Republican lawmakers are pursuing the unusual mid-decade redistricting plan amid pressure from President Donald Trump to protect the GOP’s slim majority in the U.S. House.
The Republican-led Texas House on Wednesday approved a new congressional map crafted to hand five additional U.S. House seats to the GOP over fierce opposition from Democrats, who cast the plan as a racially discriminatory attempt by President Donald Trump to stack the deck in next year’s midterm election.
The House adopted the map, 88 to 52, along party lines. A Senate panel advanced a similar map Sunday, and the full chamber was expected to send the new lines to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk later this week.
Republican lawmakers are pursuing the unusual mid-decade redistricting plan, which has set off a national map-drawing war, amid pressure from Trump to protect the GOP’s slim majority in Congress. The effort comes just four years after the Legislature last overhauled the state’s congressional map following the 2020 Census.
Democrats in the Texas House staged a two-week walkout over the plan in a bid to stall the map’s passage and rally a national response among blue states, where lawmakers could launch their own retaliatory redistricting efforts. The roughly two dozen Texas Democrats who returned to Austin on Monday said they were starting the next phase of their fight: putting the screws on their Republican colleagues and establishing a record that could be used in a legal challenge to the map.
Republicans have said the new districts were drawn purely to maximize their partisan advantage, arguing that the GOP’s margins of victory in 2024 supported new lines that entrenched their hold on power. They have also framed the effort as a response to Democratic gerrymandering elsewhere.
Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi and the map’s sponsor, emphasized in laying out House Bill 4 that Republicans were legally permitted to pursue redistricting in the middle of the decade and to maximize partisan gain.
“Redistricting can be done at any point in time,” he said. “The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance.”
To create up to five Republican pickup opportunities, the map dismantles Democratic strongholds around Austin, Dallas and Houston and makes Democrat-held seats in South Texas redder — all without seriously jeopardizing any of the 25 districts Republicans already control. The proposed map also would push a handful of Democratic members of Congress into seats already represented by other Democrats, setting up possible primary battles between long-serving members of the Texas delegation and younger newcomers.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that states can draw electoral maps on partisan grounds. But under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the map cannot diminish the voting power of people of color.
Democrats condemned the plan, arguing it widens Republicans’ partisan edge by unconstitutionally packing people of color — who are driving almost all of Texas’ population growth — into some districts while spreading them throughout others to reduce their ability to elect their preferred candidates.
“This bill represents one of the most blatant assaults on fair representation we have seen in Texas,” Rep. Ana Hernandez, D-Houston, said. “Diversity is our greatest strength. It is what makes our neighborhoods vibrant, our workforce dynamic and our communities resilient. HB 4 silences that diversity instead of celebrating it.”
Among the first points Democrats sought to make Wednesday was that the congressional map was the first piece of legislation the House was voting on, rather than flood-related bills responding to the devastating Hill Country floods. Several Democrats wore dark green in honor of the flood victims.
“Why was House Bill 1, the flood relief bill that is the House’s answer to the deadly July 4 flooding that killed over 135 people, not the first order of business of this special session for the Texas House?” Rep. Gina Hinojosa, D-Austin, asked on the floor.
Republicans shot down all 12 amendments Democrats proposed to the bill, including measures to block the map’s implementation until the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and until a federal court found that the plan would not suppress the vote of people of color.
Source: Kayla Guo and Alejandro Serrano, The Texas Tribune
Photo Credit: Democratic state lawmakers line up to question Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, as the Texas House votes to pass a Republican-led, mid-decade redistricting effort that was delayed by a two-week Democratic walkout, on Aug. 20, 2025. Credit: Kaylee Greenlee for The Texas Tribune
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