The “Legal Insurrection” Advances: Texas House Passes Republican Congressional Redistricting Map
Likely gives Republicans five more congressional seats, what NY Gov. Nancy Hochul has called a “Legal Insurrection”.
The Texas House — overcoming a weeks-long stalling effort by Democrats who fled the state to twart a vote — passed a congressional redistricting map that likely gives Republicans five more seats.
The Texas Tribune reports:
The Republican-led Texas House on Wednesday approved a new congressional map crafted to hand five additional U.S. House seats to the GOP over fierce opposition from Democrats, who cast the plan as a racially discriminatory attempt by President Donald Trump to stack the deck in next year’s midterm election.
The House adopted the map, 88 to 52, along party lines. A Senate panel advanced a similar map Sunday, and the full chamber was expected to send the new lines to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk later this week….
Democrats in the Texas House staged a two-week walkout over the plan in a bid to stall the map’s passage and rally a national response among blue states, where lawmakers could launch their own retaliatory redistricting efforts. The roughly two dozen Texas Democrats who returned to Austin on Monday said they were starting the next phase of their fight: putting the screws on their Republican colleagues and establishing a record that could be used in a legal challenge to the map….
To create up to five Republican pickup opportunities, the map dismantles Democratic strongholds around Austin, Dallas and Houston and makes Democrat-held seats in South Texas redder — all without seriously jeopardizing any of the 25 districts Republicans already control. The proposed map also would push a handful of Democratic members of Congress into seats already represented by other Democrats, setting up possible primary battles between long-serving members of the Texas delegation and younger newcomers.
NY Gov. Kathy Hochul has called what Texas was doing a “Legal Insurrection” (even though there is no such thing as a legal insurrection):
Hochul is threatening retaliatory redistricting in New York, but the NY Constitution prohibits gerrymandering.
California Governor Gavin Newsom also is threatening to redistrict California, but he would need legislative approval (a certainty) plus a statewide referendum in a special election on November 4 (the polling currently looks bad for Democrats on this issue).
This also could kick off a nationwide redistricting war that Democrats would lose because Democrats previously have gerrymandered their states almost to the max.
Anytime you hear a Democrat complain about "gerrymandering," I want you to think of this chart.
9 blue states with 32%-48% Republican voters: ZERO representation in The House.
California, Illinois, New York, Maryland, New Jersey and Oregon have 34%-46% GOP voting. Look at those… pic.twitter.com/4G6j3PJVFP
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) August 12, 2025
The national gerrymandering battle map is favorable to red states if war breaks out:
In a re-redistricting war, Republicans would win pic.twitter.com/PG9vuh3Lzv
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) August 16, 2025
Who’s up for a gerrymandering war?
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Comments
Let there be as much reapportionment as possible. If, by whatever means, the Left regains formal control of the government; you know that they will undo anything done for the benefit of the country as quickly as they can. Them having to go through a fraudulent reapportionment nationwide before they can regain a false majority will allow Conservatives to either delay the Democrats or force them into an open coup.
Subotai Bahadur
So this is the relatively moderate map Abbott originally proposed, that leaves the Dems with 8 seats out of 38. I still think that while they’re there they should also pass the more radical one he proposed, which would leave them with only 3 or 4 seats, to come into effect only if California or New York redistrict before 2032.
Kyle Becker trots out the argument from percentages, which as several commenters here have explained many times is invalid. Yes, the Dems have gerrymandered most of those states, but the percentage disparity doesn’t prove it. Similar numbers could happen even if they hadn’t gerrymandered at all.
It’s exactly like those who argue that the disparity between black people’s share of the population and of those arrested proves structural racism. Structural racism is possible, and it certainly used to exist, but there’s no evidence that it exists now, and the statistical disparity is not such evidence.
You mean you keep saying is invalid.
It obviously has partial validity. If the percentage share of the vote is 60/40 D/R and the seat division is (say) 19/1 then it doesn’t *proooove* anything, but it’s hardly representative.
What demonstrates it is the vote share combined with the laughably shaped districts.
No, it’s completely invalid, because the percentage of seats a party gets in a state is not supposed to be representative of its percentage of the total vote. In exactly the same way that the percentage of any given race in prison, or in college or Congress, is not supposed to be representative of its’ percentage of the population. There is no expectation that the two will be even close; if they do happen to be close, that’s pure coincidence.
Yes, both parties gerrymander every chance they get. We know that. But the argument from percentages is just a red herring. We despise it when the race hustlers use it; so we must come down just as hard on it when people on our side do the same.
I get your point, but I think you’re pushing it a bit too strong. The voting percentages is related to the proportions statewide but not determinative. There is a strong correlation. I do agree with you that there isn’t a causation at work here.
Dismissing it as “pure coincidence” is too much.
Milhouse, you are reading the Constitution in 20th/21st Century English. There were exclusion in the original apportionment counts as enumerated in Article 1 Section 2, Paragraph 3. What is a Free Person? Is an illegal alien a Free Person? I will grant that all Citizens and Legal Aliens are Free Persons. So are Indians still not counted? Or have we changed that to mean people from the Country of India since the population that term referred to are now referred to as Native Americans? If illegal aliens are not Free Persons since they are criminals then maybe they should be counted as 3/5ths of a person.
When the Constitution was written there wasn’t an illegal alien issue or possibly even a definition of such. That may have occurred in the 19th Century as they began refusing entry to persons (A friends great grandfather or grandfather was denied entry at Ellis Island so he snuck into the country elsewhere). But being an illegal alien certainly began in the 20th Century when strict immigration laws were passed. It is unfortunate that we didn’t amend the Constitution then to clearly define the who was to be counted in the Census/Enumeration.
Bill, the text is crystal clear, and can’t be understood any other way. Anyone who claims to understand it differently is lying, because it’s impossible to do so.
Every human being is a person. Every human being who is not a slave is a free person; not that it matters, since the constitution no longer distinguishes between “free persons” and “other persons”.
“Indians not taxed” are still not counted. At the moment there are no such people; the set of such people is zero, since Congress decided to subject all Indians to taxes and to US jurisdiction generally.
The only example you could find nowadays of an “Indian not taxed” would be if a foreign government were to appoint an American Indian to its diplomatic staff. That person would then not be counted in the census, because he’d be Indian and not subject to taxes.
Criminals were “free persons” and were counted in all pre-civil-war US censuses.
Good, now every other Red State should do the same thing. Minimize the Communists as much as possible
Yep let’s go Indiana, Missouri, Florida and Ohio.
Also there is still a possibility of Trumps mid decade census happening which would take away seats from Democrat strongholds like California and New York while adding seats in Florida, Texas and other fast growing red states. If by some miracle the new census eliminates illegals aliens then the GOP gains could be enormous.
If the new census eliminates illegals then it will not be a valid census and it will not be able to be used for apportionment. It will be a good political talking point, but the apportionments will remain the same. If you want to use it to reapportion the states, then you have to do what the constitution says and count literally every single person who is in each state, regardless of how they got there.
I agree with this. Getting a good handle on just how large of a problem the Biden administration left behind is value information and politically useful. I am cautious about demanding/pushing for such a census to be used in apportionment. I don’t think you can legally justify that as it stands. Plus, there’s the danger that if you can remove the illegal aliens from the apportionment calculations, some people may be inclined to say “Well, the important part is done. We have secured our electoral power. We don’t need to deport ’em any more.”
Tit for tat. Good.
“If the new census eliminates illegals then it will not be a valid census and it will not be able to be used for apportionment.
That is an interesting question. I would wonder if the census could be performed counting the illegals but noting them just as can with every other distinguisher.
That would certainly fulfill the requirements of the census (and would be valuable information) and leave the question of counting illegals for representative purposes as a separatecissue.
The percentage arguments don’t matter IF the voting preferences of a given states population are dispersed evenly over the state. Then the percentage of a given party would be diffuse enough to be overwhelmed by any larger party preference.
But that’s not how things actually work.
Democrats exist largely in small blue islands in red seas. Much of their food production, energy production and goods production comes largely from those red seas while the blue islands produce servicing jobs reliant on that production.
To offset the voting power of those red seas Democrats district in ways that attach blue enclaves to those areas enough that the voting populace of those seas can be subsumed by non related areas.
This is where the percentage argument holds weight. As does the presence of bizarrely attenuated districting.
The new Texas map, for example has more compact districts than the strange, long and twisted creations that came before.
“Hochul is threatening retaliatory redistricting in New York, but the NY Constitution prohibits gerrymandering.”
How about that? Hochul is a trainwreck.
She’s threatening a constitutional amendment, just like Newsome. But the earliest an amendment could pass would be 2028, so the first election it could affect would be 2030. And the amendment currently proposed keeps the ban on partisan gerrymandering, so it won’t even help her.
The argument over who should be counted for apportionment being made by the Democrats is the same one their predecessors, the slaveowners made when the 3/5 compromise was created.
They wanted then to count people they denied rights to as full persons to ensure their power
Now, they want to count people they deny rights to as full persons to ensure their power.
And the idea, at it’s base, is ludicrous.
How do we count people who are actively trying to avoid being found lest they be deported?
We don’t.
Illegal alien populations are largely estimated. Estimated in ways that benefit Democrats.
Stop giving Democrats what they want.
Let’s hope California voters reject the referendum in November, based on current polling. But what I don’t understand is why gerrymandering is permitted, especially when the intent is malicious and retaliatory.
Why would it not be permitted? Where in the constitution does it say states can’t do that?
Two questions.
1. How do I twart? Sounds like fun.
2. When is Legal Insurrection sending Kathy Hochul a cease and desist letter?
“twart”
If you can’t be bothered to proofread it, I can’t be bothered to read it.
Looks like TX didn’t destroy, they just gave the urban areas of Dallas/Houston/Austin/San Antonio their own district that will be solid D.
I prefer to divide the city like a pizza so the district has urban suburban and rural voters, but it’s politics.
Apparently one of the targeted congressman one re-election in a trump district while under indictment for bribery.
https://www.tpr.org/government-politics/2025-08-01/heres-how-republicans-proposed-redistricting-would-impact-san-antonio