There’s an old Texas saying: When the going gets tough, the tough flee to Illinois.
Okay, that’s not actually a saying anywhere. In fact, Texas is known for “Remember the Alamo,” commemorating an 1836 battle in which a small band of brave Texans — including legends such as Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett — stood their ground to the death against an overwhelming Mexican army.
Not Democrats. They’re less akin to those great Texans than they are to King Arthur’s hapless band of knights facing that rabbit in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
Rather than stand and fight against Republicans’ effort to gerrymander the state and gain as many as five U.S. House seats, state Democrats on Sunday aimed to deny a legislative quorum by boarding a private jet bound for the Land of Lincoln. (Some also flew to New York and Boston.) They intend to take a two-and-a-half-week vacation until the special session is over.
It’s not the first time Texas Democrats have done that. In 2021, they also left the state rather than vote on election laws.
“Texas House Democrats abandoned their duty to Texans,” said Governor Greg Abbott in a statement. “By fleeing the state, Texas House Democrats are holding hostage critical legislation to aid flood victims and advance property tax relief. There are consequences for dereliction of duty.”
He threatened to “remove the missing Democrats from membership in the Texas House.” (That’s unlikely to succeed, but it’s playing hardball.) He’s fining them $500 per day during their absence, and he promises prosecution for any who run afoul of bribery laws in paying that fine. “Real Texans don’t run from a fight,” he mocked.
Furthermore, the Texas Tribune reports, “The Texas House voted Monday afternoon to track down and arrest more than 50 Democratic lawmakers who were not present when the chamber gaveled in.”
Democrats hate democracy — at least when they don’t get their way.
Think I’m overstating that? The editors of National Review did some math that I read after I wrote the above sentence: “In the ten states with divided government, Republicans won 52.3 percent of the popular House vote and 47 of the 75 House seats — 62.7 percent of the seats, or a 10.4-point advantage. In the 17 states run entirely by Democrats, the Dems won 56.7 percent of the popular House vote but 143 of the 185 House seats — 77.7 percent of the seats, or a 21-point advantage.”
In other words, Democrat gerrymandering across the country has yielded them a distinct advantage in U.S. House seats. They’re nothing if not ruthless about winning. That’s why it’s so appalling to see their hysterics over Texas Republicans finally playing the same game.
It’s particularly obnoxious that Texas Democrats fled to Illinois, where Democrats parlayed 52.8% of the vote into winning 14 out of 17 congressional seats after a ridiculous mid-state gerrymander that helped flip a seat even as the state lost one to population decline. Yet there they were, hanging out with sympathetic Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who praised their “righteous act of courage” and assured them that his state’s Dems are happy “to stand in solidarity with you and send a clear message to all Americans.”
That message is, of course, shameless hypocrisy.
Even CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski understood that, asking, “Was there nobody on the PR side who was like maybe we shouldn’t go to one of the most corrupt gerrymandered states in the country?”
In Texas, you can add even greater hypocrisy. First, there’s history. Democrats kept a stranglehold on the state for 150 years, thanks in large measure to gerrymandering. In 2002, Republicans won the state house for the first time since Reconstruction, leading to a gerrymander that helped them also win the U.S. congressional delegation in 2004.
Second, Joe Biden’s Social Justice Department sued the Lone Star State to overturn its current map — the one Democrats have now fled the state to save — because it supposedly violated the Voting Rights Act. Donald Trump’s DOJ dropped the suit and argued instead that the current map’s racial gerrymandering is likely illegal, as the Supreme Court may also effectively determine in a case in the upcoming term: Louisiana v. Callais.
More hypocrisy abounds, though. In California and New York, where Democrats have shamelessly gerrymandered Republicans into a tiny minority, the two Democrat governors are promising to do it even harder.
California’s Gavin Newsom said, “Would the state of California move forward in kind? Fighting? Yes, fire with fire.” New York’s Kathy Hochul was even more aggressive, invoking the kind of violent political rhetoric Democrats decry when Republicans use it: “Here in New York, we will not stand on the sidelines with the timid souls on the sidelines who don’t care and will not invest their heart and soul into this battle. This is a war. We are at war, and that’s why the gloves are off. And I say, bring it on with that.”
Battle and war, she says? Well, Davy Crockett, she is not.
Finally, this is all very entertaining political theater, though it will matter a great deal in the 2026 midterm elections. America would indeed be a less polarized place if the two parties didn’t always try to rig the very high-stakes game in their favor, and in a better world, they’d reject heavy-handed gerrymandering. But, of course, Democrats have always been more adept at it, and Republicans shouldn’t unilaterally disarm.
