Trump’s Redistricting Coup Is Already Underway And Texas Is The Test Site For The Death Of Democracy

The Slow Coup Picks Up Speed: GOP Gives Up Trying To Win Elections As Much As Ending Them

Welcome to Texas, 2025!

Yesterday, Jonathan Martin asked if loyalty to der GOP Führer “ever asks too much… by all but signing the political death warrants of a handful of blue state Republicans.” Trump’s demands for mid-decade partisan gerrymanders in Texas, Missouri, Nebraska, Indiana, Florida, Ohio to pick up a dozen house seats could lead to blue state gerrymanders that— at least in theory— would terminate the congressional careers of  Californians Kevin Kiley, David Valadao, Ken Calvert, Darrell Issa, and either Tom McClintock, Jay Obernolte, Doug LaMalfa or Young Kim; New Yorkers Mike Lawler, Nicolle Malliotakis, Claudia Tenney and either Nick LaLota or Andrew Gabarino; either Mike Bost, Mary Miller or Darin LaHood in Illinois; Michael Baumgartner in Washington. And if Virginia’s elections this year go as strongly blue as they appear to be headed, Jen Kiggans, Rob Wittman and possibly even John McGuire could be redistricted out of their seats in time for 2026.

Meanwhile, though, Trump and his allies are full steam ahead on stealing 5 seats in Texas. John Cornyn claims he has the FBI promising to round up the Democratic lawmakers who have left the state and bring ‘em back from Illinois and New York. Cornyn, floundering and desperate to prove he’s as much a fascist as his primary opponent, Ken Paxton: “I am proud to announce that Director Kash Patel has approved my request for the F.B.I. to assist state and local law enforcement in locating runaway Texas House Democrats. I thank President Trump and Director Patel for supporting and swiftly acting on my call for the federal government to hold these supposed lawmakers accountable.”

The other Republican tactic— as Nazi-aligned and illegal as the round ‘em up one— is expelling the Democrats from the legislature. That’s the one Greg Abbott, who God hates, is going for. Yesterday, Eleanor Klibanoff reported that it’s only been two days and Abbott is already trying to declare their seats vacant, though “it flies in the face of Texas’ own founding documents, centuries of legal precedent and a recent Supreme Court of Texas ruling. But don’t count on the Texas Supreme Court which, after all is virtually an updated version of Nazi Germany’s Volksgerichtshof. Harry Litman noted yesterday— in an unrelated matter: “It’s officially happening: the use of the machinery of justice to go on fishing expeditions about political predecessors... It’s the moment we’ve feared— the moment the Supreme Court invoked in giving Donald Trump immunity, and the moment that marks an authoritarian government at its most vulgar and vicious.”

Texas’ Volksgerichtshof is made up of 9 partisan Republican hacks, 6 of them appointed by Herr Abbott himself. “Even Attorney General Ken Paxton, a fellow Republican,” wrote Klibanoff, “threw cold water on Abbott’s strategy, filing his own brief saying that while he ‘appreciates the Governor’s passion,’ he does not have the authority to bring this type of case. But just because legal precedent is not on his side doesn’t mean Abbott’s case is doomed. The long-shot filing is before the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court, where Abbott has appointed six of nine justices. Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock was Abbott’s former general counsel, as was Justice James Sullivan.”

There’s almost no way to argue that these 9 are legitimate impartial jurists. Nor is this part of a war of ideas. Like Hitler’s judicial reforms, Texas’ judiciary represents a war on democracy itself, where brute force, legal nihilism and judicial puppetry replace persuasion, consensus and constitutional norms. Trump doesn’t want to win elections. He’s perfectly happy rigging them in broad daylight and daring anyone to stop him. And Abbott, Paxton, Cornyn, and the rest of the Republican Party—blue state “moderates” included—are just fine with it, so long as they get their cut of the spoils. These are coordinated stress tests on American democracy, not isolated outrages. Texas is just the bleeding edge. Each gerrymandered district, each judicial rubber-stamp, each illegal expulsion is another swing of the wrecking ball. And the goal isn’t just to suppress Democratic votes; it’s to normalize autocracy as a default mode of governance. Trumpism, now fully reabsorbed into the Republican bloodstream, has no use for pluralism, and no patience for the rule of law unless it serves as a weapon against enemies.

This is how democracies die… not in a single cataclysm, but through relentless procedural vandalism and soft coups disguised as “reform.” And every Democratic lawmaker like Schumer still clinging to illusions of bipartisan cooperation or institutional fairness needs to wake the hell up. You don’t reason with fascists. You don’t “compromise” with a party that sees the Constitution as an obstacle to be gamed or burned. You fight back with every tool available— political, legal, rhetorical— and you treat every Republican enabler, from McCarthyist buffoons like JD Vance and Abbott to empty suits like Mike Lawler and Kevin Kiley, as complicit in the crime. And if the Texas Supreme Court green-lights Trump’s and Abbott’s authoritarian tantrum, Democrats should respond not just with court challenges but with coordinated campaigns to flip state legislatures, reform redistricting processes, and mobilize every voter who refuses to be ruled by minoritarian theocrats and fascists. This isn’t about left or right anymore… it’s about whether or not we continue pretending this is still a democratic republic. Because if Trump gets what he wants in Texas, the rest of the country is next.

Klibanoff reminded her readers that “There have been just 15 legislative walkouts nationwide since 1924, almost all in the four states that require the presence of two-thirds of legislators to conduct business… Texas is one of these high-threshold states. A two-thirds quorum has been required by the Texas Constitution since 1845, an uncontroversial proposal for a people who have ‘long been suspicious of their government and desirous of limiting its powers,’ said Texas constitutional historian Bill Chriss. The framers of the Texas Constitution imagined that there might come a day when members declined to attend in protest, writing that legislators were empowered to ‘compel the attendance of absent members, in such manner and under such penalties as each House may provide.’ Democrats most recently decamped in 2021 to stop a GOP voting bill, nearly two decades after fleeing to block a similar mid-decade redistricting effort. In both cases, Republicans issued arrest warrants and sent state troopers to look for the missing lawmakers, although since they had left the state, these measures had little effect. In 2021, when Democrats sued to challenge the arrest warrants, Blacklock authored an opinion affirming that the Texas Constitution explicitly ‘enables quorum-breaking by a minority faction of the Legislature.’” 

Let’s leave it at this: what starts in Texas, doesn’t stay there. Many of us feel we do need to help stop it there. (Trump hid his German ancestry for decades; now everyone knows where those Nazi genes came from. It’s also worth noting that Texas has far more people of German ancestry than the rest of the country— and parts of Texas with lots of Germans are also more fascist-inclined than other parts of the state.)