Texas officials didn’t have a problem sending thousands of migrants to New York, a sanctuary state, when the desperate asylum seekers illegally crossed the southern border.
They sent them here by the busloads.
But now, when a few of its lawmakers come to New York seeking sanctuary from an onerous redistricting vote, Texas leaders want to sic the FBI on them like they bombed a federal building or sold state secrets to foreign terrorists.
Either you believe in state’s rights or you don’t. On one hand, conservatives want the federal government to mind its own business and stay out of state affairs.
But when Democrats come up with a creative plan to stall a regressive redistricting vote, the Texas GOP is begging the feds to intervene.
Dozens of Texas House Democrats are currently camped out in New York and Illinois to block the state’s legislature from reaching the quorum it needs to hold a vote on a redistricting map that could further shift the balance of power and set back voting rights.
Among their biggest backers is New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who understands that the battle being waged by her new southern guests is bigger than even the state of Texas.
“Since Donald Trump’s rise, Republicans have declared war on the American people,” Hochul wrote in an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle.
“They slashed health care, gutted nutrition programs and stacked the Supreme Court to rip away freedoms we once took for granted. And now, they’re trying to rig the rules of democracy itself.”
How messed up is the GOP’s proposed map?
The latest plan has residents of Austin, the state capital, sharing a district with rural Texans who live more than 300 miles away.
And that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that Republicans are trying to redraw the map a full five years early.
“What Texas is doing isn’t a clever strategy, it’s political arson — torching our democracy to cling to power,” Hochul wrote. “The only viable recourse is to fight fire with fire.”
So, Hochul put out the welcome mat for the Texas Democrats, who, even by being out of the state, are doing what their constituents elected them to do — look out for their interests.
But Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and U.S. John Cornyn have branded them as outlaws, and are recruiting the FBI to track them down.
“We cannot allow these rogue legislators to avoid their constitutional responsibilities,” Cornyn said in a statement.
Cornyn said the FBI would only assist in locating the members, not apprehending them.
But the legislators would be about as hard to find as a plate of pulled pork at a Texas barbecue. Most have been hiding in plain sight.
“The fight to protect democracy is not confined to one state,” Mihaela Plesa, vice chair of Texas’ Democratic legislative caucus, said last week at a news conference with Hochul and her five Texas colleagues. “The fight is for all 50.”
State legislatures typically don’t tackle redistricting until after the census taken every 10 years informs them about population shifts.
But in June, the White House asked Texas Republicans to redraw the map five years early — ahead of the 2026 midterm elections — to protect their fragile majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Well, two can play that game. Hochul said that if Abbott and Cornyn and the rest of them want to cheat at Texas Hold ‘em to win a few seats in Congress, she can see their gerrymander and raise them an early redistricting vote to win some more seats in New York.
“I have newsflash for Republicans in Texas,” Hochul said. “This is no longer the Wild West. We’re not going to tolerate our democracy being stolen in a modern day stagecoach heist by a bunch of law breaking cowboys.”
