While the political battle lines are clear, legal questions are being raised as Texas GOP leaders push to get lawmakers back to the state capitol.
AUSTIN, Texas — Redistricting fights are always politically charged, but in Texas, the stakes are also legal. Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton are pushing to bring back Democratic lawmakers, but their power to do that may not be so clear-cut.
Abbott isn’t backing down. He went on a podcast on Wednesday to say the FBI is now involved.
“This is my understanding that the FBI is going to search for these derelict Texas House members in whatever state they may be in and help identify for them and maybe work with us to bring them back,” the governor said on The Dana Show.
Sen. John Cornyn confirmed the FBI’s involvement Thursday morning.
“I am proud to announce that Director Kash Patel has approved my request for the FBI to assist state and local law enforcement in locating runaway Texas House Democrats,” Sen. Cornyn said in a statement. “I thank President Trump and Director Patel for supporting and swiftly acting on my call for the federal government to hold these supposed lawmakers accountable for fleeing Texas. We cannot allow these rogue legislators to avoid their constitutional responsibilities.”
In the meantime, Abbott has also given the Texas Supreme Court until Thursday evening to decide whether he can remove those Democrats from their seats.
KHOU 11 Julissa Garza asked political science expert Brandon Rottinghaus if the governor has any legal power to trigger a special election by declaring a seat vacant if a lawmaker is just absent from the state.
“The process now doesn’t give the governor unilateral power to be able to declare a seat to be absent, which means that there’s no legal authority to be able to declare an election in that seat,” Rottinghaus said. “This is something that the courts would have to do. The courts have handled this with very strict scrutiny. They’ve looked at the eligibility requirements and have determined that unless it doesn’t meet some constitutional standard, like the person has passed away or they’re incapacitated, then they’re still in office in a technical sense.”
That means neither the governor nor the attorney general can immediately force lawmakers out of office. They have to go through the courts, and even then, there’s no guarantee a judge would rule in their favor
Rottinghaus said the attorney general could try a longer legal route by going district by district to ask individual judges to declare those seats vacant. If a judge agrees, then that could trigger a special election
“They’ll expedite it because obviously the consequences are high, and the timing is very short. But the courts are still going to have to do their due diligence on this, which means it could take a few weeks, maybe even a month, to be able to sort out all the details about what this all means,” Rottinghaus said.
There are still a lot of legal gray areas, but history tends to repeat itself.
In 2003, Republican leaders redrew the state’s congressional map mid-decade. It was a move that shook up power and cost several Democratic representatives their seats.
Like what’s happening right now, Democratic state lawmakers left the state, delaying votes on new maps.
When asked what makes these two instances different, Rottinghaus said the stakes are much higher this time because of the national implications.
“You’ve got much of the driving force of this coming from the White House itself. We also haven’t seen this degree of compliance from the Republican leadership in Texas. In the past, they haven’t pushed as hard as they have and been as punitive on issues about making sure that Democrats come back as they have been this time around. This all reflects the fact that the stakes are very high nationally for what’s happening here in Texas,” Rottinghaus said.
We’re already seeing ripple effects from the GOP-pushed maps. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said if Texas moves forward with its plan, he would aim to put a new congressional map before voters in a November special election.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is also looking into redrawing lines there.
It’s not just those states. Rottinghaus said the White House has been pushing other states to follow Texas’ lead. Missouri and Indiana are considering changes as well, with Vice President J.D. Vance visiting Indiana this week to talk with the governor there.
“This really doesn’t have any end, unless Congress can step in and say that it’s not okay legally to redistrict mid-decade, or unless cooler heads prevail and everybody just says, ‘Let’s take a beat and make sure that we can get some kind of action out of this that everybody’s comfortable with,’ and we’re going to find this escalate until the case that every single state has been redistricted and gerrymandered” Rottinghaus said.