They’re coming for our districts.
More than one million Houstonians could have new congressional representation as early as next year under Gov. Greg Abbott’s push to redraw the state’s political maps.
Abbott has ordered the Texas Legislature into a special session beginning July 21 that includes redrawing the state’s congressional districts. In his order Wednesday, the Republican governor singled out Houston’s majority-minority areas like the Greater Fifth Ward and the East End, suggesting their boundaries could be reshuffled ahead of the midterm elections.
President Donald Trump’s political team has been pressing lawmakers to redraw Texas’ congressional districts to help Republicans pick up additional seats next November as they look to defend their U.S. House majority against a potential Democratic surge.
Right now, Texas Republicans control 25 seats in Congress, compared to 12 for Democrats. Former U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner’s seat is vacant, but the Houston-area district leans heavily blue. Creating more potential pick-up opportunities for Republicans would mean making safely red districts more purple.
“They are completely out of control. It’s all about a power grab,” said U.S Rep. Sylvia Garcia, whose Democratic, mostly Hispanic 29th Congressional District in Houston could potentially be reshaped. “They don’t really care who they hurt.”
In a proclamation ordering the special session, Abbott said he wants a “revised congressional redistricting plan in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
He was referencing a letter issued by the Justice Department on Monday that stated the 9th, 18th, and 29th Congressional Districts in Houston and the 33rd based in Fort Worth “currently constitute unconstitutional” districts because they were created to favor candidates from minority communities.
Even if there were at one point reasons to justify race-based districts, they cite a 2023 ruling from Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that said “race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”
The 18th Congressional District has its roots in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and was originally won by Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman from the South to be elected to Congress. More recently, it was represented by the late Sheila Jackson Lee and by Sylvester Turner, who died in March, leaving the seat vacant. U.S. Rep. Al Green, a Houston Democrat and former president of the Houston NAACP, represents the 9th Congressional District is represented by
Gary Bledsoe, the president of the Texas NAACP, said Republicans for a long time have been trying to go after the 18th Congressional District. By putting in writing their desire to target four specific districts, all represented by Black or Hispanic leaders, the message is clear.
“What this means is the intention is to disenfranchise African American and Latino voters,” he said.
Bledsoe said the end result will almost certainly mean fewer majority-minority districts, specifically in Houston. He said white voters constitute 40% of the state’s population, yet dominate 28 of the state’s 38 congressional districts.
“Now the governor wants to increase that number even more at the expense of Texans of color,” Bledsoe said.
See here for the background. Obviously, the attempt to destroy CD18 enrages me, but it also kind of puzzles me because I’m just not sure how they’re going to move around a significant number of Democratic voters to squeeze even one extra Republican district in the area. I’ll get to some numbers in a minute, but first let’s take a closer look at the legal about-face that Abbott and the Trump Justice Department are engaging in as their pretext.
At first, the question of whether Texas would take the extraordinary step of redrawing its congressional maps in the middle of the decade was just a political calculation — would Gov. Greg Abbott go along with President Donald Trump’s plan to try to squeeze a few more GOP seats out of the midterms, despite concerns from congressional Republicans?
But then, the Department of Justice offered Texas a legal justification to pursue this long-shot strategy, warning the state in a letter Monday that four majority-minority congressional districts in the Houston and Fort Worth areas are unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. Soon after, Abbott set a special session agenda calling for mid-cycle redistricting “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
This comes just weeks after the conclusion of a trial over Texas’ current maps, in which representatives for the state argued repeatedly that a race-blind process was used to draw the boundaries of the existing districts. Critics say the apparent reversal — with Abbott now acknowledging concerns that some districts were drawn “along strict racial lines” — suggests this is a ploy to provide Texas with political and legal cover to try and add more Republican seats.
“They contended that what they drew was completely satisfactory, so now that they are acquiescing in some concocted allegation of illegality from the Trump administration is astounding,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is part of the legal challenge.
[…]
At trial in El Paso, representatives for the state and its map-drawers repeatedly testified that they were blind to race when crafting the maps and said they did not draw “coalition districts,” where different minority groups are combined to constitute a majority, which the state maintains are unconstitutional.
But in its July 7 letter, the DOJ argued that four of Texas’ districts should be redrawn, three because they are coalition districts and one because it is a majority Hispanic district created as a result of neighboring coalition districts.
All four seats are held by Black or Latino Democrats, or most recently were — Texas’ 18th Congressional District is currently vacant but was previously represented by Sylvester Turner, who died in March.
That seat and the adjacent 9th Congressional District, represented by Rep. Al Green of Houston, are plurality Hispanic districts with sizable Black populations. The letter says those districts gave rise to Rep. Sylvia Garcia’s neighboring 29th District, where a majority of residents are Hispanic. The 33rd District, held by Rep. Marc Veasey of Fort Worth, is also an unconstitutional coalition district, the letter says.
The DOJ cites a 2024 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that the Voting Rights Act’s protections do not apply to racial or ethnic groups that have combined their ranks to form a majority in a district. The case, which involved a challenge to Galveston County’s commissioners court map, reversed years of precedent, including by the 5th Circuit itself, putting the appellate court for Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana at odds with most other circuits.
“Although the state’s interest when configuring these districts was to comply with Fifth Circuit precedent prior to the 2024 … decision, that interest no longer exists,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote, adding these districts are “nothing more than vestiges of an unconstitutionally racially based gerrymandering past, which must now be abandoned, and must now be corrected by Texas.”
In his proclamation announcing the July 21 special session, Abbott referred to “constitutional concerns” raised by the DOJ, apparently alluding to Dhillon’s letter. And on Friday, House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Republican Senate leader, released a joint statement that said both chambers were “aligned in their focus to ensure redistricting plans remain in compliance with the U.S. Constitution.”
Chad Dunn, one of the lawyers challenging the state’s current maps, said Texas’ swift acquiescence to the DOJ letter contradicts legislators’ testimony.
“During the trial we had in El Paso, ‘blind to race’ was used by a member of the Legislature more times than I can count,” said Dunn, who was previously general counsel for the Texas Democratic Party. “Now the Department of Justice is saying that the Republican legislators who authored this plan weren’t telling the truth, and actually were drawing it on the basis of race. It’s going to be interesting to get to the bottom of that.”
Several of the plaintiffs asked Thursday to reopen the case for new testimony, saying the DOJ letter and the state’s testimony are “flatly contradictory.”
See here for more on the Galveston verdict, and here for more on the just-concluded trial in El Paso over the 2021 redistrcting. The hypocrisy and gaslighting is par for the course, but it may wind up being too clever by half. If the motion for re-opening testimony in El Paso is granted, I’m not sure how Republican legislators are going to answer the “were you lying then or are you lying now” questions. I Am Not A Lawyer, but it sure seems to me there is some risk of that court intervening in the process here.
The other risk is of course that by trying to eliminate one or more of the Democratic districts in the Houston area, regardless of the pretext, you’re going to have to shove a bunch of Democratic voters into Republican districts and/or a bunch of Republican voters into Democratic districts. You can also try to squeeze a few more Democratic voters from one Dem district into another, so you have fewer of them that need to be stashed in red districts. This, I believe, will not be as easy as it sounds.
Here are the numbers that make me think this will be a challenge. I’m going to look at the Beto/Cruz numbers from 2018 and the Harris/Trump numbers from 2024 to see what the ranges are for the potentially affected districts. Here’s the current map for reference. There are nine total districts that include a piece of Harris County, but for these purposes I’m also including CDs 10 and 14, which border Harris in Waller (CD10) and Galveston (CD14) and may be part of any redraw.
2018
Dist Dem % GOP %
=====================
02 37.3% 62.0%
08 36.5% 62.8%
10 40.6% 58.4%
14 36.7% 62.6%
22 40.9% 58.4%
36 35.0% 64.4%
38 39.4% 59.8%
07 67.0% 32.3%
09 79.2% 20.3%
18 76.9% 22.4%
29 75.7% 23.8%
2024
Dist Dem % GOP %
=====================
02 37.5% 61.3%
08 32.4% 66.3%
10 36.8% 61.6%
14 32.5% 66.5%
22 39.2% 58.7%
36 31.1% 67.8%
38 38.7% 59.4%
07 58.8% 38.1%
09 71.2% 27.2%
18 69.1% 29.4%
29 59.6% 39.2%
In a good Democratic year like 2018, the blue districts are a lot bluer than the red districts are red. Even in 2024, the top end of the blue scale is more intense than the top end of the red. Some districts – CDs 02, 22, and 38 in particular – didn’t change much from one year to the other, while most of the change that did occur was in CD29; the other three Dem districts were generally more volatile than the Republican districts.
The first question the mapmakers will have to answer for themselves is do they think 2026 will be more like 2018 or 2024? In a 2024 scenario, after you’ve set fire to what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, I can see a path to making CDs 07 and 29 at least red-leaning. In a 2018 scenario, I say fat chance. If we’re somewhere in between, who knows? If Donald Trump’s approval rating ticks down a bit more, maybe 2026 could be better for Dems than 2018 was. Up until a couple of weeks ago we weren’t expecting to have any interesting Congressional action outside of the CD18 Dem special election and primary. I feel confident that candidates and the ability to fundraise would materialize quickly if all of a sudden there were some not-so-red seats up for grabs.
(Any changes to the Houston-area districts can also ripple out past the districts named here, and I am not taking into account the targeting of CD33 or of the two least blue existing districts, CDs 28 and 34. Obviously, this can get even more complicated depending on what the Republicans try to do.)
So look, I don’t know what’s going to happen. We haven’t even seen any proposed maps yet. The Lege will have its hands full and things could go off the rails. I’ll be keeping an eye on it all. Mother Jones, Democracy Docket, Reform Austin, and the Trib have more.