This summer, in a special session, Texas lawmakers proposed a new congressional map designed not to reflect the people of Texas, but to control them. Despite the fact that nearly all of the state’s recent population growth has come from Black, Latino, and Asian communities, the new lines erase their political voices. Cities like Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth, home to some of the most racially diverse communities in the country, have had their congressional districts broken down and spread across rural, white districts with surgical precision to dilute the power of their vote.
The tactic is familiar. So is the intent.
This latest redistricting is not a departure from Texas’ past, it is its most recent chapter. The idea that everyone in this state could be counted, could be represented, could be heard, has never been the default in Texas. It has always been the thing that had to be fought for, won, and defended. And when it was won after Reconstruction, after the Voting Rights Act, after the election of Barbara Jordan and so many others, it was met with immediate backlash.
This is a continuation of that backlash.
As historian Gerald Horne lays out in The Counter-Revolution of 1836, the Texas Revolution wasn’t a struggle for freedom, it was a revolt to protect slavery. Mexico had outlawed slavery in 1829, threatening the wealth and power of the white American settlers flooding into its Northern Province. Rather than accept freedom of enslaved Africans, those settlers chose secession. They broke from Mexico and founded a pro-slavery state built to safeguard the right to own Black people and expand racial domination.
Texas was established not as a beacon of liberty, but as a bastion of white supremacy, created through the violent seizure of Indigenous land and the forced labor of enslaved Africans.
That legacy didn’t end with the Civil War. During Reconstruction, Black Texans briefly gained the right to vote and hold office. But white politicians swiftly responded with poll taxes, literacy tests, and lynch mobs to take it all back. In the 20th century, the tools became more subtle. Gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and at-large elections, but the goal remained the same—to blunt the political power of Black and brown Texans.
More than 50 Democratic lawmakers left the state to break the quorum needed to pass the map. These lawmakers now face $500-a-day fines, civil arrest warrants, and a smear campaign led by the state’s top Republican officials who have asked the courts to remove Democratic leaders from office and opened a baseless investigation into Beto O’Rourke’s political organization. Attorney General Ken Paxton has even called for O’Rourke to be jailed, while Senator John Cornyn has called for the Department of Justice to investigate O’Rourke, as well.
It doesn’t stop there. Earlier this month, Senator Cornyn announced that he had secured cooperation from the FBI to help locate the lawmakers. The FBI is now tasked with tracking elected representatives whose crime is that they refused to participate in eroding democracy and violating the voting rights of Black and brown Texans.
Cornyn said the lawmakers were avoiding their “constitutional responsibilities.” But whose Constitution? Whose responsibilities? Whose democracy?
What becomes clear, again and again, is that for Texas’ ruling class, democracy is acceptable only when it confirms their power. When the electorate changes—when the people of Texas begin to look less like Sam Houston and more like Barbara Jordan or Willie Velásquez—that democracy must be “corrected.” They correct it with redistricting. They correct it with voter ID laws. They correct it with the courts, with the police, and federal agents.
The lawmakers who left our state didn’t run from their jobs, they ran from a trap. The maps had already been drawn. The votes were already counted. The outcome was never in doubt. Leaving was one of the only tools they had left.
In response, Senator John Cornyn called on the FBI. Not to investigate corruption or to stop violence. But to track down lawmakers whose only offense was denying quorum to a process designed to erase their constituents from political power.
Instead of focusing on the urgent crises facing Texans, like the devastating floods in Central Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has followed orders from Washington. He’s put a Republican power grab ahead of people’s lives and threatened to redistrict 8 GOP seats if Democrats don’t return to the state. Texas Republicans could have used this special session to address the flood relief that is desperately needed in Central Texas. Instead, he called a session to redraw the congressional map.
There’s no confusion about what this is. It’s not about fairness. It’s about keeping power where it’s always been. It’s about drawing a map that locks nonwhite voters out and the Republicans in charge are betting that no one will stop them.
