Progressive Caucus chair Greg Casar warns that a move to redraw Texas congressional districts will undermine democracy in the Lone Star State and beyond.
President Trump and his Republican cronies are aware that their “One Big Beautiful Bill” is polling miserably with an electorate that, by most accounts, really hates it when the government guts Medicaid and anti-hunger programs in order to fund tax cuts for billionaires. The unpopularity of the GOP’s signature legislative effort could spell disaster for the party’s efforts to maintain its narrow control of the US House in the 2026 midterms. But Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Greg Casar (D-TX) warns that the president and his GOP allies have developed a contingency plan to avoid voter accountability next year—and it centers around the Lone Star state.
Trump has pressured Texas officials to move rapidly—as soon as next week—to redraw congressional district lines to dramatically reduce the number of Democratic-leaning constituencies in the state. If the president’s scheme succeeds, Democrats could lose as many as five of the seats they now hold in Texas.
Casar spoke to The Nation about what’s at stake for voting rights in Texas—where, as he notes, GOP gerrymandering is already severe: “Right now, it is 12 Democrats and 35 Republicans, with one vacancy, in a state that [Republican Senator] Ted Cruz couldn’t even get 51 percent of the vote in in 2018.” Casar warns that if Republicans get away with radically redrawing Texas congressional districts to favor the GOP and protect Trump even more, this model for assaulting voting rights will quickly move to other red states.
How big a threat to American democracy and voting rights is Trump’s Texas scheme?
This is a five-alarm fire for voting rights and democracy across the entire country. In my view, this is the biggest threat to our democracy right now that nobody’s talking about.
This isn’t just about any one election. Texas already has a deeply and illegally racially gerrymandered congressional map. Donald Trump is demanding to put that racially gerrymandered map on steroids.
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There’s been considerable discussion about whether Trump and the Republicans would try to find some way to mess with the 2026 election cycle. Why is he acting now?
Trump just got done pushing through a bill to kick 15 million Americans off their healthcare, all to pay for billionaire tax cuts. He knows that’s deeply unpopular. He doesn’t want to be held accountable for that. Nor does he want himself and his family to be held accountable for their corrupt and illegal business dealings.
If he can’t win the election [under existing maps], he wants to rig the rules of the election by suppressing the vote of millions of Texas voters of color and working-class Texans—by radically gerrymandering a map in a way that nobody has seen before, and then getting the Supreme Court to rubber-stamp it in the dead of night to allow for even further gerrymandering and voter suppression beyond Texas
What you are saying is that the redrawing of congressional district maps in Texas could become a template for creating all sorts of new House seats that will be gerrymandered to favor the Republicans. If the Republicans succeed, they could save GOP control of Congress, even if most voters want to end that control.
That’s right. What they’re talking about doing in Texas is basically [packing Democratic voters into a handful of districts] or splitting them up illegally into little shards and thereby diluting their voting power.
Trump wants to take us back to pre-1965 on Medicaid. And, now, he wants to take us to pre-1965 on voting rights. [Ed. note: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is supposed to guard against racial discrimination in voting. Though its powers have been severely undermined by the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court, some protections remain, particularly against the dilution of voting rights for historically underrepresented communities. Casar’s fear, and that of many others, is that the high court might allow Texas to further erode these protections.]
This is a departure from past practices, even for Republicans, isn’t it?
Yes. Usually there’s some limits on craven right-wing gerrymandering in red states. Usually, they’re limited by Republican congressional incumbents wanting their districts to stay generally the same, so they are not too vulnerable in elections. And, also, while much of the Voting Rights Act has been gutted, the Republicans haven’t been willing to completely ignore it.
Those have been the two limits on the most extreme forms of racial, right-wing gerrymandering. Trump is going “no limits.” He is saying, “Screw even the neighborhoods and districts of Republican members of Congress. Screw every part of the Voting Rights Act.” Trump is ignoring any part that’s left of the Voting Rights Act and saying that this is about Trump’s protection first. And that’s what we’re going to get next week in the Texas legislative session. And the question is: Will Republicans finally start finding a backbone when Trump is running over their own districts and electoral futures? And will Texas Democrats mobilize, and will Democrats mobilize nationwide, because this is a nationwide voting rights issue?
It looks like Trump wants to move fast on this—to get maps redrawn well before the 2026 campaign ramps up.
This is all about Trump wanting to prevent any form of accountability for himself.
As we learned in 2018, when there was a Democratic wave during the first Trump administration, it created an opportunity for House Democrats to investigate Trump’s corruption and to start reining in some of Trump’s worst abuses. Trump doesn’t want that to happen again. So he is threatening Texas Republican members of Congress, and Republican legislators, and telling them to mess up their own districts, suppress their own voters, engage in this crazy, unprecedented level of gerrymandering, and, ultimately, shatter what remains of the Voting Rights Act, all to benefit Trump. Those Texas Republicans have to decide whether to represent the interests of their voters and their own electoral interests, or whether they are just Trump’s water boys.
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Well, what we have seen in an awful lot of cases, Congressman…
I know, they often have no backbone and just decide to be waterboys.
If Republicans in Congress and the legislatures go along with this, that could significantly undermine Democratic prospects in 2026.
The two key assumptions that have held together the idea that we have huge opportunities in 2026 are: One, that Trump would not run over his own Republican incumbents. And, two, that Section Two of the Voting Rights Act would hold.
Trump is challenging those assumptions. He’s saying that he doesn’t care if he threatens, or makes more vulnerable, his own Republican members.
And, two, [Trump and the Republicans] are saying they’re willing to go to unprecedented lengths to chop up communities of interest under the Voting Rights Act.
If Trump does those two things, and does them successfully, then, you’re right, we could end up with an extremely unfair and rigged election system in 2026. And, if we don’t fight back, with everything we’ve got, if we don’t recognize that this is a five-alarm fire, we’re giving Trump an open lane to do those two things.
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