Texas Republicans have voted to track down and arrest dozens of Democratic legislators who have fled the state to block passage of a partisan redistricting plan.
The vote passed by 85 to 6, following Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s threat of bribery charges against the absent Democrats.
After the vote, the governor ordered state troopers “to locate, arrest, and return to the House chamber any member who has abandoned their duty to Texans”.
The proposed congressional map, unveiled last week by Republicans, would create five more Republican-leaning seats in the US House of Representatives, where President Donald Trump’s party currently holds a slim majority.
At least two-thirds of the 150-member state legislative body must be present to proceed with the vote. The quorum became unreachable after more than 50 Democratic lawmakers left the state.
Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows told reporters after the vote that he had “signed the civil arrest warrants” for the Democrats.
Most of the Democrats fled to Illinois where the state’s Governor JB Pritzker said he was “going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them” amid arrest threats from Abbott.
The Democrats said they planned to stay away from Texas for two weeks until the end of a special legislative session.
Monday’s vote was mostly symbolic, according to the Texas Tribune, as the warrants only apply within state lines.
The move empowers the chamber’s sergeant-at-arms and state troopers to arrest the absent lawmakers and deliver them to the state capitol building in Austin.
They would not face any civil or criminal charges as a result of the warrant, the newspaper reports.
Texas Democratic Representative Ron Reynolds told BBC News on Monday that he plans to stay away “for however long it takes” to block the redistricting vote.
Speaking from Chicago, he called the arrest threat “nothing more than a scare tactic”.
Governor Abbott warned earlier that lawmakers who refuse to return to vote on the map could face second-degree felony charges.
“It would be bribery if any lawmaker took money to perform or to refuse to perform an act in the legislature,” Abbott told Fox News on Monday.
“And the reports are these legislators have both sought money and offered money to skip the vote, to leave the legislature, to take a legislative act. That would be bribery.”
After legislators voted to issue warrants against the Democrats, Abbott issued a statement ordering the Texas Department of Public Safety “to locate, arrest, and return to the House chamber any member who has abandoned their duty to Texans”.
He added that his order would remain in effect “until all missing Democrat House members are accounted for and brought to the Texas Capitol”.
Texas Republican legislator Brian Harrison slammed Democrats for their argument that the constituencies were being redrawn along racial lines.
“Preposterous, cynical, dishonest, complete nonsense,” Harrison told BBC News.
He added “these Democrats need to be arrested” and that they “need to have all kinds of other punishments”.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, had also threatened to have the Democratic leaders arrested.
Paxton, who is currently running for the US Senate, wrote on X that the state should “use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law”.
Texas Republicans currently hold 25 out of the state’s 38 congressional seats.
They hope the new maps could increase that number to 30 – all in constituencies that President Trump won last November by at least 10 points.
Republicans currently have 219 of 435 seats in the US House of Representatives, while Democrats hold 212.
The redistricting could help pad the slender Republican majority in the House, which is the lower chamber of the US Congress.
In states where they handle the redistricting process, such as Illinois, New Mexico and Nevada, Democrats have already manipulated electoral boundaries for partisan gain just as Republicans have, according to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
But other Democratic-controlled states – such as New York, California, Colorado and Washington – assign redistricting to non-partisan, independent commissions, rather than state legislatures.
Some Democratic leaders in other states have suggested they may redraw their own legislative maps to counter the proposed losses of seats in Texas.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she was exploring a constitutional amendment to move up the timeline to redraw legislative lines in her state.
States typically undergo redistricting every 10 years, when voting maps are redrawn to account for population changes.
The most recent US Census was in 2020. Redrawing district lines in the middle of a decade is unusual.
By BBC News
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