Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 13
August 6, 2025
August 6, 2025
Members of the House of Representatives are back in their districts for August, and on Monday, Republican Mike Flood of Nebraska held a town hall in Lincoln. A woman asked what she called a fiscal question. She said: “With 450 million FEMA dollars being reallocated to open Alligator Alcatraz, and 600 million taxpayer FEMA dollars being used to now open more concentration camps, and ICE burning through $8.4 million a day to illegally detain people—How much does it cost for fascism? How much do the taxpayers have to pay for a fascist country?” The crowd cheered wildly. Nicholas Wu, Cassandra Dumay, and Mia McCarthy of Politico reported today that by the end of Flood’s town hall, “chants of ‘Vote him out!’ threatened to drown out his closing comments.”
The Politico reporters also said that Republicans maintain they aren’t worried about their angry constituents and dismiss the town hall pushback as astroturfed and not reflective of real voter sentiment.
Maybe. But with the political tide running strong against the administration, that position sounds like posturing.
Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the same day that numbers from that bureau showed a dramatic slowdown in the economy seems to have awakened businesspeople who were willing to back Trump to the reality that he’s pulling down the economy. Today Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook expressed concern about the jobs numbers, suggesting that the big revisions in them “are somewhat typical of turning points” in the economy.
At the same time, the administration’s immigration policies are deeply unpopular and unlikely to improve as Americans learn more about them. Today a report by Hatzel Vela of NBC South Florida went national as a former corrections officer for a private contractor who worked at the detention center in the Florida Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by supporters, said the detainees “have no sunlight. There’s no clock in there. They don’t even know what time of the day it is. They have no access to showers. They shower every other day or every four days…. The bathrooms are backed up because you got so many people using them.”
Florida is running the Everglades detention facility in expectation of reimbursement by the federal government. Immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick pointed out that, unlike the federal government, the state of Florida “can be sued for civil rights violations and punished with monetary damages.”
Also today, the GEO Group, a private prison and services provider, reported a better than expected second quarter today, thanks in part to two ICE contracts that, together, it expects will produce $145 million annually. The company announced a $300 million stock buyback, a process that increases the value of the stock held by remaining shareholders.
The Department of Homeland Security continues to echo the language of Nazis, posting today, “Serve your country! Defend your culture.” It does not appear that people are rushing to sign up. The administration has worked hard to recruit new agents, offering a signing bonus of up to $50,000 and help repaying student loans. Today, it eased requirements for new recruits, removing age limits and posting “no undergraduate degree required!” David Dayen of The American Prospect noted today that probationary employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been ordered to report to ICE within seven days or lose their jobs.
As concerns grow about the economy and immigration policy, which were Trump’s strongest suits, Trump’s open attempt to steal the 2026 election by a rare mid-decade redistricting in Texas to carve out five more Republican seats in Congress has given Democrats a platform to call attention to MAGA’s attempt to stay in power regardless of the will of the voters. And they have seized the opportunity, calling the Republicans out in interviews and on social media.
At least fifty Democrats have left the state to deny the Republicans a quorum—the minimum number of people necessary to hold a vote—that would let them jam through a new voting map. Yesterday Texas governor Greg Abbott asked the Texas Supreme Court to let him expel the leader of the House Democrats, Representative Gene Wu, from the legislature, saying Wu had abandoned his office. According to Eleanor Klibanoff of the Texas Tribune, legal experts disagree. She quotes Charles Rhodes, an expert on constitutional law at the University of Missouri law school. “I am aware of absolutely no authority that says breaking quorum is the same as the intent to abandon a seat,” he said. “That would require the courts extending the premise to the breaking point. It’s inconsistent with the very text of the Texas Constitution.”
Yesterday Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas asked the FBI to find and arrest the Democratic legislators—a wild overreach of federal power—and Trump told reporters the FBI might have to get involved.
David Petesch of Shaw Local, a paper in Illinois, reported that a bomb threat early this morning at the hotel where the Texas lawmakers are staying in Illinois forced them to evacuate. After the threat was cleared, the Democrats said: “We are safe, we are secure, and we are undeterred. “We are grateful for [Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker], local, and state law enforcement for their quick action to ensure our safety.” On social media, one lawmaker blamed Texas Republicans for the threat. “This is what happens when Republican state leaders publicly call for us to be ‘hunted down,’” Representative John Bucy III said. He added: “Texas Democrats won’t be intimidated.”
Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo reported today that the administration is now turning to a plan to redistrict Indiana, sending Vice President J.D. Vance to meet with Republican lawmakers there. But, as Lafond notes, Republicans already hold seven of the state’s nine congressional seats. Indiana state representative Matt Pierce, a Democrat, told the Indy Star that the attention to redistricting Indiana shows that the White House is worried about 2026.
Those concerns are unlikely to be relieved by the news today that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is cancelling at least $500 million worth of awards and contracts to develop mRNA vaccines. These vaccines include those that addressed covid and were being explored for protection against HIV transmission and cancer.
And then there are the Epstein files, Trump’s appearance in them, and the administration’s attempts to change the subject.
Yesterday Democrats on the House Oversight Committee used a legislative maneuver to force its chair, James Comer (R-KY), to issue subpoenas for the Department of Justice records on the Epstein investigation, along with subpoenas for former government officials connected to the case. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) posted that the DOJ now has two weeks to release the files to the committee. She wrote: “It’s time to find out who’s been protected, who thought they were above the law, and who’s been hiding behind power.”
On Tuesday, Trump defended the fact that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former lawyer, had met with a lawyer representing Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker who obtained victims for Jeffrey Epstein, as well as with Maxwell herself. “[W]hatever he asks would be totally appropriate,” Trump told reporters. “And I think he probably wants to make sure that, you know, people that should not be involved or aren’t involved are not hurt by something that would be very, very unfortunate, very unfair to a lot of people.”
Meanwhile, outlets reported today that top administration officials, including Vance, Blanche, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel, were scheduled to meet at the vice president’s residence Wednesday to coordinate the administration’s Epstein strategy. Notably, they appear to be meeting without President Trump.
The family of Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, issued a statement saying: “We understand that Vice President J.D. Vance will hold a strategy session this evening at his residence with administration officials. Missing from this group is, of course, any survivor of the vicious crimes of convicted perjurer and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. Their voices must be heard, above all. We also call upon the House subcommittee to invite survivors to testify.”
After news of the meeting leaked, a source told Nandita Bose of Reuters that the meeting had been canceled.
Today, reporters noticed that the online United States Constitution, maintained by the Library of Congress, was missing parts of Article I, the part of the Constitution that lays out the rights and duties of Congress. Parts of Section 8 and all of Sections 9 and 10 were gone.
Those include Congress’s control over the District of Columbia, Congress’s power to make the laws, the promise that habeas corpus would not be suspended, the stipulation that no money can be used by the government unless Congress has appropriated it, the requirement that no president can accept gifts from foreign countries, and the specification that only Congress can levy tariffs.
Officials said the deletions were “due to a coding error,” and by the end of today the missing sections were restored.
—
Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/06/gop-town-halls-anger-backlash-00494925
https://www.reuters.com/business/feds-cook-says-tepid-july-jobs-data-merits-concern-2025-08-06/
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4480348-geo-group-shares-decline-as-full-year-outlook-disappoints
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/06/trump-ice-immigration-00496051
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/05/texas-democrats-ken-paxton-court-vacate-seats-quorum-break/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/05/politics/trump-blanche-epstein-maxwell-vance-bondi-patel-meeting
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/us/politics/california-texas-redistricting-maps.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/08/06/texas-lawmakers-potential-bomb-threat-illinois/
https://prospect.org/labor/2025-08-06-fema-employees-reassigned-to-ice/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/05/politics/trump-blanche-epstein-maxwell-vance-bondi-patel-meeting
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/06/jeffrey-epstein-jd-vance-trump-meeting
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#1-8
Bluesky:
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lvq77ek6rs2n
acyn.bsky.social/post/3lvmevha3ns2u
markjacob.bsky.social/post/3lvqzlt7tic2x
crockett.house.gov/post/3lvo6dldbv22y
gtconway.bsky.social/post/3lvqm6t2xkk2k
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3lvqreuf3ik2f
acyn.bsky.social/post/3lvomswb24525
August 5, 2025
August 5, 2025 (Tuesday)
Sixty years ago tomorrow, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The need for the law was explained in its full title: “An Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, and for other purposes.”
In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865 they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868 they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by adding that right to the Constitution.
All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and cheating employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870 the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.
With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.
In 1871 they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services like roads and schools, and which could only be paid for with tax levies.
The idea that Black voters were socialists—they actually used that term in 1871—meant that white northerners who had fought to replace the hierarchical society of the Old South with a society based on equality began to change their tune. They looked the other way as white men kept Black men from voting, first with terrorism and then with grandfather clauses that cut out Black men without mentioning race by permitting a man to vote if his grandfather had, literacy tests in which white registrars got to decide who passed, poll taxes, and so on. States also cut up districts unevenly to favor the Democrats, who ran an all-white, segregationist party. By 1880 the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until 1964.
Southern states always held elections: it was just foreordained that Democrats would win them.
Black Americans never accepted this state of affairs, but their opposition did not gain powerful national traction until after World War II.
During that war, Americans from all walks of life had turned out to defeat fascism, a government system based on the idea that some people are better than others. Americans defended democracy and, for all that Black Americans fought in segregated units, and that race riots broke out in cities across the country during the war years, and that the government interned Japanese Americans, lawmakers began to recognize that the nation could not effectively define itself as a democracy if Black and Brown people lived in substandard housing, received substandard educations, could not advance from menial jobs, and could not vote to change any of those circumstances.
Meanwhile, Black Americans and people of color who had fought for the nation overseas brought home their determination to be treated equally, especially as the financial collapse of European nations loosened their grip on their former African and Asian colonies and launched new nations.
Those interested in advancing Black rights turned, once again, to the federal government to overrule discriminatory state laws. Spurred by lawyers Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, judges used the due process clause and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to argue that the protections in the Bill of Rights applied to the states, that is, the states could not deprive any American of equality. In 1954 the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Republican former governor of California, used this doctrine when it handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional.
White reactionaries responded with violence, but Black Americans continued to stand up for their rights. In 1957 and 1960, under pressure from Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, Congress passed civil rights acts designed to empower the federal government to enforce the laws protecting Black voting.
In 1961 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) began intensive efforts to register voters and to organize communities to support political change. Because only 6.7% of Black Mississippians were registered, Mississippi became a focal point, and in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, organized under Bob Moses, volunteers set out to register voters. On June 21, Ku Klux Klan members, at least one of whom was a law enforcement officer, murdered organizers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and, when discovered, laughed at the idea they would be punished for the murders.
That year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which strengthened voting rights. When Black Americans still couldn’t register to vote, on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, marchers set out for Montgomery to demonstrate that they were being kept from registering. Law enforcement officers on horseback met them with clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The officers beat the marchers, fracturing the skull of young John Lewis (who would go on to serve 17 terms in Congress).
On March 15, President Johnson called for Congress to pass legislation defending Americans’ right to vote. It did. And on this day in 1965, the Voting Rights Act became law. It became such a fundamental part of our legal system that Congress repeatedly reauthorized it, by large margins, as recently as 2006.
But in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts struck down the provision of the law requiring that states with histories of voter discrimination get approval from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. Immediately, the legislatures of those states, now dominated by Republicans, began to pass measures to suppress the vote. In the wake of the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states increased the rate of voter suppression, and on July 1, 2021, the Supreme Court permitted such suppression with the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision.
Currently, the Supreme Court is considering whether a Louisiana district map that took race into consideration to draw a district that would protect Black representation is unconstitutional. About a third of Louisiana’s residents are Black, but in 2022 its legislature carved the state up in such a way that only one of its six voting districts was majority Black. A federal court determined that the map violated the Voting Rights Act, so the legislature redrew the map to give the state two majority-Black districts.
A group of “non-African American voters” immediately challenged the law, saying the new maps violated the Fourteenth Amendment because the mapmakers prioritized race when drawing them. A divided federal court agreed with their argument. Now the Supreme Court will weigh in.
Meanwhile, on July 29, Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) led a number of his Democratic colleagues in reintroducing a measure to restore and expand the Voting Rights Act. The bill is called the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act after the man whose skull police officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
—
You can find Liza’s daily cartoon and commentary at her publication “Seeing Things”, here:
Seeing ThingsNew and unpublished drawings and thoughts for people who want to see more of life, from a New Yorker cartoonist. Drawings, cartoons, words, live drawing, process, more...By Liza Donnelly—
Notes:
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constance-baker-motley.htm
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2025/24-109
https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/louisiana-v-callais-faq/
August 4, 2025
President Donald J. Trump’s firing of the commissioner of labor statistics on Friday for announcing that job growth has slowed dramatically has drawn a level of attention to Trump’s assault on democracy that other firings have not. Famously, authoritarian governments make up statistics to claim their policies are working well, even when they quite obviously are not.
Yesterday former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told George Stephanopoulos of This Week on ABC News: “This is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism…. [F]iring statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial. This is really scary stuff." In The Bulwark, Bill Kristol called out the open assault “on the truth, on the rule of law, on a free society” as “part of the broader pattern of the transformation of government information into pure propaganda.”
Summers shot down Trump’s claim that the commissioner had rigged the numbers in the jobs report to make him look bad. "These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals,” he said. “There's no conceivable way that the head of the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] could have manipulated this number.”
Kathryn Anne Edwards at Bloomberg explained the implications of Trump’s determination to control economic statistics: “The peril…isn’t a potential recession; it’s losing highly reliable, accurate and transparent data on the health of the world’s largest economy.” As Ben Casselman pointed out in the New York Times, officials at the Federal Reserve, for example, need reliable statistics on inflation and unemployment to inform decisions about interest rates, which in turn affect how much Americans pay for car loans and mortgages.
Economist Paul Krugman noted that Trump lashed out against the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because most economists warned that Trump’s economic policies would hurt the economy, and the official data is starting to confirm that he was wrong and they were right. Krugman suggested that those numbers will continue to get worse as Trump’s tariffs and deportations start to show up in inflation.
An Associated Press/ NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today shows that 86% of American adults report that the cost of groceries is a source of stress, with 53% saying it causes “major” stress. Only 14% of adults say the cost of groceries is not a source of stress for them.
On all his key issues Trump is currently underwater—meaning that more people disapprove of his handling of them than approve—and reports that he is abandoning his campaign promise to require healthcare insurance companies to pay for in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will not endear him to those voters, either. Krugman notes that as Trump’s popularity is disintegrating, he appears to be ramping up his attempts to destroy American democracy.
At the same time, the administration continues to reel under pressure over the files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s inability to let the issue drop is keeping it very much alive. On Sunday the president railed against radio host Charlamagne Tha God for saying that the administration’s poor handling of the Epstein issue created an opportunity for traditional Republicans to take their party back.
As more information emerges about Trump’s association with Epstein, Trump and his loyalists are trying hard to push stories suggesting that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton or former president Barack Obama or other Democrats are the real criminals.
On July 24, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that officials in the administration of Barack Obama ”manufactured” evidence in 2016 to suggest that Trump’s campaign was connected to Russian operatives. This was ridiculous on its face, but then the administration declassified documents it claimed proved their allegations. But another set of documents released on August 1 said the two emails that purportedly proved such a plan were instead, as Charlie Savage of the New York Times put it, “most likely manufactured by Russian spies.”
After Gabbard made her claims, media outlets reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi was surprised as well as annoyed by Gabbard’s explosive accusations and, already in trouble for botching the Epstein issue, scrambled to support them.
Today Sadie Gurman, Josh Dawsey, and Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to an official at the Department of Justice, Bondi has signed an order directing a U.S. attorney to present evidence concerning the matter to a grand jury. This is a major escalation in their crusade to convince voters that the real story in the news should be that Trump is a victim.
The Wall Street Journal reporters note that the administration’s claims “come as the Trump administration has faced intense bipartisan criticism over its refusal to provide more information about the FBI investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”
Another aspect of the Epstein issue is also in the news today. After the Wall Street Journal published the story by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo reporting that Trump contributed a bawdy birthday letter to an album Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell compiled for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday in 2003, Trump sued the Wall Street Journal’s parent company Dow Jones and owner Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion. But the lawsuit read as if it were written primarily to rile up Trump’s base. The Wall Street Journal stood firm on the accuracy of its reporting, and the defendants moved to dismiss the lawsuit.
Then Trump asked a federal judge in Miami to force Murdoch to answer questions under oath within 15 days, and that, too, sounded like an attempt to display dominance. The request stressed Murdoch’s age and ill health as a reason for the request. "Murdoch is 94 years old, has suffered from multiple health issues throughout his life, is believed to have suffered recent significant health scares, and is presumed to live in New York, New York," all making him unlikely to be able to testify at a trial, the filing read.
Today Trump quietly backed away from his demand for Murdoch’s deposition, and both sides put off discovery—the process of disclosing information and evidence to the other party—at least until after the motion to dismiss has been decided.
Trump’s former lawyer Todd Blanche, now deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice, has met twice with Maxwell, who says she will “testify openly and honestly” before Congress about Epstein if she gets a pardon. She is currently serving a twenty-year sentence for sex trafficking and other charges. Today Alexander Bolton of The Hill said Republican senators are warning Trump and Bondi that they should consider very carefully whether it would be a good idea to grant Maxwell a pardon.
Also today, Casey Gannon of CNN reported that two of Epstein’s victims have filed letters with the court expressing outrage at the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files, suggesting that the department was protecting wealthy men at the expense of the victims.
—
Notes:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/01/trump-erika-mcentarfer-jobs-report-fired.html
The BulwarkKilling Democracy—And Not Bothering to Hide ItWe talk a lot about failing institutions. But you know what matters more? People. Because people create new institutions, like the Washington Litigation Group, a new legal nonprofit designed to fight the Trump administration in court…Read morea day ago · 606 likes · 294 comments · William Kristol, Mike Murphy, Jim Swift, and Benjamin Parkerhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/business/trump-bls-firing-economic-reports.html
Paul KrugmanTrump is Getting DesperateLast week’s big non-Epstein news was Friday’s very bad jobs report and Donald Trump’s immediate reaction — which was not to rethink his policies but to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics…Read morea day ago · 2518 likes · 565 comments · Paul Krugmanhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/08/03/trump-administration-ivf-care/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c23g5xpggzmo
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/29/nx-s1-5482955/trump-epstein-murdoch-deposition-lawsuit
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26040084-trumpmurdoch080425pdf/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gabbard-releases-russia-documents-concerns-intelligence-sources/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/us/politics/trump-russia-durham-explainer.html
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-russia-probe-doj-grand-jury-19ca41ab?mod=hp_lead_pos5
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/04/politics/epstein-victims-statements-grand-jury
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5433788-maxwell-pardon-republican-warning/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/us/politics/trump-charlamagne-tha-god-epstein-republicans.html
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lvm5z34c2k2a
August 4, 2025
August 3, 2025
August 3, 2025
Today, Democratic lawmakers from the Texas House of Representatives left the state to deny Republican lawmakers the quorum—the number of legislators required to pass legislation—they need in order to push through a new district map that would take five seats currently held by Democrats and give them to Republicans. President Donald J. Trump has demanded this rare mid-decade redistricting in an attempt to hold control of the House of Representatives in 2026. He is urging all Republican-dominated states to make a similar change to guarantee Republican dominance regardless of the will of voters.
Republicans in the Texas legislature rushed a bill that would make the new map law through committee on Saturday morning after the one public hearing they held on it showed overwhelming opposition. Sophia Beausoleil of NBC 5 in Dallas–Fort Worth reports that the Texas House is scheduled to vote on the bill Monday.
“My Democratic colleagues and I have just left our beloved state to break quorum and stop Trump's redistricting power grab,” Texas state representative James Talarico said in a video posted to social media. “Trump told our Republican colleagues to redraw the political maps here in Texas in the middle of the decade to get him five more seats and protect his majority in Congress. They're turning our districts into crazy shapes to guarantee the outcome they want in the 2026 elections. If this power grab succeeds, they will hang on to power without any accountability from the voters. But Texas Democrats are fighting back. We're leaving the state, breaking quorum and preventing Republicans from silencing our voices and rigging the next election. We are not fighting for the Democratic Party. We are fighting for the democratic process, and the stakes could not be higher. We have to take a stand.”
The Texas legislators traveled to Boston, Massachusetts, and to Albany, New York, to confer with Democratic leaders. About 30 of them, though, went to Chicago, Illinois, where Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker welcomed them at a press conference tonight.
Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu emphasized that the Democrats had tried to work with the Republicans, but Texas governor Greg Abbott and the Republican lawmakers were forcing the new map through against the will of the voters because Trump told them to. Wu’s explanation mirrors that of Republican state representative Cody Vasut, who told Natasha Korecki and Ryan Chandler of NBC News: “This map was politically based, and that’s totally legal, totally allowed and totally fair.”
Wu warned that the attempt to grab five new seats in Texas to maintain control of the U.S. House of Representatives against the will of voters is a threat not only to Texas, but to the entire country and to the concept of America. “If Donald Trump is allowed to do this, if he is allowed to once again cheat and get away with it, there's no stopping this. This will spread across the country, and…will occur everywhere. Because if one person's going to cheat and no one's going to stop it, why doesn't everyone just do it then? And that is not a society, that is not an America that works.”
Wu continued: “Everyone is already tired of the hyperpartisan bickering and all the fighting because we never get anything done. And they are creating a system that will reinforce that and make it even worse. And we're telling people, please come out, stand up against it, rise up and say no more. Enough."
Wu said the Texas Democratic representatives “did not make the decision to come here today…lightly, but we come here today with absolute moral clarity.”
Governor Pritzker has been in contact with the Texas Democrats to plan for such a moment. His staff will provide logistical support to the visiting Texans. Tonight he made it clear that the Texas Democrats’ fight against Trump’s power grab is the fight of all Americans to protect democracy. “Let's be clear,” Pritzker said, “this is not just rigging the system in Texas. It's about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come.”
Pritzker continued: “Texas Democrats were left no choice but to leave their home state, block a vote from taking place, and protect their constituents. This is a righteous act of courage.” Pritzker urged other Americans to “take a page from these leaders's playbook. When you show people that you have the will to fight, well, they can muster the will to fight, too. Courage is contagious.”
“To be in public office right now is to constantly ask yourself, how do I make sure that we’re standing on the right side of history? There's a simple answer. The wrong side of history will always tell you to be afraid. The right side of history will always expect you to be courageous. Expect courage from people around you, and it will show up. Expect fear, and fear will rule the day. Let the courage of these leaders be an example to the rest of the country. I'm proud to stand side by side with our friends from Texas today.”
Tonight U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) told an audience in Phoenix, Arizona: “My former colleagues from the Texas House—those Texas Democrats—decided to get the hell out of Texas…and breaking quorum is where they’re at right now. And they didn’t just do it by themselves—they went to Illinois, where there is a governor that gives a damn. You see, this fight is going to take all of us.”
Crockett’s comments came at tonight’s launch of the “Won’t Back Down” Tour, organized by MoveOn and MeidasTouch, to hold Republicans accountable and organize for 2026. Crockett, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Representative Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) spoke tonight; Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) will take the tour to Nebraska next.
Texas governor Abbott responded to the Texas House Democrats' quorum break by threatening to remove from office any Democrats who are not back in their seats for Monday’s vote and to replace them “swiftly” with his own appointees thanks to his power to fill vacancies. He also suggested he would consider them felons for accepting money to pay for their food and housing in Chicago and that such a designation would enable him to cross state lines to get them back. He threatened to use “my full extradition authority to demand the return to Texas of any potential out-of-state felons.”
When a reporter asked about Abbott’s threat, Pritzker responded: “They’re here in Illinois. We’re going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them…. It’s the leaders of Texas who are attempting not to follow the law. They’re the ones that need to be held accountable.”
—
Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5434522-talarico-fights-trump-redistricting/
The BulwarkDo They Have Your Attention Now?THERE IS AN OLD SAYING, likely apocryphal, that’s attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake…Read more19 days ago · 507 likes · 85 comments · Lauren EganYouTube:
watch?v=xrL3vobOQMg (Pritzker starting at 30:26, Wu starting at 16:07, 38:00)
Bluesky:
jamestalarico.bsky.social/post/3lvjl63weq223
acyn.bsky.social/post/3lvjyyqynwk2q
kyledcheney.bsky.social/post/3lvk7sr32vs2r
August 2, 2025
Republicans in the Texas legislature are working to redistrict the state before the 2026 midterm elections. Although state legislatures normally redraw district lines every ten years after the census required by the Constitution, President Donald J. Trump has asked Texas Republicans to redistrict now, mid-decade, in order to cut up five districts that tend to vote Democratic and create districts Republicans will almost certainly win. Five additional seats will help the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives despite their growing unpopularity.
Trump is urging other Republican-dominated state legislatures—those in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Ohio, for example—to do the same thing. “We’re going to get another three or four or five, in addition,” Trump said to reporters about House seats. “Texas would be the biggest one, and that’ll be five.”
Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times note that “[v]oters are…reduced almost to bystanders as Republicans essentially admit to trying to determine the outcome of Texas races long before the elections are held.”
A person close to the president told Goldmacher and Corasaniti that the White House strategy is “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”
Trump and the Republicans would not be trying to rig the system if they thought they could win a majority of voters.
Carving districts to either “crack” political opponents into different districts or “pack” them into a single district is called “gerrymandering,” after Elbridge Gerry, an early governor of Massachusetts who signed off on such a scheme (even though he didn’t like it). Parties have always engaged in gerrymandering, but computers make it possible to carve up districts with surgical precision.
The extreme gerrymander Texas Republicans are attempting is coming on top of partisan gerrymanders already in place. As journalist David Daley explained in his book Ratf**cked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy, after Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Republican operatives worked to make sure he had a hostile Congress that would keep him from passing legislation.
To push a plan they dubbed Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, they raised $30 million, mostly from corporations, to buy ads and circulate literature that would convince voters to elect Republican state legislators in 2010. The legislatures elected in 2010 would get to redistrict their states with maps that would last for a decade.
The plan worked. After the 2010 election, Republicans controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. But Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the House of Representatives.
Gerrymandering doesn’t just weight the scales of an election toward one political party, it also depresses turnout for the opposing party: if you know your candidate is going to lose, why bother to vote? (In one heavily gerrymandered North Carolina district in 2024, Democratic candidate Kate Barr worked to call attention to gerrymandering by using the campaign slogan: “Kate Barr Can’t Win.”) Sometimes the opposing party doesn’t even bother to run a candidate.
Meanwhile, the party with a lock on the district gets more radical, as candidates have to worry about being primaried by someone more extreme than they are, rather than about attracting centrist voters that in a fair district they might lose to an opposing party’s candidate.
Trump is also confronting his unpopularity by trying to cement his power in the federal courts. Republicans began working to cement their power by stacking the courts during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese, deliberately politicized the Department of Justice in an attempt, as he said, to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.”
On July 20, Trump demanded the Senate abandon its longstanding tradition of so-called blue slips, an informal process by which a senator from the minority party can effectively block a judicial nominee proposed for their state. While this system can be abused by senators holding seats open for a president of their party—as Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) did during the Biden administration—it is designed to prevent a president from stashing unqualified or bad appointees in their states.
Benjamin S. Weiss of Courthouse News noted that Democratic New Jersey senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim used the system to prevent Trump’s lawyer and advisor Alina Habba from consideration to be the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.
After posting on social media that the practice means “the president of the United States will never be permitted to appoint the person of his choice,” Trump demanded that Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, end the system “IMMEDIATELY, and not let the Democrats laugh at him and the Republican Party for being weak and ineffective.” Trump then reposted other posts calling Grassley a “RINO”—or Republican In Name Only—and “sneaky” and suggesting he hates America.
Ending the practice would effectively cut senators in the minority from any influence at all on judicial appointments, and Grassley, who has gotten Trump’s many controversial appointees through Senate confirmation, has refused to agree. He said: “I was offended by what the president said, and I’m disappointed it would result in personal insults.”
In July, Trump demanded the Senate cancel its scheduled August break and long weekends to confirm his “incredible nominees.” Democrats have deployed the same techniques Republicans used to slow the confirmation of Democratic presidents’ nominations. According to Manu Raju and Victoria Stracqualursi of CNN, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said he would agree to let some nominees go through quickly in batches so the senators could go home, but only if the administration unfroze the federal funds Congress appropriated for agencies like the National Institutes of Health and programs like foreign aid, and only if Trump agreed he would not push for another rescissions package clawing back appropriations Congress passed.
Tonight, Trump posted: “Tell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the Radical Left Lunatics, to GO TO HELL! Do not accept the offer, go home and explain to your constituents what bad people the Democrats are, and what a great job the Republicans are doing, and have done, for our Country. Have a great RECESS and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Schumer reposted Trump’s rant and commented: “The Art of the Deal.”
Meanwhile, Democrats say they will fight back against Republican gerrymandering. They will challenge any Republican redistricting in court, but after standing firm on democratic institutionalism in the past, they now say they are willing to fight fire with fire and redistrict their own states to create Democratic districts.
What the Republicans are doing “is so un-American, and it's a constant threat to our democracy,” Wisconsin governor Tony Evers said. “So I'm really pissed, frankly, and we are going to do whatever we can do to stop this from happening.” Governors Kathy Hochul of New York and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois are weighing options for redrawing maps in their own states. This will be more difficult for them than for Republican states because Democratic states tend to use independent citizen-led redistricting commissions rather than partisan systems.
California governor Gavin Newsom posted on social media: “[Trump] is so scared of the American people holding him accountable for his catastrophic actions, he wants Republicans to rig the 2026 elections for him.” Newsom pointed out that it would be easy for California to eliminate its Republican-leaning districts altogether, getting rid of nine Republican seats.
He posted on social media: “Game on.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/us/politics/texas-republican-redistricting.html
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1007-smith-gerrymandering-20151007-story.html
David Daley, RatF**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy (Liveright; 2016).
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-09-28-op-9537-story.html
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5428518-gop-senators-defend-grassley/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/29/politics/senate-gop-trump-nominations
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, August 2, 2025, 6:27 p.m.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/02/politics/senate-trump-schumer-standoff
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