Late Sunday afternoon, dozens of Texas House Democrats boarded a charter flight at the Austin airport and absconded to the Land of Lincoln in an attempt to halt, if not stop altogether, Republicans’ heavy-handed scheme to redraw the state’s congressional map to increase the GOP advantage by as many as five seats.
Backed by Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who provided safe haven to the more than 50 members who fled, Texas House Dems are pledging to do anything and everything possible to stop the tilting of the playing field ahead of the 2026 midterms. Fleeing the state was about the only tool in their kit, a bid to deny the lower chamber the constitutionally required two-thirds of members to convene.
“We’re not walking out on our responsibilities. We’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent,” Democratic caucus chair Gene Wu said in a statement. “As of today, this corrupt special session is over.”
This marks the second time in four years that the minority party in the lower chamber has broken quorum over voting rights issues. It’s the beginning of another dicey high-stakes political fight that seemingly has no end other than the GOP ultimately getting its way—if not now, then soon enough. It also leaves Texans contemplating the prospect of an eternity spent damned to endless special sessions.
So, how did we get here? Upon orders from President Donald Trump and his political operatives to carve up the existing maps to add precisely five more Republican-favored seats ahead of the 2026 midterms, Governor Greg Abbott called a special session last month that tucked redistricting into a long list of agenda items.
At the start of session, the House and Senate select committee on redistricting held a handful of hearings to take public testimony on the prospect of new maps—without even having a proposed map on which to testify. Then after the perfunctory public hearings ended, a new map was introduced via House Bill 4, which strategically packed and cracked Black and Latino communities in Central and South Texas, Houston, and Dallas-Fort Worth, while generally throwing the current Democratic congressional delegation into chaos. The proposal could well give Republicans control of 85 percent of Texas’ 35 U.S. House seats—compared to the roughly 58 percent of votes a statewide Republican candidate can expect to earn.
In the first and only hearing on the actual map, held last Friday, bill “author” and GOP state Representative Todd Hunter repeatedly insisted that the measure was purely about maximizing Republican political performance in Texas. In case it was unclear, yes, he’s using that declaration as a moral defense of the proposal—since the U.S. Supreme Court has okayed partisan gerrymandering, while race-based gerrymanders are still (technically) forbidden by the Voting Rights Act.
The House redistricting committee’s one marathon hearing on HB 4 was dominated by members of the public, including Democratic members of Congress themselves, who opposed the bill.. Then, early the next morning, the map was approved along a party-line vote and scheduled for a vote on the House floor Monday.
While House Democrats in Chicago, plus some in New York, seem willing and able to withhold their numbers for the remaining weeks of this first 30-day special session, all that would do is delay the inevitable. In order to truly throw a wrench in the GOP’s machinations, Dems would likely have to keep their quorum break going through November, when the state opens up candidate filing for the 2026 elections.
That would require maintaining an organized quorum break of more than 90 days—easily the longest in Texas history—through possibly three special sessions and under more punitive political conditions than ever.
After the 2021 quorum break, the GOP-controlled House instituted new rules that impose a $500-a-day fine on each so-called political fugitive, a penalty that cannot be paid using individual campaign funds. (Thanks to our threadbare ethics laws, though, they could likely get around this through various creative legal arrangements, like cash “honorariums” or becoming paid “consultants” for whichever deep-pocketed donor ponies up.) Republicans back in Austin, meanwhile, are calling on Democratic members to be stripped of committee leadership positions and office budgets.
Abbott also issued a letter claiming dubious authority to declare Democrats’ offices vacated and call special elections to replace them. He also warned that Democrats who accepted funds from outside parties to pay the daily fines may be violating state bribery laws—something, it bears noting, that many Republicans cared little about when the appearance of venality marred Attorney General Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial.
National Democrats have pledged to support the state House Democrats come hell or high water; U.S House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries even visited Austin to pledge his support for Dems if they decided to flee, though he offered little in the way of specifics.
So far, the nascent quorum break has resulted in high-profile media coverage and widespread praise and support from fellow Democrats across the country. Texas House Democrats are presenting a unified front, though not all have joined the effort.
House Dems’ quorum break back in 2021 began in similar fashion. The caucus fled to Washington, D.C., to block passage of a Texas GOP draconian voter suppression bill. The ostensible mission in the nation’s capital was to pressure President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would have shored up and expanded the right to the ballot box nationwide—and would have cracked down on partisan and racial gerrymandering.
But Senate Democrats including Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were unmoved and the federal legislation did not budge. Meanwhile, as the days and weeks dragged on, Texas Democrats in exile grew weary, increasingly fractured, and eager for a political off-ramp. Eventually a contingent—including House Dem du jour James Talarico—peeled off from the larger group and returned to Austin, restoring a quorum on the House floor. The whole ordeal was a massive stress test for a diverse caucus that has a hard time staying united on any one issue even when the stakes are much lower. They were able to claim only a modicum of victory when the ultimate version of the voting bill excised some of the most pernicious provisions.
Asked at a press conference outside Chicago Sunday night about how Democrats will avoid a fate similar to the 2021 quorum break, caucus Chair Gene Wu replied: “This is not 2021. The threat is to not just our state but the entire country.”
As Texas Democrats argue, if they don’t stop this new Republican map from passing in Texas, then the entire country will be thrown into an unrelenting gerrymandering arms race—with major blue states California, New York, and Illinois gerrymandering their own maps (in some cases already quite gerrymandered in their own right) to counteract the Texas GOP’s rigging. Trump, meanwhile, has reportedly set his sights on additional redrawing in red states including Missouri.
At this point, that arms race seems like an inevitable outcome that no quorum break—regardless of how long—can prevent.
