Facing a potential loss of their slim margin in the House of Representatives in 2026, MAGAt Republicans encouraged by the Malignant Fascist are working overtime to make sure any exercise of democracy at the ballot box is strangled in the crib:
Texas Republicans answered President Donald Trump’s call to redraw the state’s congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms by releasing a new map that eliminates five House seats held by Democrats and creates five new seats that voted for Trump in 2024.
The new map would yield 30 Republican-leaning seats and just eight Democratic-leaning seats. It would do so by splitting five seats currently held by Democrats in and around the cities of Houston, Dallas and Austin and in the heavily Latino Rio Grande Valley. The goal is to help Republicans hold their razor-thin four-seat margin in the House in the 2026 elections to prevent any meaningful oversight of the Trump administration from a Democratic-controlled body. [snip]
Democrats have promised to fight back against the GOP move by contesting the seats in the new maps and the courts. House Majority PAC is planning to invest $20 million in Texas to target GOP incumbents and protect Democrats with advertising, voter registration and a focus on outreach to Latinos. [snip]
Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement, “Texans deserve better than this, and if the legislature and the governor follow through with enacting this egregious gerrymander, it will face fierce legal challenges.”
Democrats and Texas residents could bring a Voting Rights Act complaint in court against the new map, although it is likely to run into a hostile 5th Circuit and Supreme Court that have been looking to further destroy the Voting Rights Act.
The push to redraw Texas’ congressional map came directly from the Trump administration when Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the civil rights division, sent a letter to Texas officials declaring that four Democratic-held districts violated the Voting Rights Act and threatened legal action. Despite that claim being false, it prompted Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, to convene a special session to draw a new map.
Meanwhile, Trump explicitly stated the partisan goal of the DOJ letter and the redistricting it prompted on July 15, saying, “I think we’ll get five” GOP seats out of it...
Democrats are warning of counter moves in California, Illinois, New York, and Maryland, but
... Republicans are also looking to expand their gerrymander romp with Ohio already moving toward a mid-cycle redistricting to eliminate Democratic seats and Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis floating the same.
One way or another, they're going to try to hold on to their once- in- a- lifetime power trifecta. Cheating, various means of voter suppression, overturning results that don't favor them are all in their tool box. Authoritarian regimes stop at nothing to preserve their hold on power and, his "immunity" courtesy of the Republican SCOTUS notwithstanding, the soggy- brain psychopathic MF has ample reasons to want to keep his multitude of political enemies at bay.
It should go without saying Democrats need to fight fire with fire (or to use the cliche, they can't bring a butter knife to a gun fight). They need to ignore those in the party who think we can bipartisan our way out of this. The danger is now and the stakes are too high.
BONUS: This --
@marcelias.bsky.social: We "need to tell Republicans that if they take 5 seats, we're going to put 30 seats on the table... When people say to me 'don't bring a knife to a gunfight,' I don't even want to bring a gun to a gunfight. I want to bring missiles to the gunfight."
— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen.bsky.social) July 30, 2025 at 7:28 PM
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