Representative Democracy Will Live or Die In Texas

The small-d democratic logic of an argument made by Texas state Representative Ann Johnson—who, with her Democratic colleagues in the state legislature, has left Texas in order to prevent Republican legislators from carrying out President Trump’s order to radically gerrymander its congressional maps—is beyond debate.

“If Republicans are scared of Texas voters, they should adjust their policies—not rig our maps,” says Johnson, a top Texas lawyer and three-term legislator, who flew out of the Lone Star State on Sunday as part of a tactical move intended to prevent Republican Governor Greg Abbott and Republican legislators from implementing a plan to redraw district maps in order to flip five of the 12 seats Democrats currently hold to the GOP.

Specifically, Texas Democratic legislators are breaking quorum—a tactic that effectively denies Republican legislative leaders the ability to proceed with Trump’s gerrymandering scheme. “I am asking everybody to remember that Quorum Break is a tool that the founding fathers of Texas put in place for when a minority party knows that the majority party has gone off the rails and is doing something against the interests and will of the voters,” explains Johnson. “Thousands of you have come out to say that you do want your seats stolen by Trump. The Big Ugly Bill passed by one vote—one vote—and he is afraid of you going to the polls in November of 2026. He has asked Governor Abbott to break the rules and get him five new Republican seats. You all spoke up [in opposition]. They pushed it. They put it on the floor. And, so, please know that this extraordinary step of a Quorum Break is so that your voices can be heard. If they are not going to be heard here in Texas, then we are breaking quorum to go to the nation and say: ‘This is it! You must stop Trump’s takeover!’”

Abbott is apoplectic. He has threatened to charge the Democrats with felonies and remove them from their elected positions. Savvy legal experts say he lacks the standing to do so. And the Democratic governors of several blue states have signaled that, if Abbott finds a way to override the Texas Democrats and go ahead with the new gerrymander, they may look to counter his moves by redrawing maps in their own states.

The increasingly chaotic wrangling over congressional district maps illustrates just how high the stakes are for Texas, and the whole of the United States.

The suddenly nationalized fight over gerrymandering in Texas goes to the basic premises of representative democracy, which the best of the founders of the American project understood as an experiment in giving power to the people. The experiment has never worked perfectly. But, at its best, it has provided a check and a balance on executive overreach and authoritarian abuses by DC elites.

In the past, when American presidents and their parties experienced the sort of collapse in poll numbers that Trump and the GOP have been hit with since they decided to gut Medicaid and anti-hunger programs in order to fund tax cuts for billionaires, and at the same time sent the economy reeling with ill-conceived tariff policies, those leaders adjusted their policies.

Or they lost their positions, and their congressional majorities, at the next election.

This principle of electoral accountability has tended to be a powerful corrective in American politics. In its mildest form, it requires presidents and members of Congress to explain their choices and to try to win the American people over to their points of view. In more extreme circumstances, it has led to epic political shifts, as occurred in 1932, when Americans rejected the Wall Street–aligned Republicans whose policies had accelerated the Great Depression, and replaced them with Franklin Roosevelt and the coalition of Democrats and left-wing allies who would usher in the New Deal.

Now Trump wants to upend the accountability calculus by having his allies rework the already highly skewed maps of Texas in a way that could give Republicans a chance to hold on to the House, where they currently occupy 219 seats, just one more than is needed to claim a clear majority in the 435-seat chamber. But, as always, he also wants to test how much authoritarianism he can get away with. If the Texas gambit goes forward, other Republican-controlled states will surely follow the Lone Star GOP —and if the US Supreme Court allows them to do so, by gutting what remains of the Voting Rights Act—Trump and the GOP could retain full control of the federal government in 2026, even if voters in Texas and nationwide give a majority of their votes to Democrats.