Brutal.
Kerr County’s emergency management coordinator acknowledged Thursday that he was ill and asleep when rain inundated the Hill Country community early July 4.
Will Thomas told lawmakers during a legislative hearing in Kerrville that his wife woke him at 5:30 a.m. with a call from the city “requesting that I mobilize.” At that point, floodwaters had already torn through Kerrville.
Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said he was also asleep in the early morning hours of July 4. Deputies on duty called him before dawn to notify him of the situation. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, who oversees emergency management, said he was out of town.
The officials’ testimony was part of the special hearing state lawmakers called in Kerrville to hear from residents and local officials about the state and local response to the flooding in Central Texas that killed at least 130 people. Gov. Greg Abbott has asked lawmakers to introduce legislation during the current special session to address concerns raised by the floods, including how residents were warned about the rising Guadalupe River and how quickly they received aid.
While acknowledging the surprising volume of rain that night, some lawmakers questioned what appeared to be confusion at the local level.
“The three guys in Kerr County who were responsible for sounding the alarm were effectively unavailable,” said state Sen. Ann Johnson, a Democrat from Houston.
[…]
Johnson asked Thomas how the county warned Camp Mystic of the rising Guadalupe River. Twenty seven campers and staffers of the all-girls camp died in the flooding.
“It is my understanding that there were little girls with water around their feet at 2 a.m. that were told, ‘Stay in your cabin.’ And those little girls did what they were told. What was the protocol to warn people when that scenario comes up?” she asked Thomas after his testimony.
Thomas told Johnson the camp should have notified the sheriff’s office of flooding. But Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said he did not receive any such notification from Camp Mystic.
The complete absence of the top three officials during the critical period in Kerrville is just mind-boggling. My wife, upon reading this news, said to me “Have they never heard of delegation of authority?” As in, if you’re not available for whatever the reason – and it was a holiday weekend, people are allowed to go out of town – someone else is given the authority and responsibility to act on your behalf. However you look at this, it was a massive failure.
More from the Trib.
The Kerr County officials’ testimony was their first public statements about what they had been doing the morning of the disaster, and they revealed that key officials weren’t awake to react to flood warnings in the critical early morning hours of July 4.
“One of the problems that this process is showing is we have a lot of folks who have titles but when the time came to act, they did not do so in a timely fashion,” Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo, said during the hearing.
“The three guys in Kerr County who were responsible for sounding the alarm were effectively unavailable,” said Ann Johnson, D-Houston. “Am I hearing that right?”
When the flooding began, Kelly was at a house on Lake Travis outside of Austin, he said. Everything felt normal to him; he’d been getting ready for family to come over during the holiday weekend. He said Leitha, Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd and Kerrville City Manager Dalton Rice tried to contact him while he slept.
Kelly said he woke up around 5 a.m., or 5:30 a.m., or 6 a.m. — he wasn’t quite sure. In Kerr County, rain had been pounding the south fork of the Guadalupe River and a wall of water was raging down the river toward unsuspecting communities that had no idea what was headed their way.
“We now know that by that time the flooding had already overtaken Camp Mystic, Heart O’ the Hills and La Junta, and several other upriver camps,” Kelly said, “something that I could never have imagined.”
Thomas, the emergency management coordinator, told lawmakers that he was home sick. He hadn’t been feeling well since July 2 and didn’t work on July 3, which he’d previously requested to take off anyway for another reason, he said. He missed two regular state emergency management calls that day, but said other county leaders typically receive written summaries afterward to make sure information reaches them even when Thomas isn’t working.
Thomas said he woke up around 5:30 a.m. after the City of Kerrville Emergency Management Coordinator Jerremy Hughes called his wife, who roused him.
Both Kelly and Thomas told legislators that they’d had no idea what was coming.
But there were warnings: The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for the county on July 3, meaning flooding was possible, and pushed out increasingly dire flood warnings saying that flooding was happening or imminent starting at 1:14 a.m. July 4.
“Based on the data we had at the time, there was no clear indicator that a catastrophic flood was imminent,” Thomas said. “The rain fell in remote areas with limited gauge data; forecasts were not materially different from past events that did not result in flooding.”
Emphasis mine. The lack of imagination, the inability to conceive of worst-case scenarios, these are not attributes you want in people who are responsible for disaster readiness and response. The “we’ve gotten these warnings before and they were always nothing” stance is understandable to a point – overreacting has its costs as well – but the warnings were a lot more dire hours before the disaster hit, when all three of these guys were sound asleep. Honestly, given what we now know, I don’t understand why these guys haven’t resigned. I’m surprised there isn’t more pressure on them to do exactly that.
And wait, it gets worse.
A five-year-old emergency management plan, obtained by The Texas Tribune late Thursday, shows that Kerr County and Kerrville officials were operating from a generic disaster response template that, in some cases, officials failed to follow when 30-plus feet of floodwaters swamped the Guadalupe River banks on July 4.
The plan, which all counties must file with the Texas Division of Emergency Management, serves as a disaster playbook for local officials.
Emergency management plans spell out who is in charge of the entire response to a mass disaster that could result in serious injury and death, and designate which tasks — evacuations, medical treatment tents, sanitation and the recovery of bodies — go to which county and city administrative leaders to keep confusion at a minimum and bureaucratic bottlenecks from occurring.
It’s not known if Kerr County and Kerrville officials used the plan. A request for comment was not immediately returned late Thursday.
But if they had, there was a clear set of instructions on when to increase monitoring of weather once a flood watch was issued, the first sign that trouble may be approaching, and also at what point evacuations should begin. And the plan indicates that all of the top officials in the area considered flash flooding and flooding as the greatest threat to Kerrville and Kerr County.
“Our cities of Kerrville, Ingram and Kerr County is (SIC) exposed to many hazards, all of which have the potential for disrupting the community, causing casualties and damaging or destroying public or private property,” the November 2020 plan begins.
The plan puts the the county judge and the mayor in charge of offering general guidance to disaster response. It puts the emergency management coordinator or the city manager as the lead to direct the overall response. Initially city officials had to take lead because the top three county officials were out missing when the flooding began.
[…]
Local officials told lawmakers that they received little warning about the flood, that it came too quickly for an adequate response. Thomas admitted to state Sen. Charles Perry, a Lubbock Republican, that Kerr County and Kerrville first responders had never conducted a countywide evacuation exercise ever.
“We have not done a full-scale evacuation exercise,” Thomas admitted.
But the 55-page plan, indicates that local officials should have been better prepared. The plan was released to the Tribune by the Texas Division of Emergency Management in response to a public records request. Kerr County officials have not responded to a similar request made earlier by the Tribune.
“Proper mitigation actions, such as floodplain management, and fire inspections, can prevent or reduce disaster-related losses,” the plan states. “Detailed emergency planning, training of emergency responders and other personnel, and conducting periodic emergency drills and exercises can improve our readiness to deal with emergency situations.”
Here’s a recent example of an emergency drill. In the cybersecurity world, we do stuff like this pretty regularly too. It’s a good way to make sure everyone knows what they’re supposed to do in an emergency, in a low-stakes environment where errors and goof-ups are learning opportunities and not reasons why people die.
The reason for these hearings is also to learn from what happened, which contrary to what certain people believe is good practice and not “loser behavior”, and make changes to prevent the things that went wrong from happening again. I must admit to a certain amount of queasiness here, because those changes will in some ways mandate behavior by local governments, perhaps with consequences for failure, and while in the abstract that’s the right thing to do, we’re talking about the Texas Legislature and Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick, and their track record on this matter is not just bad, it’s actively harmful. Maybe, in this case, with the focus of the failures being on dark red counties and conservative Republican officials, they’ll take a less punitive approach and do something constructive instead. That I’m thinking about it this way really says a lot about how our state government works these days.
There’s another avenue for improvement, but for various reasons it’s not likely to be taken in this session.
Although not specifically named in Gov. Greg Abbott’s list of directives for the current special legislative session, state lawmakers have filed several bills to shore up the safety of youth camps in the wake of the devastating Hill Country floods.
So far, nine bills have been proposed that would address everything from emergency plans and camper disaster drills, to better communication systems and life jackets inside every cabin. They are all in response to the July 4 floods that killed 137 people, including 27 campers and counselors at storied Camp Mystic. The camp’s longtime owner Dick Eastland was also among the victims.
“My hope is that these common sense reforms would help prevent confusion during floods and ensure every camper has the tools and information needed to act quickly when every second matters,” said state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, who has filed three of eight camp safety bills.
Realistically, it’s tough to see how any camp safety proposal will pass by Aug. 19, when the special session ends, when so much is vying for the Texas Legislature’s attention. Many flood-related proposals that will likely take priority over camps are aimed at fast-tracking disaster funding to businesses and improving emergency disaster response.
And there’s no guarantee that all camps will be on board with the proposed safety regulations.
While some camp industry representatives have told The Texas Tribune they welcome regulation as they grieve alongside their impacted peers, these businesses, particularly more profitable camps, have influenced legislation or circumvented certain mandates in the past. Two weeks after the flooding, the Associated Press reported that Camp Mystic had in recent years successfully appealed to FEMA to have several of its buildings removed from federal flood zone maps, which could have lowered Mystic’s insurance cost and made expansion of the camp easier to do.
“The youth camps don’t like regulation,” state Rep. Vikki Goodwin told The Texas Tribune when asked about concessions she had to make to certain camps on a 2023 safety bill.
Whether the camp safety bills make it, are re-filed in another special session or resurface in the 2027 regular legislative session, one thing is certain: The small but politically astute camp industry is expected to face a lot more questions from lawmakers and specifically, Texas parents, about how it keeps campers safe, particularly the large contingent of sleepaway camps along the state’s lakes and rivers.
“Whatever is coming out, especially from the Legislature or state law, we’re going to gladly take it and run with it,” said Dan Neal, the chair of the state’s camp advisory committee and whose family owns Georgetown-based Camp Doublecreek. “And the camps that I know that I work closely with are going to be happy to take what that is, and really, I would say, make it even better than what is just gonna be probably the base regulation.”
[…]
The youth camp industry is hardly different from other industries in Texas, a pro-business state famously allergic to strict regulation. Youth camps, like most private enterprises and even counties and cities, hire lobbyists to protect their interests via a trade association during legislative sessions.
This is where I remind you that while camps and Elon Musk are free to hire all the lobbyists they want to get what they want from the Legislature, Greg Abbott wants to make it illegal for cities and counties and school districts to be able to do that. Because reasons.
Anyway. Pertaining to the previous story, items like requiring camps to do safety drills and to file disaster readiness plans with the Texas Division of Emergency Management are in some of the bills that have been filed. Those seem like good ideas, along with a parent’s suggestion that camps be required to post their emergency plans on their websites; right now, parents can ask to see them but there is no requirement of disclosure. The camps have their lobbyists – the Camp Association for Mutual Progress is their trade association, which is a fancy way of saying their lobbying group – and the parents do not. You know how that tends to go.
One more thing.
A tiny agency that manages the Guadalupe River in Kerr County is promising to spend at least $1.5 million on flood protection and mitigation measures, weeks after more than 100 people — including 27 young campers and counselors at Camp Mystic — lost their lives in the area during devastating floods.
The pledge from the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, announced during a legislative hearing in Kerrville on Thursday, comes about a week after a Houston Chronicle investigation revealed that the authority delayed upgrading its flood warning system despite sitting on at least $3 million in reserve funds for more than a decade.
“You may wonder if one county river authority is too small to meet these challenges,” said Bill Rector, who was first appointed to the authority’s board by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2015 and now serves as its president. “I say no.”
But lawmakers appeared skeptical of his claims and criticized UGRA for failing to act earlier, continuing a pointed line of questioning they had launched against the river authority during a separate hearing last week.
“It was recognized through studies that you paid for that there was a need for an early warning system,” State Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo, told Rector. “And yet you didn’t do anything about it.”
State Rep. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, said “you should be in the business of protecting people from the river.” As people in the audience began to applaud, she added, “I don’t see how the Upper Guadalupe River Authority helped in any way in this flood.”
Campbell suggested that the river authority wasn’t capable of performing adequately on its own and should instead combine with the much larger Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, which manages the waterway in 10 counties downstream of Kerr County.
“I could be wrong, but I think it’s something we need to look at,” said Campbell, whose district includes some of the rivershed that is handled by GBRA.
State Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, noted that UGRA’s entire board is appointed by Abbott, though it is one of very few river authorities in the state that has the power to levy taxes. Three of its nine board members lead summer camps along the Guadalupe, including Dick Eastland, the director of Camp Mystic who died during the floods.
“So you’re not accountable to the voters of Kerr County, even though you’re taxing them?” asked King, who chairs the House committee on flood recovery. “They couldn’t un-elect you and take you off the board, if they didn’t think you were doing a good job?”
“That’s correct,” Rector said.
[…]
During the Kerrville hearing, lawmakers repeatedly asked Rector why the UGRA did not overhaul its antiquated flood warning system earlier. In 1989, the river authority paid for the system with a 46% property tax hike. But in recent years, it chose to spend down its hefty reserves – which were set aside for a water supply project that leaders ultimately chose not to pursue – in part by decreasing the tax rate, which is now lower than it was decades ago.
Rector did not directly respond to requests to explain that decision. Instead, he said that some of the UGRA’s surplus money went to “several projects that we were funding at that time.”
Better late than never, of course. But boy was the cost of being late awfully steep.
Posted in That's our Lege
|
Tagged Ann Johnson, Camp Association for Mutual Progress, Camp Mystic, Dan Patrick, Donna Campbell, Drew Darby, Flood Information & Response System, flooding, Greg Abbott, Guadalupe River, Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, Judith Zaffirini, Ken King, Kerr County, Kerrville, Senate, special session, Texas, Texas Department of Emergency Management, Texas Water Development Board, The Lege, Tropical Storm Barry, Upper Guadalupe River Authority, Vikki Goodwin
|
Let’s take a moment and pour one out for the real victims of the proposed Congressional redistricting, Texas’ Republican Congressional incumbents.
:quality(70)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/0dd59a5a1a3bf9a1cc750e6d4146ea00/REP%20HUNTER%20STWD%20CONGRESS%20PROPOSAL%2089%201%20HB4-INTRO.jpg)
Democrats aren’t the only ones who won’t be happy with the way Texas Republicans on Wednesday proposed redrawing the state’s 38 congressional districts to comply with President Donald Trump’s directives.
While no Texas Republican members of Congress have gone on record to oppose the maps, the impact is clear. The new maps dice up neighborhoods some have long represented, stretch them in some cases hundreds of miles from their homes, and potentially open them to GOP primary challengers in areas where they don’t have the same ties.
And it all comes as most haven’t been raising money as aggressively, given they didn’t know until the last few weeks that their districts would undergo major reconstructive surgery.
The new maps would push U.S. Rep. August Pfluger, a Republican who lives in San Angelo, into parts of Austin, adding nearly 200,000 constituents in places he’s never represented in Travis and Williamson counties. U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, will lose nearly 200,000 people combined near Katy, Benham and Bastrop. And U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, will lose another 50,000 people in Harris County, driving him deeper into Montgomery County.
It’s all happening as 13 of the current 25 Republicans in Congress haven’t raised more than $600,000 over the last six months for their re-elections.
Candidates bracing for competitive election cycles typically spend months building up their funds. U.S. Reps Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio, and Monica De La Cruz, R-Edinburg, who have traditionally had more competitive districts, for example both have over $1 million in their account heading into the March primary season.
None of the Republicans in Congress from Texas have testified in any of the hearings over the last two weeks about the redistricting, but U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, D-Austin, said he knows many of the Republicans are upset but just aren’t willing to speak up because of fear of getting sideways with the Trump White House.
“It’s just that Texas Republicans in Congress are too chicken to say it on the record,” he said at a rally in Austin on Friday.
Your heart just breaks for them, doesn’t it? If only they had access to political power and a venue for expressing their opinions to those in power. Imagine what they could accomplish if only they had that.
Anyway. The Downballot does its deep dive into the five districts that the Republicans aim to flip, and they have 2020 election data to go along with the 2024 data. Under 2020 conditions, the two South Texas districts (CDs 28 and 34) were won by Joe Biden, and the other three (CDs 09, 32, and 35) were won by Trump by margins of five, two, and ten points, respectively. In other words, it would not take too much for the Republicans to end up going 0 for 5, if the climate is sufficiently Democratic. The Republicans are making a bet that the gains they saw in 2024 with Latino voters will continue in this election and beyond. (The Downballot gets into that in their latest podcast episode.) Maybe that’s a good bet, maybe it’s not. Trump’s polling with Latinos ain’t great right now. How lucky do you feel?
The Trib also gets into this, and I see it’s because the full set of election data is now available. Here’s the 2018 data and the 2020 data. I was too optimistic above, the new CD32 is just too red in even a 2018 scenario, but the other four would be at worst tossups. And Beto beat Ted Cruz by ten points in CD15 in 2018, though Trump carried it by two and a half in 2020. How much have Latinos really shifted? We’ll find out.
The incumbents who will really feel the squeeze, regardless of what year 2026 performs like, are Democratic incumbents.
In their newly proposed congressional map, Texas Republicans are looking to forge red districts in Central Texas, Dallas and Houston that would push a handful of Democratic incumbents into nearby districts already occupied by another Democrat.
The new configuration would leave Democratic members in those regions with the uncomfortable prospect of battling each other for the dwindling seats in next year’s primaries; retiring; or taking their chances in nearby GOP-leaning districts where they would face uphill battles for political survival.
For now, Texas Democrats are focused on fighting to stop the map by testifying at hearings across the state, firing up donors for a potential quorum break and taking every opportunity to blast the proposal as racist and illegal. The map, introduced by state Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, is still subject to changes from the Republican majority, in addition to Democratic attempts to fight it. And if enacted, it would surely face legal challenges which could further change the makeup of districts.
But if the new lines go through for 2026, they could pit long-serving older members of the Texas delegation against younger newcomers, drudging up existing tensions in the Democratic Party over age and seniority.
In Austin, where Republicans have condensed two Democratic-held seats into one district, progressive Reps. Lloyd Doggett and Greg Casar — ideologically similar but 42 years apart in age — have both been drawn into the same seat.
In North Texas, the three Democratic incumbents in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area would need to decide how to condense themselves into the two remaining blue-leaning districts. While the core of Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s downtown Dallas district was kept largely intact in the new map, Republicans want to dismantle the suburban Dallas district of Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Farmer’s Branch, pushing many of her voters into the exurban districts of her Republican neighbors. Those changes would leave Johnson with a suddenly bright red district.
Rep. Marc Veasey’s nearby 33rd District, meanwhile, would remain blue but undergo a major transformation, dropping much of Fort Worth — the political base Veasey has represented since he was a state legislator in the mid-2000s — and adding parts of Johnson’s current district.
And in Houston, the Democrat who emerges from the 18th Congressional District’s November special election could see their time in office abruptly cut short. The 18th District has a storied history, as the first southern district to send a Black woman — the legendary Rep. Barbara Jordan — to Congress. Several prominent Black Democrats have since held the seat, including longtime Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who died last year. The district has been vacant since March after Jackson Lee’s successor, former Houston mayor Sylvester Turner, also died in office.
But with Republicans packing Democrats into three blue Houston-area seats rather than their current four, the winner in the 18th District’s special election — which will decide who finishes out Turner’s term — could end up in a primary a few months later against one of the more experienced incumbent Democrats or face pressure to bow out.
No Texas Democrats have announced how they would handle the musical chairs scenario the new map would trigger. But with a Dec. 11 deadline to file for next year’s midterms — and pressure from donors and party leaders likely to force their hands well before then — they will have to ponder their futures quickly.
The new map could compel members to retire, change districts or run for a different office rather than face a bruising primary against a colleague.
See also this Chron story. It’s too soon to say what will happen. All things considered, if this map passes and isn’t blocked, and one outcome is that it convinces a Julie Johnson or Marc Veasey or Greg Casar to run for Governor instead, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I’d rather have them all in Congress, of course, but as lemonade goes that’s not too shabby.
Here’s one optimistic take.
“Just imagine how you’d feel if you worked for Julie’s [campaign], and you work real hard and you block walked and phone banked and then, boop, now you’re in Keith Self’s [district],” Darrel Evans, a communications chair with the Collin County Democratic Party, told the Observer. “You just feel so disenfranchised, I would imagine.”
So things don’t look great for Democrats in North Texas’ urban core.
But Evans isn’t despairing just yet, and the source of his belief that Democrats can make this proposed map work is northern Collin County.
Part of what’s weird about this situation (other than the fact that the President of the United States is getting directly involved in a state issue and lawmakers are just letting him) is the fact that redistricting is typically done at the start of each decade, after new census data is available. This ensures that the people drawing the state maps know how many people are in each state, determining how much representation each state has, and where those people are.
The last census was conducted in 2020, and since that time, northern Collin County has been ground zero for some of the fastest growth in the entire country. Take Princeton, for example. Between July 2023 and July 2024, the town’s population grew nearly 31%. Celina, Anna and Melissa were also named some of the United States’ fastest-growing towns, and all are in Collin County.
Evans believes that the massive migration to these areas could give Democrats some new footholds, without Republicans ever seeing it coming. The growth in these areas has led to infrastructure issues like water shortages, understaffed emergency services and inadequate roads. Those aren’t issues Evans believes that establishment Republicans are prepared to face head-on, but they are issues that he thinks will drive voters to the polls, even if it’s a Democrat running on the platform.
“[Republicans] are doing this, I want people to remember, without good data,” said Evans. “And I’m really hoping that they’re going to make some errors, because I don’t see the Texas GOP as being all that competent.”
It’s a possibility. Certainly something to work towards.
Finally, we close a loop from before.
A Texas Senate committee overseeing congressional redistricting voted along party lines Wednesday to block efforts to subpoena a U.S. Justice Department official and a conservative mapmaker involved in drawing a newly proposed congressional map. All six Republicans on the panel rejected the motion, while the three Democratic members voted in favor, falling short of the votes needed to compel testimony.
The vote followed Democrats’ push to question Harmeet Dhillon, a Justice Department attorney who authored a letter alleging that several Democratic-held districts, three in Houston and one in North Texas, were racially gerrymandered. Dhillon’s letter, sent to Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton on July 7, argued that the districts improperly packed nonwhite voters, raising constitutional concerns. Senate Democrats also sought to subpoena redistricting strategist Adam Kincaid, whose group is reportedly behind the latest proposed map.
Sen. Borris Miles (D-Houston) criticized Republican members for declining to investigate those behind the map changes. “We couldn’t garner enough respect from our colleagues to just question the person who wrote the letter attacking our districts, attacking our communities,” he said, as reported by The Dallas Morning News. Democrats contend that Dhillon’s letter directly influenced Abbott’s decision to include redistricting on the special legislative session agenda, alongside flood relief and emergency preparedness.
Committee Chair Sen. Phil King (R-Weatherford) defended his vote, stating that Dhillon’s letter was not addressed to the Senate and that she had already been invited to testify. “I think we’re a little premature in that regard to consider a subpoena,” King said, noting that only three business days had passed since the invitation.
She’ll never testify, and she’ll never be pushed to testify. Leave no stone turned, that’s the motto. Now gird up for today’s hearing.
Posted in Election 2026, That's our Lege
|
Tagged Al Green, California, CD07, CD09, CD18, CD23, CD28, CD29, CD32, CD33, CD34, CD35, CD37, Cody Vasut, Collin County, Congress, Donald Trump, fines, Greg Abbott, Greg Casar, Jasmine Crockett, Julie Johnson, Justice Department, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, Lloyd Doggett, New York, Phil King, quorum, redistricting, special session, Texas, The Lege, Todd Hunter, Voting Rights Act
|
That sure was fast. Good thing all those hearings are over.
Texas GOP lawmakers released their first draft of the state’s new congressional map Wednesday, proposing revamped district lines that attempt to flip five Democratic seats in next year’s midterm elections.
The new map targets Democratic members of Congress in the Austin, Dallas and Houston metro areas and in South Texas. The draft, unveiled by Corpus Christi Republican Rep. Todd Hunter, will likely change before the final map is approved by both chambers and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott. Democrats have said they might try to thwart the process by fleeing the state.
This unusual mid-decade redistricting comes after a pressure campaign waged by President Donald Trump’s political team in the hopes of padding Republicans’ narrow majority in the U.S. House.
Currently, Republicans hold 25 of Texas’ 38 House seats. Trump carried 27 of those districts in 2024, including those won by Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen.
Under the proposed new lines, 30 districts would have gone to Trump last year, each by at least 10 percentage points.
The districts represented by Cuellar and Gonzalez — both of which are overwhelmingly Hispanic and anchored in South Texas — would become slightly more favorable to Republicans. Trump received 53% and 52% in those districts, respectively, in 2024; under the new proposed lines, he would have gotten almost 55% in both districts.
Also targeted are Democratic Reps. Julie Johnson of Farmers Branch — whose Dallas-anchored district would be reshaped to favor Republicans — and Marc Veasey of Fort Worth, whose nearby district would remain solidly blue but drop all of Fort Worth — Veasey’s hometown and political base. That seat — now solely in Dallas County — contains parts of Johnson’s, Veasey’s and Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s current district, raising the prospect of a primary between Veasey and Johnson.
The map’s newly proposed GOP seat in Central Texas also triggers the prospect of Austin Democratic Reps. Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett facing each other in a primary for the area’s lone remaining blue district. To avoid that scenario, one of the two would have to step aside or run an uphill race for a new Central Texas district, based in San Antonio, that Trump would have won by 10 points.
In the Houston area, the proposed map would remake four Democratic districts. The biggest upheaval would be in the 9th Congressional District, a majority-minority seat represented by Rep. Al Green that currently covers the southern part of Harris County and its direct southern neighbors. It would shift to the eastern parts of Houston, where no current member of Congress lives. Instead of being a seat that Vice President Kamala Harris won by 44 percent under the current boundary, Trump would have won it by 15 percent.
[…]
To pick up new seats, Republicans have proposed to pack more Democratic voters into districts in the state’s blue urban centers, giving Democrats even bigger margins in districts they already control, such as those represented by Crockett, Rep. Joaquin Castro in San Antonio and Rep. Sylvia Garcia in Houston. And they’re looking to disperse Republican voters from safely red districts into several districts currently represented by Democrats, such as the ones held by Johnson and Casar.
No Republican incumbents’ districts were made significantly more competitive.
The map-drawers managed to move more Republican voters into Democratic districts around Dallas and Houston without imperiling the nearby seats of GOP Reps. Beth Van Duyne, R-Irving and Troy Nehls, R-Fort Bend. Both faced competitive races in 2020 before their districts were redrawn in 2021 to become solidly Republican, and neither was made to sacrifice those gains in the state House’s initial map.
There’s a lot to unpack here and we still have limited data. The Chron has a nice embedded map that shows what the 2024 Trump margins were in each of the proposed and current districts. What data we do have about the new map is here. El Paso Matters, the Fort Worth Report, and the Current have some local angles; there’s plenty of other coverage about this but I’ll leave that for now, there’s going to be tons more to come. For now, a couple of high level notes:
– I have to say, this map is not nearly as ugly and convoluted as I thought it would be. Compared to the first map, which was submitted by some random dude, it’s practically clean. The ugliness is under the covers, not on the surface.
– Obviously, the Republicans either had the map itself or full knowledge of it before the three now-conducted hearings. It’s ludicrous to think otherwise. They have a long history of hiding the ball in these matters, partly to deflect heat and partly to limit the record for future litigation.
– There will be at least one more hearing, this Friday at the Capitol. Expect that to be an all-day affair.
– On the matter of what they knew and when they knew it, this sums it up:
Yeah, now pull the other one.
– So far everything is being cast in terms of 2024 election data. That is the most recent election, but it was a Presidential election while 2026 will be a midterm – Trump’s second midterm, in fact – and it’s fair to say that the political climate is different now. What I want to see is the data from 2018, not so much because I think 2026 will be exactly like 2018 but because I want to see what a possible range for the data might be.
– Here’s a side matter of interest:
A debate over Texas’s 2021 congressional redistricting map intensified Tuesday as Senate Democrats pushed for a public vote to subpoena Trump DOJ official Harmeet Dhillon, who earlier this year raised federal concerns about potential Voting Rights Act violations in the map approved by the GOP-controlled Legislature. Dhillon, now Assistant Attorney General, wrote to Gov. Greg Abbott in July warning of “serious concerns” about racial discrimination in the maps.
According to the Quorum Report, Senate Democratic Caucus Chair Carol Alvarado, D-Houston, urged Senate Redistricting Committee Chair Phil King, R-Weatherford, to hold a livestreamed vote on the subpoena, arguing that the committee has the power to issue one even if enforcement is uncertain.
Chair King said he does not agree with the DOJ’s assessment of the map, aligning with Attorney General Ken Paxton and other Republican testimony from a recent federal trial in El Paso. “I don’t think the map that is in place for Congress today is discriminatory,” King said, “I believe the map I voted for…was a legal map. I think that testimony that I’ve seen in trial supports that. I certainly believe the testimony of Sen. Huffman supports that. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the right to take up redistricting if we choose to do so.”
While open to a public vote, King said he is waiting on a legal opinion from the Texas Legislative Council on whether the committee has the authority to subpoena a federal official from out of state. Alvarado stressed the urgency, citing a July 7 letter from DOJ with an August 7 deadline, and called for the process to be as transparent and timely as possible.
The disconnect between what the Trump Justice Department asserted about the 2021 map – drawn entirely by Republicans – and what Republicans have testified in federal court under oath about that map really is glaring. Greg Abbott used that pretext as a reason for the re-redistricting process, while Ken Paxton is out there saying the Justice Department got it all wrong. The list of Things That Would Be A Big News Story If They Happened Under Literally Any Other President Ever is a billion items long now, and maybe the best we can do is document them. But this is still weird and should be investigated.
– We’ll see what national Dems do in response to this. Califonia has already made its intentions clear.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has told aides he will move forward with a plan to redraw his state’s congressional lines to install more Democrats if Texas Republicans pass their own updated map, according to a person with direct knowledge of Newsom’s thinking.
The Texas proposal, backed by President Donald Trump, looks to flip five seats held by Democrats, according to a draft unveiled Wednesday in the state House. The California proposal would aim to do the same, with lawmakers set to advance a map targeting five Republican incumbents, according to two people who have spoken to Newsom or his office about it. They were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private conversations.
Map makers are looking at options that would target Republican Reps. Ken Calvert, Darrell Issa, Kevin Kiley, Doug LaMalfa and David Valadao, according to a person associated with Newsom’s redistricting efforts.
Once approved by the Democratic-controlled California Legislature, where Newsom has been successfully lobbying lawmakers for weeks, the maps would likely be put to California voters in a statewide ballot measure. The referendum plan is subject to change and has yet to receive final approval from Newsom, who has also publicly suggested the Legislature could change the maps without voter approval.
California has an independent redistricting commission that was enshrined in the state’s constitution. But those close to the process believe maps passed by way of a ballot measure or the Legislature’s approval would withstand legal scrutiny because the independent commission is only tasked with drawing new lines once every decade — leaving the process for mid-decade redistricting open, supporters argue.
I don’t know what the law is there, but that’s not a problem to worry about now. I’m happy for California and other blue states to do their own re-redistricting as appropriate. The ideal would be for there to be substantive reform on this at a national level, but in the meantime there can’t be a different set of rules for each party.
– As for the quorum busting matter, at this point I have no official position on it. If there’s one thing we should have learned from the previous quorum breaks, they’re a big sugar high that is quickly followed by a lot of groping around for what to do next. The main problem is that there’s no clear end game. Waiting them out takes too long and is far too much to ask of people who have lives to live. I wish there were a better answer but the truth as ever is that we need to win more elections. And the next time we have full control of the federal government, we really really need to pass an updated and stronger Voting Rights Act while also clipping SCOTUS’ ability to weaken it. I don’t know what else to say. Lone Star Left, the Texas Signal, Reform Austin, the Lone Star Project, and Mother Jones have more.
UPDATE: Lone Star Left is also wondering why all of the quorum-breaking pressure is on House Dems while no one is talking about Senate Dems despite the fact that the $500-day-day fines only apply to House members, and I have to say that’s an excellent point.
Posted in That's our Lege
|
Tagged Al Green, California, Carol Alvarado, CD07, CD09, CD18, CD23, CD28, CD29, CD32, CD33, CD34, CD35, CD37, Cody Vasut, Congress, Donald Trump, fines, Greg Abbott, Greg Casar, Illinois, Jasmine Crockett, Julie Johnson, Justice Department, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, Lloyd Doggett, New Mexico, New York, Phil King, quorum, redistricting, special session, Texas, The Lege, Todd Hunter, Tom DeLay, Voting Rights Act
|
While we wait for maps, we can ponder whether or not there will be a quorum break.
As Republicans in Texas move full steam ahead with a plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts, Democrats are privately mulling their options, including an expensive and legally dicey quorum break.
If they go that route, it appears they will have the backing of big-dollar Democratic donors.
By fleeing the state to deprive the Legislature of enough members to function, Democrats would each incur a fine of $500 per day and face the threat of arrest. Deep-pocketed donors within the party appear ready to cover these expenses, according to three people involved in the discussions.
The donors’ willingness to foot the bill eliminates a major deterrent to walking out — the personal financial cost — and could embolden Democrats who might otherwise hesitate.
But first, the donors and absconding members would need to figure out how to skirt a potential roadblock: Texas House rules prohibit lawmakers from dipping into their campaign coffers to pay the fines. Republicans approved the $500 daily punishment in 2023, two years after Democrats fled the state in an unsuccessful bid to stop Republicans from passing an overhaul of the state’s election laws.
Two people involved in the latest Democratic fundraising strategy sessions, who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, claim their legal teams have found a way to disburse the funds to the members but declined to provide any additional details.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Dallas Democrat who was part of the 2021 quorum break, sees a path to circumvent the campaign finance rules: With minimal limits on external income, Texas lawmakers can simply accept the donations as another salary, she said. As one of the most prolific fundraisers in the U.S. House, Crockett said she’s willing to tap her donor base — and her $3.7 million war chest — to cover the expenses.
[…]
Donors appeared convinced and ready to open their checkbooks should Texas members decide to flee the state, according to three people who were on the calls or briefed on them. One person estimated lawmakers would need $1 million per month to finance the protest — a sum that those involved in the calls are certain they can secure.
Paying these fines may not even be necessary, Crockett believes.
“I think that the first step would be to make sure that there are attorneys on deck to actually challenge the legality of these rules,” she said in an interview with The Texas Tribune.
Andrew Cates, an Austin-based campaign finance and ethics lawyer, said he would be “very surprised if there were any real monetary penalties that were enforceable.”
Okay, let me say first that “As Republicans in Texas move full steam ahead with a plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts” sure sounds like an overbid to me, especially when there are no freaking maps. But maybe I just have different definitions of “full steam ahead” and “with a plan”. I was skeptical about that “$1 million a month” figure, but Lone Star Left, which has their doubts about a quorum break, did some back of the envelope math on it before the session started, and it’s in the ballpark. That’s a real consideration, and I’m not sure how confident I am in the national fundraising process for this. But at least there’s a number.
I personally would be a lot more worried about our deranged madman in DC deciding to send in a goon squad to arrest every out of state Dem and drag them back to Austin in chains. This was all his idea in the first place, and he will have no compunctions about using excessive force or pretty much anything else. I’m not sure how to quantify this, but the odds of there being violence visited on the quorum busters is very much not zero. And I’m sure that is something they have thought about.
Nonetheless, they are doing some due diligence.
Members of the Texas House Democratic Caucus have gone to New Mexico for the day to meet with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. It’s not a quorum break — unlike the last time Texas Democrats sent a contingent to New Mexico — but another chance for Democrats to lock arms nationally against the mid-decade redistricting effort in the Lone Star State.
[…]
It’s the THDC’s third such expeditionary force this special session after members traveled to California and Illinois on Friday to meet with Govs. Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker. Democrats frame the coalition as a national “firewall” against Texas’ map redraw pushed by President Donald Trump and called by Gov. Greg Abbott as Republicans look to retain the U.S. House in 2026.
U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York will travel to Austin on Wednesday, underscoring the national spotlight on Austin.
Unlike Newsom and Pritzker, Lujan Grisham isn’t considering retaliatory redistricting because there’s no more juice to squeeze out of New Mexico. The state’s three congressional seats are already held by Democrats. Instead, Texas Democrats are using the trip to argue that Abbott and Republicans are wasting time with redistricting as opposed to prioritizing a legislative response to the recent Central Texas floods.
Flash floods have hit the New Mexico mountain town of Ruidoso three times in less than a month during the ongoing monsoon season. One of the floods killed three people. The town is expected to get more rain Tuesday.
“We’re traveling to meet with leaders who put people first in a crisis,” Moody said in a statement, contrasting New Mexico with Texas’ focus on redistricting. “We’re seeking serious, productive conversations with other governors about how to solve the real problems Texans expect and deserve their leaders to solve.”
Like I said, I don’t know what they’re going to do. I don’t envy them the decision, and I cannot and will not be mad at anyone who isn’t willing or able to flee the state.
Meanwhile, Ken Paxton has responded to the Trump Justice Department and its claims about how the current map was drawn.
On July 7, President Trump’s Department of Justice sent a letter to Texas leaders claiming three Houston-area and one Fort Worth-based Democratic congressional districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.
In a letter four days later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton disagreed with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division’s interpretation.
He mentioned that a lawsuit against Congressional District 18 had already been dismissed and the other three districts – TX 9, 29, and 33 – were drawn race-blind. The state just wrapped up a four-week trial in El Paso defending the constitutionality of the 2021 maps.
“The evidence at that trial was clear and unequivocal: the Texas legislature did not pass race-based electoral districts for any of those three political maps,” wrote Paxton in bold in a letter obtained through a public records request.
The Attorney General went on to write that Texas State Senator Joan Huffman, R – Houston, as chair of a redistricting committee, testified under oath she drew the districts race-blind and only sought “to maximize Republican political advantage.”
The letter is important because Governor Abbott placed redistricting on the special session agenda because of the constitutional concerns raised by the DOJ in their July 7 letter. In interviews afterward, Abbott said he believed the current maps would hold up in court but supported looking into redrawing them.
You can see a copy of the letter in the story. Paxton still has the original lawsuit against the current maps to defend, and he’d surely prefer not to have the Justice Department crap all over his defense. As I’m sure you can tell, I’m just full of sympathy for him.
One more thing from this story:
The Department of Justice does have a move of last resort if Texas lawmakers cannot draw new congressional maps during the summer. Some Democrats have threatened to break quorum, leaving town so the lawmaking process stops. Fifteen already traveled out of state to strategize with their colleagues in California and Illinois.
With that in mind, during the first few weeks of the special session, some Republican political operatives told NBC DFW they could take their case to the court system and impose new maps on the state if lawmakers cannot draw new ones.
In the letter sparking this latest round of redistricting, Trump’s Department of Justice said as much.
In the July 7 letter, the Assistant Attorney General over the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, warned Governor Greg Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that legal action could come if changes were not made.
“If the State of Texas fails to rectify the racial gerrymandering of TX-09, TX-18, TX-29 and TX33, the Attorney General reserves the right to seek legal action against the State, including without limitation under the 14th Amendment,” Dhillon wrote.
Just a reminder, one of the justifications for the DeLay re-redistricting of 2003 was that the 2001 Congressional map had been drawn by a three-judge panel since the Lege (which in 2001 still had a Dem majority in the House) could not agree on a map. The party line at the time was that only a map drawn by the Lege was legitimate. Those were the days, let me tell you.
Axios has a couple of interesting tidbits.
State of play: Midterm elections are typically a tougher playing field for the party in power. Democrats are eyeing taking back the House in 2026.
- If safe Republican districts in Texas are diluted with Democratic voters to build Republican districts elsewhere, then reliable seats could turn competitive for Republicans, Jon Taylor, department chair and political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, tells Axios.
[…]
What they’re saying: “Given the kind of election that’s taking place, given the issues that may be in play, they may be in for an unpleasant surprise,” Taylor says of the Republican Party.
- “They are putting everything at risk in this special session by putting this on the agenda.”
Zoom in: The Cook Political Report says the most obvious targets are the 28th and 34th congressional districts in South Texas, represented by Democratic U.S. Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, respectively.
- Taylor also thinks Republicans could “radically” redraw the 35th Congressional District, represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, which runs from East Austin to San Antonio along Interstate 35.
- Other potential targets: the 32nd and 37th districts, represented by Democratic U.S. Reps. Julie Johnson of the Dallas area and Lloyd Doggett of Austin.
- Republicans who could gain Democratic voters include U.S. Reps. Tony Gonzales, whose sprawling district extends from San Antonio to El Paso, and Chip Roy, whose district encompasses much of the conservative Hill Country but includes portions of Austin and San Antonio.
What we’re watching: Republicans are looking to South Texas after Trump performed well with Latino voters there.
- But Taylor says it isn’t a given that they will continue to prefer Republicans.
- Hispanic adults give Trump’s handling of immigration a lower approval rating (21%) than the national rating (35%), per a Gallup poll conducted in June.
[…]
The bottom line: There’s already a warning sign for Republicans as they weigh redistricting.
- The top concern among Texas voters is no longer immigration or border security — for years, winning issues for the GOP — according to the Texas Politics Project Poll in June.
- It’s now “political corruption/leadership.”
We’ve talked about the risk to Republicans before. We still don’t know what it amounts to, and we don’t know how seriously anyone on that side is taking it. I assume any threat to CDs 35 and 37 are mostly to screw with Reps. Casar and Doggett, as there are more obvious electoral targets elsewhere. But who knows?
Finally, the NYT reports on New York possibly doing their own retaliatory redistricting; the story is firewalled, so that’s all I know. We’re all just waiting here.
Posted in That's our Lege
|
Tagged California, CD07, CD09, CD18, CD21, CD23, CD28, CD29, CD32, CD33, CD34, CD35, CD37, Cody Vasut, Congress, Donald Trump, fines, Greg Abbott, Greg Casar, Illinois, Jasmine Crockett, Julie Johnson, Justice Department, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, Lloyd Doggett, New Mexico, New York, quorum, redistricting, special session, Texas, The Lege, Tom DeLay, Voting Rights Act
|
