After two weeks spent outside state lines—marked by a surge of national media attention and, then, a struggle to keep their fight in the limelight—Texas House Democrats ended their quorum break as abruptly as a second special session began. Within a few days, the Republicans’ scheme to engineer a rare mid-decade redistricting of the state’s congressional maps had been rammed through the Texas House and Senate.
What began as a demand from on high (i.e. the Trump administration) and sparked a national partisan gerrymandering arms race, has become the new political reality now that Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 4 into law on Friday.
Democrats knew there was nothing they really could do to stop passage of the new maps upon their return, and they thus claimed their walkout to be victorious because it had successfully spurred Texas’ rival mega-blue state, California, to advance a new map of its own that would nuke its already-marginal number of Republican seats.
