“Denying quorum has been a Texas political strategy since 1870” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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In June 1870, 13 Texas senators walked out of the Capitol to block a bill giving the governor wartime powers, depriving the upper chamber of the two-thirds quorum required for voting. Though the fleeing members were arrested, and the bill eventually passed, the “Rump Senate incident” established quorum-breaking as a minority party tactic that has persisted in Texas politics ever since.

After significant quorum breaks in 1979, 2003, and 2021, Texas House Democrats are once again employing this nuclear option, fleeing the state Sunday to block passage of a congressional redistricting map that would give Republicans five additional seats in the U.S. House. The attempt represents the latest chapter for the maneuver that political scientists say, barring exceptional endurance on the part of the democratic delegation, is likely to be symbolic rather than directly effective in preventing redistricting.

“It’s a messaging move,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “It’s a last resort for Democrats who have run out of options legislatively and even legally.”

The reality of a quorum break

While the Democrats technically can prevent the GOP’s redistricting effort by breaking quorum, it would require the entire delegation to stay out of the state until at least November, which political scientists say is unlikely given historical precedent.

“If we’re going to follow our current primary schedule, we do need to have these districts approved by the Legislature before the opening of filing [for the 2026 midterms] in November,” explained Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University.

The challenge for Democrats is that Gov. Greg Abbott can call unlimited special sessions lasting up to 30 days each. If Democrats break quorum during the current special session, which runs through late August, Abbott could immediately call another session the next day, and continue doing so indefinitely.

Even if Democrats managed to stay out of state until the November filing deadline, it could be possible for Republicans to simply hold a second round of primaries for the 2026 midterms according to Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“Back in 1996, a couple of congressional districts in Texas were redrawn in violation of the Voting Rights Act. They actually had to hold a second round of primaries,” Taylor noted.

History suggests that the difficulty of living out of state away from legislator’s families and day jobs makes it difficult for an entire delegation to break quorum for longer than two special sessions.

“Many of them have children, families that they’ll be not seeing, at least not in state, missing things from football games to confirmations,” Jones said. “The precedent is that it’s not that hard to do for one special session. It’s possible albeit a reach for a second. Going toward a third would be unprecedented.”

There is also the physical difficulty of housing so many people out of state. The 2003 quorum break, prompted by another redistricting fight, “was a pretty bare bones operation. They had to kind of set up a war room in Oklahoma under very adverse circumstances. It was not a luxury,” said Rottinghaus.

Only 12 of the 62 House Democrats who have reportedly left the state need to return to restore a quorum, allowing votes to proceed.

Previous quorum breaks failed. In 2021, Democrats returned after six weeks. In 2003, Democrats ultimately returned and saw the redistricting maps they opposed become law.

Democrats can generate national media attention, but that coverage fades quickly.

“The novelty and the nationwide media coverage will start to dissipate in a matter of a week or two,” Jones said. “It’s tough to keep a story on the front burner for more than a week or so, especially when there’s really nothing new about it.”

What penalties do Democrats face?

House rules adopted in 2023 impose a $500-per-day fine on lawmakers who leave the state, and indicate that campaign funds cannot be used to pay the penalties. But Texas ethics laws provide ample workarounds.

“Under Texas ethics laws, it’s quite easy for some group to effectively just simply pay these legislators money as a form of compensation that then they can use to pay these fines,” Jones said. “Let’s say Mark Cuban wants to pay all these House Democrats $1,000 a day as consultants — they can do that.”

Last week, The Texas Tribune reported that Democrats had begun fundraising for a potential quorum break. During the 2021 quorum break, a Beto O’Rourke-backed group gave $600,000 to Texas House Democrats’ for their stay in Washington, D.C.

The legislators are also likely to challenge the fines in court, potentially delaying the financial consequences of the break

“Several mentioned that [the fines] are essentially a violation of their civil liberties,” Jones said, noting that former House member and current Rep. Jasmine Crockett has been among those discussing legal challenges.

Can Republicans compel Dems to return?

Attorney General Ken Paxton has promised his office will assist in “hunting down and compelling the attendance” of any Democrat who flees the state, however, political scientists say that there is no direct way for Republicans to compel the return of legislators who have left the state.

“If the House members are outside of the state of Texas, there is really nothing they can do,” said Jones.

If Democrats were still in Texas, Republicans could deploy the Department of Public Safety to track them down and physically compel their attendance. In 2003, during a redistricting battle, state troopers and even federal resources were used to search for missing legislators.

“They employed some federal resources to track planes that were flying out that they suspected had members on them,” Rottinghaus said of the 2003 episode.

The challenge of tracking down missing legislators was vividly illustrated during the 1979 “Killer Bees” episode, when a dozen Democratic state senators hid out in Austin to block changes to the primary election date. Then-Lt. Gov. William P. Hobby Jr. sent Texas Rangers and state troopers to hunt them down, leading to a weekslong game of hide-and-seek.

“They got caught eventually because of an enterprising reporter who was looking at a tip or rumor, and managed to confront one of the state senators taking out the trash,” Taylor said.

But Republicans’ most potent weapons may be political rather than legal. They can pressure Democrats by arguing other important legislation, including emergency aid for recent Hill Country flooding and regulations on consumable hemp, is being held hostage by the walkout.

“State Republicans may make a case that the future of the STAAR test or THC regulation or some funding for some of the disasters that have taken place recently are all in jeopardy because Democrats have bailed.” Rottinghaus said.

Republicans could also take novel, aggressive measures, like trimming the $20,000 monthly operating budgets given to House members to run their offices’ operations or declaring the seats vacant and triggering special elections, Rottinghaus said. The last option has never been used, even during the most contentious previous quorum breaks.

For some legislators, that most drastic option is already on the table. In a July 30 letter sent to the Republican Caucus, Rep. Brent Money, R-Greenville wrote “Should members flee the state for an extended period, the Governor has the constitutional authority to declare their seats vacant.”

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Correction, Aug. 3, 2025 at 8:01 p.m.:

A previous version of this story should have stated that Bill Hobby was lieutenant governor during the 1979 quorum break by state Senate Democrats.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/03/texas-quorum-breaks-history/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The post Denying quorum has been a part of Texas politics since 1870 appeared first on feeds.texastribune.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning

The content provides a detailed and factual overview of quorum-breaking tactics used primarily by Texas House Democrats in opposition to Republican redistricting efforts. It includes expert analysis from political scientists, historical context, and discusses the legal and practical challenges faced by both parties. While the article appears balanced and informative, it subtly frames Democratic quorum breaks as a justified “last resort” against Republican strategies, which may reflect a slight left-leaning perspective typical of The Texas Tribune’s generally progressive-leaning audience and editorial stance.

SUMMARY: Willie Simpson III, 32, was arrested in northwest Harris County for shooting two of his ex-girlfriend’s children, ages 16 and 12, after threatening to kill them. According to court documents, Simpson found the teenage boys outside their apartment, ordered them inside or he would shoot, then opened fire when they fled. The 19-year-old was shot in the abdomen, and the 16-year-old jumped from a second-floor balcony to escape. Simpson also kicked in a bathroom door and shot a 12-year-old girl. A 13-year-old present hid and was unharmed. Texts show Simpson threatened to kill the kids if their mother didn’t return. He faces five felony charges and was held on \$350,000 bond.

Newly obtained court documents say the man threatened to kill the woman’s four children before he shot two of them last Sunday.

Source

“In draft congressional map, Texas Republicans bet big that gains with Latino voters will persist” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

WASHINGTON — In the 2024 election, Hispanic voters fled their traditional Democratic Party roots, casting their ballots for Republican Donald Trump at historic rates in areas long seen as Democratic strongholds, like South Texas.

With their plan to flip five blue seats under a new congressional map introduced in the Legislature last week, Texas Republicans are betting Latino voters will stick with them in 2026.

In three of the districts Republicans hope to capture — the 9th Congressional District in east Houston, the 35th District southeast of San Antonio and Rep. Henry Cuellar’s 28th District in South Texas — the GOP map-drawers crafted new boundaries that make each seat more favorable for Republicans while also adding more Hispanic voters to the district.

These three districts would be majority Hispanic, as would the seat held by Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, whose South Texas seat Republicans are also gunning for.

If the districts were in place during the 2024 election, Trump would have carried each by at least 10 percentage points, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.

Such margins depended, in large part, on Hispanic-majority counties whose voters have been moving rightward since 2016. And in 2024, when the vast majority of U.S. counties shifted right, predominantly Hispanic counties saw even more pronounced movement.

Trump carried all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley after failing to crack 30% in the region during his first presidential bid, and he won 14 of the 18 Texas counties within 20 miles of the border.

But Trump’s coattails extended only so far down the ballot, with Democrats winning numerous local races in the same counties that recorded eye-popping shifts at the top of the ticket. Cuellar and Gonzalez secured reelection even as Trump carried their districts, and even with Cuellar also facing down an indictment for alleged money laundering and bribery.

GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, appearing just below Trump on November ballots, ran well behind his party’s nominee in a number of South Texas locales, especially those with larger Latino populations. If the new lines proposed for Cuellar’s district had been in place, the 28th District would have gone for Trump by 10 points, while Cruz would have eked out a narrow 0.1% win.

Without Trump at the top of the ticket in 2026 and three of the five target districts increasing their share of Hispanic voters, the GOP map-drawers are making what could amount to a risky bet that enough Latino voters will turn out again to support GOP candidates across the ballot.

Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who has worked in Texas politics for decades and hosts a podcast about Latino voters, believes Trump has a unique appeal to Hispanic voters that doesn’t necessarily trickle down to other Republican candidates.

Especially potent was Trump’s assertion that the economic system was rigged against Americans and he would be the one to fix it, Rocha said.

That sort of messaging transcends partisan affiliation, Rocha said, arguing that Trump in 2024 and progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020 each overperformed in the Rio Grande Valley and with Latino voters “because their messages aligned around a rigged system, around failed trade policies and reinvigorating economic populism.”

“The newest swingy electorate in Texas”

Trump’s freewheeling lack of political correctness also led some Hispanic voters to associate him with “machismo,” Gilberto Hinojosa, the former Texas Democratic Party chair and Cameron County judge, said. “In some parts of our community, they could relate to that.”

Campaign operatives from both parties pinpointed two issues that drove Latino voters to the right last November: immigration and the economy.

During the campaign, those operatives told the Tribune, President Joe Biden and Democrats struggled to convince voters they were doing enough to secure the southern border, while inflation hit the electorate’s pocketbooks and proved an especially damaging issue for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris among Hispanic voters.

“Four years of open borders and 12 million illegal immigrants coming into this country did real damage across Texas, but in the Hispanic community in particular,” Cruz told The Texas Tribune last week. “I think that was a big part of the reason why both President Trump and I won Hispanics statewide, and why the two of us flipped the Rio Grande Valley.”

But Rocha doesn’t think this means Trump and other Republicans are sure to hold onto those gains with Latino voters, who he labeled “the newest swingy electorate in Texas.”

Trump’s approval rating is underwater among Hispanic voters. A July national poll by Equis Research found that one-third of Hispanic voters who backed Biden in 2020 then Trump in 2024 are planning to vote for a Democratic congressional candidate. Another one-third of these voters are undecided.

Democrats are gearing up to court Latino voters in next year’s midterms by homing in on the economy, already deploying messaging that highlights Trump’s tariff strategy — which many economists have said will worsen inflation — to paint Republicans as unconcerned with the day-to-day lives of Americans.

“Throughout this cycle Democrats will be laser focused on making sure Latino voters know the harm that has come from the Republican trifecta and highlighting how Republicans broke their promise to lower costs and instead gave billionaires a tax cut at their communities’ expense,” said Madison Andrus, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats’ campaign arm.

Republicans largely believe they can outflank Democrats by simply reminding voters of the record-high inflation under Biden’s presidency.

Prices for some common goods have fallen since Trump returned to the White House, a fact that GOP operative Wayne Hamilton sees as a bulwark against a Democratic resurgence among Latinos. “Long term, that’s good for South Texas,” said Hamilton, who leads a group, Project Red TX, that focuses on recruiting and supporting Republican candidates in South Texas. “That’s good for the border. That’s good for America.”

Jobs are also likely to be central to any messaging to Latino voters.

In South Texas, many Hispanic voters work in the fracking industry — a sector some Democrats want to phase out in favor of clean energy alternatives. That plan, Hinojosa said, is viewed by Latinos as an existential threat to their jobs and way of life, despite the employment opportunities also generated by renewable energy.

“What’s important to Hispanics in South Texas is quality jobs that provide good wages and working conditions and benefits,” Hinojosa said. Rocha agreed, arguing that Democrats should run ads centered on the “sanctity of work.”

On the other side of the aisle, Republicans are looking to do the same. To win Hispanic voters, Cruz said Republicans need to “remain the party of jobs,” calling it his “No. 1 priority in the Senate.”

The National Republican Campaign Committee is also recruiting Latino candidates to run in districts that could tilt in their favor if new Texas maps are approved. Gonzalez has drawn a challenge from Eric Flores, a Republican Army veteran and lawyer from Mission, while Cuellar may face Democrat-turned-Republican Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, who is mulling a race.

“Hispanic communities in South Texas are sick and tired of out of touch Democrats Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez turning their backs on them time and again,” NRCC spokesperson Zach Bannon said in a statement.

Mayra Flores, a Republican who briefly represented the 34th District after winning a 2022 special election for part of 2022, has already announced a bid against Cuellar.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/03/texas-redistricting-congressional-map-latino-hispanic-voters-gop/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The post Texas GOP redistricting map bets on continued Latino support appeared first on feeds.texastribune.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

This article presents a balanced report on the shifting political landscape among Hispanic voters in Texas, highlighting both Republican gains and Democratic efforts without overt endorsement of either side. The coverage includes perspectives from Democratic and Republican strategists, acknowledges the complexities behind voter behavior, and discusses policy issues relevant to both parties. Language remains neutral and factual, focusing on electoral data and campaign strategies rather than promoting partisan viewpoints. This approach suggests an intent to inform rather than persuade, characteristic of centrist reporting.