion dollar industry.
And there's a big question about, you know, what comes next.
Does the legislature come up with a compromise?
Do they double down on basically ending legal cannabis?
And so that in and of itself would be a major issue to tackle both, you know, policy-wise, but especially politically in a 30-day special session.
And there's other stuff on the call too.
Do they have the band?
Does this part-time legislature have the bandwidth to do a good job on all of that stuff in 30 days?
I think that's a pretty hard case to make.
I don't want to get in the weeds here, but I'll just point out for folks.
And if I get something wrong, correct me.
The Texas legislature only meets every other year.
Most of the folks in the legislature are part-time, as you say.
They have like full nine to five jobs, careers, other things they're doing.
So when you think about 30 days to address the humanitarian crisis related to the floods, a billion-dollar industry in the state and a redistricting plan, it starts to look like that's not really possible.
And you can see how their redistricting is crowding out other things that are priorities.
Let's get back to the nuts and bolts.
The Democrats, in order to stop this, fled the state.
You know, most people are reading about this and hearing about it, but what does leaving the state do?
How does that prevent the redistricting from going forward, at least for the moment?
Well, for the legislature to function, it needs a quorum.
And in the House, it's two-thirds.
And so there's 150 members in the Texas House.
And so you need 100 members to do anything, really, or to pass laws, that's for sure.
And so the Democrats have 80-something members.
So that is enough to, if enough leave, they can deny the Republicans a quorum or they can deny the body a quorum by taking it below that 100-member threshold.
So as of just a couple hours ago, there are 96 members of the legislature that are showing up.
All the Republicans basically, plus now eight Democrats.
It was six, and now it's eight.
Two have started showing up.
Two more have started showing up.
And so the Republicans are four members.
Well, the legislature is four members away from being able to have a quorum and they can go right back to where they started.
Now, the special session is only for 30 days, as you stated.
It began, we'll see, about two weeks ago.
And I think the proximate goal for those Democrats who left is to at least shut down or to deny a quorum for the next couple of weeks and to basically kill off this special session.
Now, you may be asking, then what?
And this gets into the game theory, right?
But the reality is, and frankly, I think the most likely outcome is at some point, they'll get their quorum.
The governor will call another or have already called another special session, put this map project back on the agenda, and it will pass.
Because once there's a quorum, the Republicans have the numbers to do whatever they want.
I want to talk about the national picture, but I want to talk about first what this is doing in Texas and in Texas politics.
It may be too early to tell.
Is there a sense here, though, that this will have any effect on momentum for Democrats, a sense of resentment or somehow motivating independents or folks who are kind of thinking this is just getting the politics is getting too dirty now maybe that's not possible maybe i'm naive maybe that's just sort of a pie in the sky but is there any sense on the ground of folks feeling like this is literally trump said we're entitled to five more seats i think that's a direct quote and
And the governor said, sure, I can do that for you.
And here we are.
Is there any sense on the ground that people are enough is enough?
It's a big state.
It's 30 million people.
It's very geographically, racially, in every way it's diverse.
And I hesitate to generalize too much, right?
And, you know, I don't have any, you know, sort of deep insights from the street.
But I will say that this has fired some people up, particularly, you know, let's call them base Democratic voters in a way that I wouldn't say it's surprising, but I would say maybe the intensity of the backlash has surprised me a little bit.
You know, in one sense, it's just kind of like the latest outrage, the latest Trump outrage.
But on the other hand, I do think people have the sense that rightfully or wrongfully that this is something of almost like an endgame.
And that's worse by people like Beto O'Rourke.
I mean, he's been saying if Republicans can get away with this, if Trump can get away with this in Texas, then there's then this becomes the playbook indefinitely.
You know, and you start getting into, as we're all doing these days, you know, some pretty existential questions about democracy.
I mean, and now we have this idea on the table that the seats for the Democratic members of the Texas House who have left the state could somehow be vacated.
And then the governor would be able to appoint his own people.
Now, I don't know how serious that is legally or even politically.
It's a little hard to tell.
It depends on who you ask.
Just for the record, he cannot do that.
Michelle Davis, writing at Lone Star Left, puts it this way.
About an hour ago, Abbott put out a statement saying he plans to unilaterally remove legislatures for breaking quorum.
His letter is full of bluster, but it distorts constitutional authority.
He can't do shit.
And I'll explain why.
The Texas Constitution explicitly allows members to break quorum.
Only a court can determine if an elected official has, quote, vacated office and only through a quo warranto action, a lawsuit that challenges someone's right to hold office.
Quorum breaking is not a felony.
Fundraising to cover fines is not bribery.
Bribery requires a corrupt agreement to influence an official act.
Davis notes that it was put in place exactly for this reason, to prevent the minority from being steamrolled by an out-of-control majority.
Once again, here is Forrest Wildler, senior writer at Texas Monthly.
But the fact that we're even talking about this, you know, you start, it's sort of, I think, maybe a little bit of a mask off moment for people.
Not that there needs to be another one.
But just given the kind of, such a radical idea that raises the question of whether there's just, you know, what, the stakes are just extremely high.
And what is the, what are we even doing here?
So I think that's, I think that's on people's minds.
There's been rallies.
There's a lot of, you know, chatter.
There's a lot of people just kind of talking about what do we do?
And there's a big push to, you know, to do something.
And because, frankly, the options for Democrats in Texas being this kind of perpetual, under the boot heel minority party in Texas, their options are very limited.
And this really is one of the only legislative tools that is available to them.
And that's why it's been used in the past.
It was used in 2021 to try to, to try to stop this, these new restrictions on voting rights.
It was used in 2003 during the last mid-redistricting cycle that was pushed by Tom DeLay, if anybody remembers him.
And so I think that a lot of the members, you know, a lot of the elected officials are feeling this push from their people to do something.
And this is, this really is one of the few things that they can do.
Now, the question is, and I was just down at the Capitol talking to some of the Democrats who did not leave the state, trying to get them on the record about why not.
They're a little, some of them are kind of hard to pin down.
So they almost don't want, really want to talk about it.
But one representative, I just spoke to state representative, Terry Canales.
He's a Democrat who represents a district along the border.
Talked to me for a while.
And basically what he said is that nobody, the leaders in the House Democratic Caucus, the chairman, I guess in particular, was not able to articulate an objective or a goal or like an end game for this, for this quorum break.
And he believes based on what's happened in the past and on, I guess, just kind of the lay of the land, if you will, that it's not going to succeed.
That eventually they will have quorum and they will pass these maps or some version of these maps.
And that it's better to stay here and to try to have a, quote unquote, seat at the table on some of the, maybe the other issues.
Maybe improve the map somehow.
I'm not clear how it's going to work.
Rather than do this quorum break, which inevitably will result in essentially defeat.
I mean, I could talk further because I wanted, I did ask him because I think when I'm listening to those who left, what are the goals?
You know, what I've been able to glean is that one, it's to raise attention on the issue, which I think they're successful at doing in the sense that there's lots of media coverage and the rest of the country's paying attention.
Two is to try to pressure or encourage blue state governors to do their own kind of countermeasures to counteract what the Texas legislature is likely to do.
And three, just to kind of light a fire under people.
And we don't know exactly what that'll produce, but there's just this, again, the sense of urgency.
And so I asked Representative Canalis about that.
And he just said that he felt like the blue state governors were already going to do what they were going to do.
And that, you know, essentially like this would result in the same way if they hadn't left.
I understand that sentiment in some sense.
I also think that had there not been this grand exit from the state, you know, you and I may not be talking.
And there wouldn't be wall-to-wall coverage of this.
You wouldn't have J.B. Pritzker, you know, governor of Illinois talking about this on Fox, on cable news nonstop.
I mean, there are ways that this has become a national issue that breaks some of those barriers in terms of the silos and the news echo chambers.
And we're there.
And I guess, you know, I just want to, I know you have a couple more minutes here.
I just want to finish on that is we're now in a place where Governor Newsom of California has gone from saying, if you do it, I'll do it.
To, you know, really exploring what that looks like in California.
We have Governor Hochul in New York doing the same thing and saying she's tired of playing politics with one arm tied behind her back.
This has escalated to, I think, a symbolic level.
And I know that this may be beyond your scope, but I do want to ask you about this.
You know, Texas has long been the kind of emblem of conservative America.
It is the biggest conservative state in the country.
It is the leader.
It is the one who is the kind of breaks the banner when you run out onto the field and under the Friday night lights.
California and New York are that for?
democratic blue state whatever you want to call it in this country did you see this escalation coming Do you think this has any effect?
And is it having any effect on the ground in your state as you kind of going back and forth from the Capitol every day?
Look, when Trump said he wanted new maps, we all knew they would do it.
There's no, you know, there's no sense that there's anything else going on here other than Trump wanted something, more power or maintaining his power and the party is going to give him what he wants.
And, you know, these maps are already the congressional districts already pretty gerrymandered, right?
I mean, we don't really have very many competitive elections.
We don't have very many competitive elections in Texas at the congressional level or even at the state house level.
You know, and part of that is because the way that they've gerrymandered is to try to create, you know, as many safe districts as possible for incumbents.
And that does include Democrats.
Of course, on balance, they want to try to maximize the number of safe seats for Republicans.
And now he's really, Trump is really putting, you know, he's really pushing the outer bounds of what is possible.
We have, you know, powerful computers now that can draw these just elaborate and bizarre shaped districts.
It's a science and it's an art that has become more and more refined over time.
I think, you know, I will say, I think there is a big risk in these maps, particularly with some of the, some of the districts in South Texas.
You know, they're really counting on Hispanic voters in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley along the border to maintain and maybe even build upon the trend of Trump winning many of these voters over.
They think the trend is their friend.
I think that's a, I think that's a pretty big gamble.
Nothing is, you know, for sure in politics.
But one thing we do know about Latino voters, including in Texas, is they don't have, many of them do not have firm sort of partisan loyalties and the pendulum swings back and forth.
And we know what Trump is doing.
I think there might be a sense of overreach, particularly if trade and the economy takes a downturn.
Remember, Texas has an incredible amount of trade with Mexico.
Laredo is now the largest inland port in the country.
There's a tremendous amount of trade that goes through there and to other ports of entry.
If Trump persists with these tariffs and the economy continues to be a downturn, I think that this could blow up in his face, potentially.
But from a Democratic perspective, not many chances can be taken here because the stakes are so high.
And so that's why I think you're seeing this conversation from blue state governors, which is like that we go, when they go low, we go high thing is kind of out the window because it's not working right now.
Forrest Wildler, thank you so much for your time and doing this on short notice.
Just a few follow-up comments about what's happening in Texas and would love to hear from those of you in Texas about what's going on in your community in your world.
If you're in Austin or Dallas or San Antonio, if you're in Denton, if you're in Amarillo, send us a line.
Let us know what's up.
I want to say that this is just not good for democracy.
And I think that Forrest Wildler alludes to that here briefly.
He says this is a mask off moment.
And we have all known that the United States has had a gerrymandering problem for a long time, whether it's Ohio, whether it's Texas, wherever you look, there are places that have these weirdly drawn districts in order to keep a certain party in power.
A place like Wisconsin comes to mind that in every election nationally is basically 50-50.
And yet for a long time, the state legislature has tilted very far Republican because of gerrymandering.
And things are changing there finally.
I bring that up because there has been this sense of gerrymandering as a secret but not secret thing.
And don't get me wrong, it's not been good.
It's not been positive.
It's not been helpful.
We've somehow reached another stage, however, a stage where it's openly, it's out in the open.
The president is saying we deserve five more seats.
This is a year in advance attempt to basically steal the midterms.
And what this does is by bringing it to this very next level, you now have the governors of California and New York saying we're going to respond.
And I've seen these online.
There are ways that you can get to a 52 to zero map in California.
Right now, there's nine Republicans, I believe, in the Assembly.
You could gerrymander the hell out of California and get to 52.
You could do a lot in New York.
And in the short term, you're like, that's good.
And it may be what's needed to prevent an unfair and really bad outcome in 2026.
I have to think about that more.
I have to think about whether or not, you know, how that works.
But what I do know is this.
You cannot have a democracy where the governors of the three most populous states are saying to people, your vote essentially doesn't matter or there's really nothing at stake because we're going to rig the game so quickly and so easily that we know who's going to win.
And yes, people still have to vote.
And as Forrest Wildler said, there are some question marks in Texas in certain places, especially with Latino voters.
But if you're openly saying to people, we're going to rig the game on purpose, you've just reached a level in democracy that cannot hold.
And you've reached a place too where you have the two states that represent, for lack of a better term, and I know I don't like this term and you don't either, but blue America or blue states, California being this symbolic gargantuan place where one out of eight Americans live and New York, not only being the place of New York City, but an overwhelmingly populous place as well.
You have the two symbolic leaders of American liberals, not progressives, but liberals, saying, we're going to do what they're doing.
Now, in one sense, as Wildler said, they're no longer going high when they go low.
That's over.
In another sense, we're at a place where these drastic actions, these extreme measures, really portend a situation where the fabric of the Federation of States won't hold.
And I just want to notice that.
Now, I'm not blaming the Democrats for that.
I'm saying we've been pushed to a place where the anti-democratic forces in our country are openly saying we deserve five more seats in Texas.
We deserve them.
Do you all remember when Trump called the governor of Georgia and said, I need 11,000 something more seats?
I could not get that out of my mind when I was talking to Forrest Wildler just now.
Hey, I just need these many votes.
Can you give them to me?
And Brad Raffensberger said, no, I can't.
And here Trump says, I just need five more congressional seats.
Can you give them to me?
And Governor Abbott says, of course, no problem.
And now the Texas legislature, instead of focusing on the floods, instead of focusing on business, cannabis business, which is billions of dollars in business, is focused on redistricting.
He called and said, I need more votes.
And instead of persuading the people, instead of winning elections, instead of running good candidates, it's just we'll rig the game for you even further, even though it's already rigged.
Do you see the progression where we've come, not only from 2016, but from 2020 till now?
That's the difference.
And in some ways, I know that many of you are rooting for Newsom and Hochland and Pritzker, and you can see the ways that they are trying to fight back.
And I'm not here to condemn that unilaterally.
What I'm trying to notice is you can't have a democracy where people believe in voting and candidates and sharing power and the public will of the people if you have this kind of game playing going on.
It's just one of those things that you can't have in a democracy if you want it to work well.
This is a shortcut, and it's a shortcut because of an existential threat to the Republic.
And I understand that.
But we're now at a place that is much different than 2016 and 2020.
I'm not sure what's going to happen here.
Forrest Wildler seems to think that quorum will be reached and that will be the outcome.
Nonetheless, one wonders if some momentum might be gained, if some minds might be changed, and if people see through what is happening in Texas and everywhere across the country, only time will tell.
I want to thank everyone for listening today.
I'm Brad O'Nishi.
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