The New Yorker:

What could the minority party do to resist the Republican push for redistricting?

By Rachel Monroe

Just before midnight on Friday, August 22nd, insects circled the bright lights outside the Texas state capitol and sprinklers watered the lawn. Inside, lawmakers milled around the Senate chamber as a long day threatened to be prolonged.

A few weeks earlier, at the behest of President Donald Trump, Texas Republicans had introduced a mid-decade redistricting bill, redrawing the congressional map to give the party the likelihood of five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Without the proposed changes, Republicans were at an “extreme risk” of losing the House, Ken King, a representative from the Texas Panhandle and the bill’s author, said. The bill was a shoo-in in the Republican-dominated Texas legislature. To protest it, a contingent of more than fifty Democrats in the Texas House had fled the state, delaying the vote and drumming up national interest. After two weeks in Illinois and elsewhere, they returned to Texas, where the Republican majority quickly passed the bill. Yet the Democrats claimed a kind of victory. “The quorum break was beyond our wildest dreams,” Gene Wu, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said. “Would you be talking about redistricting, about gerrymandering, about racial discrimination, about trying to cheat the public if we did not do this?” Now the redistricting plan had to clear the state Senate, where a substantial Republican majority made a similar quorum break unfeasible. Instead, Carol Alvarado, a state senator from Houston, prepared a last-ditch effort to filibuster the bill.

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