Texas governor threatens to remove Democrats who left state in bid to block Trump-backed redistricting
The revolt by the state House Democrats, many of whom went to Illinois or New York on Sunday, along with Abbott giving them less than 24 hours to come home ratcheted up a widening fight over congressional maps. Although this began in Texas, it's drawn in Democratic governors who have floated the possibility of rushing to redraw their own state's maps in retaliation. Their options, however, are limited.
At the centre of the escalating impasse is Trump's pursuit of adding five more Republican-leaning congressional seats in Texas before next year that would bolster his party's chances of preserving its slim U.S. House majority.
The revamped congressional maps drawn by Texas Republicans would create five new Republican-leaning seats. Republicans currently hold 25 of the state's 38 seats.
To block what Democrats have called gerrymandering, Democratic representatives delayed a Monday vote in the Texas House of Representatives on the proposed maps by simply not showing up.
After one group of Democrats landed in Chicago on Sunday, they were welcomed by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, but declined to say how long they were prepared to stay out of Texas.
"We will do whatever it takes. What that looks like, we don't know," said state Rep. Gene Wu, the Texas House Democratic Caucus leader.
Walkouts delay vote
Legislative walkouts often only delay passage of a bill, including in 2021 when many of the same Texas House Democrats left the state for 38 days to protest new voting restrictions. Once they returned, Republicans wound up passing that measure.
Four years later, Abbott is taking a far more aggressive stance and swiftly warning Democrats that he will seek to remove them from office if they are not back when the House reconvenes Monday afternoon. He cited a non-binding 2021 legal opinion issued by Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton that suggested a court could determine a legislator had forfeited their office.
He also suggested the lawmakers may have committed felonies by raising money to help pay for fines they'd face.
"This truancy ends now," Abbott said.
In response, House Democrats issued a four-word statement: "Come and take it."
Lawmakers can't pass bills in the 150-member Texas House without at least two-thirds of them present. Democrats hold 62 of the seats in the majority-Republican chamber and at least 51 left the state, said Josh Rush Nisenson, spokesperson for the House Democratic Caucus.
Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows said the chamber would still meet as planned on Monday afternoon.
"If a quorum is not present then, to borrow the recent talking points from some of my Democrat colleagues, all options will be on the table. . .," he posted on X, formerly Twitter.
'Rigging the system'
Pritzker, a potential 2028 presidential contender who has been one of Trump's most outspoken critics during his second term, had been in quiet talks with Texas Democrats for weeks about offering support if they chose to leave the state to break quorum.
Last week, the governor hosted several Texas Democrats in Illinois to publicly oppose the redistricting effort, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom held a similar event in his own state.
Pritzker also met privately with Texas Democratic chair Kendall Scudder in June to begin planning for the possibility that lawmakers would depart for Illinois if they did decide to break quorum to block the map, according to a source with direct knowledge who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.
"This is not just rigging the system in Texas — it's about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come," Pritzker said Sunday night.
Trump is looking to avoid a repeat of his first term, when Democrats flipped the House just two years into his presidency, and hopes the new Texas map will aid that effort. Trump officials have also looked at redrawing lines in other states, sparking accusations of election tampering from critics.
A refusal by Texas lawmakers to show up is a civil violation of legislative rules.
The Texas Supreme Court held in 2021 that House leaders had the authority to "physically compel the attendance" of missing members, but no Democrats were forcibly brought back to the state after warrants were served that year.
Two years later, Republicans pushed through new rules that allow daily fines of $500 US for lawmakers who don't show up for work as punishment.
The quorum break will also delay votes on flood relief and new warning systems in the wake of last month's catastrophic floods in Texas that killed at least 136 people. Democrats had called for votes on the flooding response before taking up redistricting and have criticized Republicans for not doing so.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Winnipeg Free Press
7 minutes ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
How reliable is the jobs data? Economists and Wall Street still trust it
WASHINGTON (AP) — The monthly jobs report is already closely-watched on Wall Street and in Washington but has taken on a new importance after President Donald Trump on Friday fired the official who oversees it. Trump claimed that June's employment figures were 'RIGGED' to make him and other Republicans 'look bad.' Yet he provided no evidence and even the official Trump had appointed in his first term to oversee the report, William Beach, condemned the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics appointed by former President Joe Biden. The firing followed Friday's jobs report that showed hiring was weak in July and had come to nearly a standstill in May and June, right after Trump rolled out sweeping tariffs. Economists and Wall Street investors have long considered the job figures reliable, with share prices and bond yields often reacting sharply when they are released. Yet Friday's revisions were unusually large — the largest, outside of a recession, in five decades. And the surveys used to compile the report are facing challenges from declining response rates, particularly since COVID, as fewer companies complete the surveys. Nonetheless, that hasn't led most economists to doubt them. 'The bottom line for me is, I wouldn't take the low collection rate as any evidence that the numbers are less reliable,' Omair Sharif, founder and chief economist at Inflation Insights, a consulting firm, said. Many academics, statisticians and economists have warned for some time that declining budgets were straining the government's ability to gather economic data. There were several government commissions studying ways to improve things like survey response rates, but the Trump administration disbanded them earlier this year. Heather Boushey, a top economic adviser in the Biden White House, noted that without Trump's firing of McEntarfer, there would be more focus on last week's data, which points to a slowing economy. 'We're having this conversation about made-up issues to distract us from what the data is showing,' Boushey said. 'Revisions of this magnitude in a negative direction may indicate bad things to come for the labor market.' Here are some things to know about the jobs report: Economists and Wall Street trust the data Most economists say that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a nonpolitical agency staffed by people obsessed with getting the numbers right. The only political appointee is the commissioner, who doesn't see the data until it's finalized, two days before it is issued to the public. Erica Groshen, the BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017, said she suggested different language in the report to 'liven it up', but was shot down. She was told that if asked to describe a cup as half-empty or half-full, BLS says 'it is an eight ounce cup with four ounces of liquid.' The revised jobs data that has attracted Trump's ire is actually more in line with other figures than before the revision. For example, payroll processor ADP uses data from its millions of clients to calculate its own jobs report, and it showed a sharp hiring slowdown in May and June that is closer to the revised BLS data. Trump and his White House have a long track record of celebrating the jobs numbers — when they are good. These are the figures is Trump attacking Trump has focused on the revisions to the May and June data, which on Friday were revised lower, with job gains in May reduced to 19,000 from 144,000, and for June to just 14,000 from 147,000. Every month's jobs data is revised in the following two months. Trump also repeated a largely inaccurate attack from the campaign about an annual revision last August, which reduced total employment in the United States by 818,000, or about 0.5%. The government also revises employment figures every year. Trump charged the annual revision was released before the 2024 presidential election to 'boost' Vice President Kamala Harris's 'chances of Victory,' yet it was two months before the election and widely reported at the time that the revision lowered hiring during the Biden-Harris administration and pointed to a weaker economy. Here's why the government revises the data The monthly revisions occur because many companies that respond to the government's surveys send their data in late, or correct the figures they've already submitted. The proportion of companies sending in their data later has risen in the past decade. Every year, the BLS does an additional revision based on actual job counts that are derived from state unemployment insurance records. Those figures cover 95% of U.S. businesses and aren't derived from a survey but are not available in real time. These are the factors that cause revisions Figuring out how many new jobs have been added or lost each month is more complicated than it may sound. For example, if one person takes a second job, should you focus on the number of jobs, which has increased, or the number of employed people, which hasn't? (The government measures both: The unemployment rate is based on how many people either have or don't have jobs, while the number of jobs added or lost is counted separately). Each month, the government surveys about 121,000 businesses and government agencies at over 630,000 locations — including multiple locations for the same business — covering about one-third of all workers. Still, the government also has to make estimates: What if a company goes out of business? It likely won't fill out any forms showing the jobs lost. And what about new businesses? They can take a while to get on the government's radar. The BLS seeks to capture these trends by estimating their impact on employment. Those estimates can be wrong, of course, until they are fixed by the annual revisions. The revisions are often larger around turning points in the economy. For example, when the economy is growing, there may be more startups than the government expects, so revisions will be higher. If the economy is slowing or slipping into a recession, the revisions may be larger on the downside. Here's why the May and June revisions may have been so large Ernie Tedeschi, an economic adviser to the Biden administration, points to the current dynamics of the labor market: Both hiring and firing have sharply declined, and fewer Americans are quitting their jobs to take other work. As a result, most of the job gains or losses each month are probably occurring at new companies, or those going out of business. And those are the ones the government uses models to estimate, which can make them more volatile. Groshen also points out that since the pandemic there has been a surge of new start-up companies, after many Americans lost their jobs or sought more independence. Yet they may not have created as many jobs as startups did pre-COVID, which throws off the government's models. Revisions seem to be getting bigger The revisions to May and June's job totals, which reduced hiring by a total of 258,000, were the largest — outside recessions — since 1967, according to economists at Goldman Sachs. Kevin Hassett, Trump's top economic adviser, went on NBC's 'Meet the Press' on Sunday and said, 'What we've seen over the last few years is massive revisions to the jobs numbers.' Hassett blamed a sharp drop in response rates to the government's surveys during and after the pandemic: 'When COVID happened, because response rates went down a lot, then revision rates skyrocketed.' Yet calculations by Tedeschi show that while revisions spiked after the pandemic, they have since declined and are much smaller than in the 1960s and 1970s. Other concerns about the government's data Monday Mornings The latest local business news and a lookahead to the coming week. Many economists and statisticians have sounded the alarm about things like declining response rates for years. A decade ago, about 60% of companies surveyed by BLS responded. Now, only about 40% do. The decline has been an international phenomenon, particularly since COVID. The United Kingdom has even suspended publication of an official unemployment rate because of falling responses. And earlier this year the BLS said that it was cutting back on its collection of inflation data because of the Trump administration's hiring freeze, raising concerns about the robustness of price data just as economists are trying to gauge the impact of tariffs on inflation. U.S. government statistical agencies have seen an inflation-adjusted 16% drop in funding since 2009, according to a July report from the American Statistical Association. 'We are at an inflection point,' the report said. 'To meet current and future challenges requires thoughtful, well-planned investment … In contrast, what we have observed is uncoordinated and unplanned reductions with no visible plan for the future.
Global News
an hour ago
- Global News
Rwanda reaches deal with U.S. to take upto 250 migrants, Reuters reports
The United States and Rwanda have agreed for the African country to potentially accept hundreds of migrants deported from the U.S., the spokesperson for the Rwandan government and an official told Reuters, as President Donald Trump's administration takes a hardline approach toward immigration. The agreement, under which Rwanda would accept up to 250 migrants, was signed by U.S. and Rwandan officials in Kigali in June, said the Rwandan official, speaking on condition of anonymity, adding that Washington had already sent an initial list of 10 people to be vetted. 'Rwanda has agreed with the United States to accept up to 250 migrants, in part because nearly every Rwandan family has experienced the hardships of displacement, and our societal values are founded on reintegration and rehabilitation,' said the spokesperson for the Rwandan government, Yolande Makolo. 'Under the agreement, Rwanda has the ability to approve each individual proposed for resettlement. Those approved will be provided with workforce training, healthcare, and accommodation support to jumpstart their lives in Rwanda, giving them the opportunity to contribute to one of the fastest-growing economies in the world over the last decade.' Story continues below advertisement The White House and State Department had no immediate comment. The Department of Homeland Security referred questions to the State Department. Get daily National news Get the day's top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day. Sign up for daily National newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy President Donald Trump aims to deport millions of immigrants in the U.S. illegally and his administration has sought to ramp up removals to third countries, including sending convicted criminals to South Sudan and Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. 2:36 Venezuela releases 10 jailed Americans in prisoner swap with El Salvador Rwanda has in recent years positioned itself as a destination country for migrants that Western countries would like to remove, despite concerns by rights groups that Kigali does not respect some of the most fundamental human rights. In May, the foreign minister said Rwanda was in the early stages of talks to receive immigrants deported from the United States. The Trump administration argues that third-country deportations help swiftly remove some migrants, including those with criminal convictions. Immigration hardliners see third-country removals as a way to deal with offenders who cannot easily be deported and could pose a threat to the public. Story continues below advertisement Opponents have criticized the deportations as dangerous and cruel, since people could be sent to countries where they could face violence, have no ties and do not speak the language. The Trump administration has pressed countries to take migrants. It deported more than 200 Venezuelans accused of being gang members to El Salvador in March, where they were jailed until they were released in a prisoner swap last month. The Supreme Court in June allowed the Trump administration to deport migrants to third countries without giving them a chance to show they could be harmed. But the legality of the removals is being contested in a federal lawsuit in Boston, a case that could potentially wind its way back to the conservative-leaning high court. Rwanda signed an agreement with Britain in 2022 to take in thousands of asylum seekers, a deal that was scrapped last year by then newly-elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer. No one was sent to Rwanda under the plan because of years of legal challenges.
Winnipeg Free Press
an hour ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
FACT FOCUS: Trump says he's cut drug prices by up to 1,500%. That's not possible
Days after he sent letters instructing top pharmaceutical manufacturers to use a 'most favored nation' pricing model for prescription drugs, President Donald Trump told reporters on Sunday that he had cut costs by up to 1,500%. But Trump's grandiose claim is mathematically impossible. Here's a closer look at the facts. TRUMP: 'You know, we've cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500%. I don't mean 50%, I mean 14 — 1,500%.' THE FACTS: This is false. Cutting drug prices by more than 100% would theoretically mean that people are being paid to take medications. The Trump administration has taken steps to lower prescription drug prices, but experts say there's no indication costs have seen such a massive drop. Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the University of Southern California's Schaeffer Center, called Trump's claim 'total fiction' made up by the Republican president. He agreed that it would amount to drug companies paying customers, rather than the other way around. 'I find it really difficult to translate those numbers into some actual estimates that patients would see at the pharmacy counter,' said Mariana Socal, an associate professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University who studies the U.S. pharmaceutical market. She added that Trump's math is 'really hard to follow.' Asked what Trump was using to back up his claim, White House spokesman Kush Desai said: 'It's an objective fact that Americans are paying exponentially more for the same exact drugs as people in other developed countries pay, and it's an objective fact that no other Administration has done more to rectify this unfair burden for the American people.' The White House provided a chart of price differentials for drugs in the U.S. and comparable countries, but did not offer any other evidence. On Sunday, Trump also described cuts to drug prices as a future development, not that already happened. 'So we'll be dropping drug prices,' he said. 'It will start over the next two to three months by 1,200, 1,300 and even 1,400%.' Prices for most prescription drugs — unbranded generics are the exception — are higher in the U.S. than they are in other high-income countries. This is in large part due to the way drug prices are negotiated in the United States. Trump made his recent appeal in letters to 17 pharmaceutical manufacturers, the White House announced last week. He asked them to reduce costs in the U.S. by matching the lowest prices of prescriptions drugs in other comparably developed countries. Some drugmakers have since indicated that they are open to cutting costs. This move follows an executive order Trump signed in May setting a 30-day deadline for drugmakers to electively lower prices in the U.S. or face new limits in the future over what the government will pay. The federal government has the most power to shape the price it pays for drugs covered by Medicare and Medicaid. It's unclear what — if any — impact the Trump administration's efforts will have on millions of Americans who have private health insurance. Socal pointed out that if drug manufacturers had cut costs to the extent Trump claims, they would be shouting it from the rooftops, especially given the heat they've taken over the years for their pricing practices. Wednesdays What's next in arts, life and pop culture. 'My expectation would be that they would make announcements — public announcements — and that those announcements would come way in advance of the actual effective dates when those price cuts would come into effect,' she said. Joyce agreed that there has been no indication of a substantial cut. 'Not at all, not at all, none whatsoever,' he said. 'And let alone 1,500.' ___ Find AP Fact Checks here:
