Texas Democrats ‘Surrender’ and Return Home After Court Ruling

The Texas House of Representatives failed once again to reach a quorum Friday morning as Democratic lawmakers continued their weeks-long walkout to block a Republican-backed congressional redistricting bill.

But Democratic leaders signaled they are preparing to return — just as Gov. Greg Abbott moved to keep the fight alive.

Minutes after the House adjourned without action, Abbott called a second special session of the legislature to begin at noon, aiming to pass GOP-crafted maps that would add up to five Republican-friendly congressional districts while dismantling several Democratic-held seats.

“The Special Session #2 agenda will have the exact same agenda, with the potential to add more items critical to Texans,” Abbott said earlier in the week. “There will be no reprieve for the derelict Democrats who fled the state and abandoned their duty to the people who elected them.”

Abbott vowed, “I will continue to call special session after special session until we get this Texas first agenda passed.”

The proposed maps already cleared the GOP-controlled Texas Senate, but Democratic members of the House fled to states including Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts to prevent the chamber from reaching the two-thirds attendance threshold required to conduct business. Their absence has also stalled unrelated legislation, including disaster relief measures following catastrophic flooding in Hill County last month that killed more than 130 people.

Texas House Democratic leader Rep. Gene Wu said Thursday that members would return after the current session’s adjournment but plan to take the fight to court.

“Now, as Democrats across the nation join our fight to cause these maps to fail their political purpose, we’re prepared to bring this battle back to Texas under the right conditions and to take this fight to the courts,” Wu said.

Abbott has urged the Texas Supreme Court to remove Wu from office, while Attorney General Ken Paxton has asked for the removal of 13 other Democrats. The absent lawmakers also face fines of up to $500 a day for their absence.

The redistricting push is part of a Republican strategy to solidify their narrow majority in the U.S. House ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Democrats currently control 212 seats to the GOP’s 219. Republicans argue the Texas maps would help prevent a repeat of 2018, when Democrats regained the House majority during Trump’s first term.

In a counter-move, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday he would pursue a rare midterm redistricting in his own state to create five new Democratic-leaning districts. Calling the Texas effort an attempt to “rig the system,” Newsom declared, “We will meet fire with fire.”

However, Republican representation in California is already far under its collective state-polling, exposing that the Golden State is already gerrymandered to favor Democrats. It is difficult to see how Newsom can effectively offset the Texas redistricting effort.

Meanwhile, a legal attempt to compel Texas Democrats to return hit a dead end this week. On Wednesday, Illinois Judge Scott Larson refused to enforce civil arrest warrants issued in Texas for the absent lawmakers. Paxton and Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows had filed the petition in Illinois’s westernmost county, far from the Chicago suburbs where many of the Democrats have been staying.

Larson wrote that the petitioners “failed to present a legal basis for the court to obtain subject matter jurisdiction” and said his court could not instruct Illinois authorities to enforce civil warrants on “nonresidents temporarily located” in the state. Even if jurisdiction existed, Larson noted, the court could only determine whether the lawmakers had disobeyed a court order — not order them to return to Texas.

House Democratic Caucus Chair Wu has accused Abbott of pushing “racist maps that silence more than 2 million Black and Latino Texans.” In a statement on Wednesday, Wu vowed, “The First Called Special Session will never make quorum again.”

Abbott hit back on X, formerly Twitter, calling the Democrats’ remote statements “embarrassing” and telling them to “come back and fight like Texans rather than running and hiding like cowards.”