The special session agenda also includes eliminating the STAAR test, cutting property taxes, enacting THC and hemp regulations and congressional redistricting.
AUSTIN, Texas — When state lawmakers return to the state capitol later this month, they will have a jam-packed agenda that is full of unfished conservative priorities from the recent legislative session, including redrawing Texas’ congressional maps.
The Texas Constitution only allows lawmakers to pass bills during a special session on issues selected by the governor. In total, the governor is asking lawmakers to take on 18 items during the 30-day special session.
There will be a heavy focus on the deadly flooding in Central Texas this Fourth of July weekend. Lawmakers will take up bills related to flood warning systems, flood relief funding, and natural disaster preparation and recovery.
Abbott called for the special session last month after vetoing several bills, including Senate Bill 3, a proposed ban on the sale of consumable hemp products containing THC.
The agenda says Texas will address congressional redistricting “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
Michael Li, a redistricting expert with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said it is an unusual move.
“There certainly are cases when a party control of the legislature changes hands or control of the government, changes hands, and the new people in power decide to redraw maps, but it’s very, very unusual that the party that drew maps will go back and try to redraw them then,” Li said. “I’m hard-pressed to think of another circumstance where a party drew a map and then went back a few years later and then redrew it.”
The last time Texas conducted mid-decade redistricting was in 2003, after Republicans captured the House, Senate, and governor’s office, a move spearheaded by Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
It comes as the Trump administration has pushed Texas to redraw its maps to carve out more Republican seats, thereby shoring up the GOP’s advantage in the U.S. House, which they currently control 220-212.
Republicans hold 25 of the state’s 38 congressional seats. Democrats hold 12 and are expected to pick up another vacant seat in a special election this November.
This week, the Department of Justice sent a letter to Governor Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, expressing legal concerns about four districts in the Dallas and Houston areas, all of which are represented by Democrats.
The letters named are TX-9, represented by Rep. Al Green; TX-18, previously held by Sylvester Turner before his death earlier this year; TX-29, represented by Rep. Sylvia Garcia; and TX-33, represented by Rep. Marc Veasey.
The DOJ said those districts constitute “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. In the letter, the DOJ states that TX-9 and TX-18 sort voters along racial lines to create two coalition seats, which creates a majority Hispanic district in TX-29.
Li said the districts make sense, and there’s nothing that prohibits the state from drawing a coalition district as a matter of policy choice.
“It certainly gives communities some color who are providing most of the state’s population growth a seat at the table, but also, in addition, it helps to make Republican districts very safe,” Li said. “What Republicans did is they really tapped Democratic-leaning nonwhite voters into these districts to serve a political aim of the state, and that’s not prohibited under current law.”
Li said it is a high-risk play, both legally and politically.
“It has intentional discrimination written all over it because it’s tough to get more seats in Texas without attacking the power of communities of color,” Li said.
While the idea behind the new maps is to strengthen Republican seats and give Republicans a better chance of maintaining their slim majority in the U.S. House, some are concerned that it could jeopardize Republican lawmakers and put them at risk if they miscalculate with the new districts.
“You’re making a bet on the politics of the future and that you know what the politics of the future will look like. There are many places in the country where that’s easy to do, but not Texas,” Li said. “Texas is the fastest growing state in the country. It’s changing both in terms of adding new people and also changing demographically. If anyone can tell you how they think Texans are going to be voting in 2030, they are a braver person than I am.”
Li said Texas has been very volatile politically in the last few years. After 2016, it shifted heavily toward Democrats, but the last couple of elections had shifted back toward Republicans.
“You’ve got a lot of people who are under 18 and very diverse who are turning 18 and may participate in the political process for the first time. You’ve got people of color moving to places where they didn’t live before,” Li said. “All of that makes Texas a tough state to sort of gerrymander reliably.”
Some Republican incumbents are nervous they could end up vulnerable. Diluting the voting power of communities of color could stretch GOP voters thin, turning safe districts into swing districts.
The Texas congressional district maps were last redrawn in 2021. At the time, state lawmakers focused on shoring up Republican districts.
“In this state where Republicans don’t win two-thirds of the vote, they have two-thirds of the seats, and those seats are very safe,” Li said. “There aren’t many competitive districts on the Texas map. So it’s a very good map for Republicans.”
The risky nature of the mid-decade redistricting is highlighted by a cautionary tale of what happened after the 2010 census. Republican state lawmakers drew GOP voters into nearby Democratic districts to try and turn them red, but in the 2018 midterms, it came back to bite them.
Democrats picked up 12 seats in the state house, knocked off two longtime Republican congressmembers and came close to winning in some statewide races.
“What looked like at the beginning of the decade in 2011 to be a fairly safe Republican map by the end of the decade was not a very good map for Republicans,” Li said. “They were fighting tooth and nail to sort of plug the holes in the leaking dam.”
“They thought they were being smart, but it turned out that they were being too smart for their own good,” Li said.
Political maps must be redrawn once every decade after the U.S. Census is taken, although no federal law prohibits those maps from being redrawn mid-cycle. The Texas Constitution allows the maps to be redrawn at the discretion of the governor and the Legislature.
The 2021 state legislative and congressional maps have faced legal challenges, arguing they discriminate against some Black and Latino voters. The case went to trial in El Paso last month; however, a ruling is not expected for several months.
State Rep. Ramón Romero, Jr. (D-Fort Worth), who is the chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, called the redistricting effort “another attempt to silence Latino voters in Texas.”
“Instead of addressing the real problem – maps that weaken minority voting power – Gov. Abbott is rushing lawmakers back to redraw congressional districts that further silence communities of color,” Romero said.
Property taxes and eliminating the STARR test
The agenda includes several other issues, such as eliminating the STAAR test and reducing property taxes. In the governor’s special session proclamation, he called on lawmakers to pass legislation that would “reduce the property tax burden on Texans” and “impose spending limits on entities authorized to impose property taxes.”
In the recent legislative session, state lawmakers considered legislation to replace the STAAR test in the next school year, but it died in the closing days of the legislative session.
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) said the House and Senate hashed out their differing visions for the bill in a conference committee and reached an agreement, but House leadership did not believe they had enough support to bring the bill to a vote.
“It looks like we’re going to get another chance, and that’s a good thing because we’re talking about taking the star test out and replacing it with three smaller tests, two of which are more diagnostic, item-level tests, and then a third test, which would be criterion, but with a norm-referenced output,” Bettencourt said.
The TEA has been using STAAR test results since the 2011-12 school year to grade schools. However, many parents and teachers believe those scores don’t reflect all of the ways schools serve kids, nor do they believe the tests cover everything students should learn.
Bettencourt said during the upcoming special session that he is hopeful state lawmakers will be able to develop a more modernized STAAR test that better reflects what students are taught in Texas classrooms.
“We want to be able to come back with a better testing schedule than one big test at the end of the year,” Bettencourt said. “We’re going to have three tests, two of which help students and teachers know where they are before they take the third test.”
Other issues on the agenda
The agenda also lists items related to conservative priorities that failed to pass during the regular session, including a crackdown on abortion pills in Texas, proposals to ban cities and counties from hiring lobbyists to advocate for them at the Capitol and requiring people to use bathrooms that align with the sex they were assigned at birth.
The 18-item agenda also includes a proposal to allow the Texas Attorney General’s Office to prosecute state election crimes, something the state AG does not have the authority to independently do unless invited by a local district attorney.
While Republicans celebrated the aggressive special session agenda, Democrats criticized the lengthy list of GOP priorities and said the special session should be laser-focused on flood-related items.
“Thirty days is not a lot of time, but at minimum, those 30 days should be on doing everything within our power to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again,” State Rep. Gina Hinojosa (D-Austin) said.
Hinojosa called the special session a partisan power grab, and described it as “revolting.”
“It is only 30 days. In those 30 days, we need to focus on the safety of Texans and on saving lives. The legislature and politicians can famously get into partisan squabbling, pettiness on all sorts of issues,” Hinojosa said. “We’ve got to set that aside for the benefit of Texans, for the safety of children, and for the safety of all Texans, and so I’m hoping we can come together and do that.”
State Rep. Gene Wu (D-Houston), who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, called the agenda for the upcoming special session a “stunning betrayal.”
“Gov. Abbott listed flood preparedness at the top of his special session call but then buried it under a pile of cynical, political distractions,” Wu said.