Texas Republicans have introduced a plan to redistrict the state in a plan that, if it survives the legal challenges, could produce five more seats in the House of Representatives. In response, many Texas Democrat lawmakers have fled the state in an attempt to prevent the plan from coming to a vote. That, in turn, has prompted Governor Greg Abbott to ask for the arrest of those legislators to coax them to get back to Austin now. ABC News contributor Sarah Isgur appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to explain the shenanigans being conducted on both sides of the aisle, and why the Texas GOP is willing to roll the dice on the plan in the first place.
Isgur told host Larry Mendte that skipping out on the state legislature as a stall tactic is nothing new: “This is a tactic that Texas legislators have used before, the Democrats, that basically, if they leave the state, they can deny the legislature a quorum, meaning that they can’t move forward with business. In this case, it’s the business of doing a mid-decade redistricting- redrawing those Congressional maps because Republicans think they can squeeze five more seats for Republican gains in the mid-term election, which is a huge deal because Republicans have such a slim majority in the House of Representatives right now. Five seats out of Texas would be a very big deal.”
New York governor Kathy Hochul is one of several governors threatening to do some redistricting of their own in response to Abbott’s move; Isgur warns there is a downside, however, that comes with shuffling the districts outside of a census year: “To make these districts as politically advantageous as possible, you have to lower the margins, which means each of those races becomes a little bit tighter and a little bit scarier for the party in charge. It could backfire on either party that does it.”
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