Ana Faguy and Max Matza
BBC News
Watch: Texas Speaker plans civil arrest warrants against absent Democrats
Texas Republicans have voted to track down and arrest dozens of Democratic legislators who have fled the state to block passage of a plan to re-draw electoral boundaries to favour Republicans.
After the vote, Republican Governor Greg Abbott ordered state troopers “to locate, arrest, and return to the House chamber any member who has abandoned their duty to Texans”.
Abbott has also threatened to charge the absent Democrats with bribery if they raised public money to cover the daily fine they incur for boycotting the chamber.
The redrawn Congressional map would create five more Republican-leaning seats in the US House of Representatives in Washington DC, where Republicans hold a slim majority.
At least two-thirds of the 150-member state legislative body in Texas must be present to proceed with the vote. The quorum became unreachable after more than 50 Democratic lawmakers left the state.
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.
Watch: “Texans are being let down,” Governor Abbott tells Fox News
Monday’s vote was mostly symbolic as the warrants only apply within Texas 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.
Texas Democratic legislator Ron Reynolds told BBC News from Chicago on Monday that the arrest threat was “nothing more than a scare tactic”.
Members of the Texas House incur a $500 (£377) for each day they fail to show up.
Governor Abbott has warned that those who refused to return to vote could face 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 ordered 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”.
Watch: “Democrats need to be arrested” – Texas representative tells the BBC
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, also threatened to have the absent Democrats arrested.
Paxton, who is 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 Donald Trump won last November by at least 10 points.
Ahead of next year’s midterm elections, the Texas redistricting could help pad the slender Republican majority in the US House of Representatives – the lower chamber of 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.