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By taking up new congressional maps pushed by President Trump first, Republicans hope to discourage Democrats from walking out of a special session before they vote on flood relief.
July 21, 2025Updated 5:03 p.m. ET
Republicans in the Texas Legislature are planning to hold off on voting on measures to address the state’s deadly July 4 flooding until after they approve a partisan redistricting of Texas’ U.S. House boundaries, hoping to thwart Democrats’ efforts to block new House maps, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
Republican leaders gaveled in the special legislative session on Monday, called by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican with an ambitious list of demands for the session. The biggest by far are flood response, driven by a disaster that killed at least 135 people, and redistricting, driven by President Trump.
Public hearings on the floods start on Wednesday in Austin and in hard-hit Kerrville next week. Hearings on redistricting will span the next two weeks in Austin, Houston and the Dallas area.
Texas Republicans had been working quietly for several months to take up Mr. Trump’s call for an aggressive redrawing of the state’s congressional maps, aiming to gain five additional Republican seats in the U.S. House and help the party keep control of the chamber after the 2026 midterms.
Then the floods hit on July 4 and prompted calls for state leaders to improve warning systems and provide disaster relief.
Now those two imperatives — one a natural disaster, the other overtly political — could create an incendiary atmosphere as the legislative session builds steam, with just 30 days to accomplish both.
Voting on new congressional maps before any response to the Hill Country floods could create a political liability for Republicans, who control all levels of Texas government. Texas is still reeling from the disaster, which is one of the worst in the state’s modern history, and few Texans have voiced concerns about the state’s political maps.
Forty-eight Texas House Democrats on Monday signed a letter urging the State House speaker, Dustin Burrows, to take up flooding legislation ahead of redistricting.
“There is no greater purpose of the government at this time,” the letter stated. “Texas families are grieving their dead and Texas communities are hurting,” the members said. “In this special session, flood relief must come first.”
But advancing the new maps first could also help Republicans accomplish their goal by discouraging Democrats in the Texas House from staging a walkout to deny the legislature a quorum for a final vote on redistricting. Such a walkout would also impede new flood legislation.
Final votes on the new maps could come early next month, according to the people, who requested anonymity to discuss the planning and cautioned that the schedule could still change.
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Some Republican lawmakers said going forward with redistricting first made sense because the issues raised by the floods were more complicated than those related to political maps.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if the redistricting vote, just due to logistics, happened before the disaster preparedness,” said State Representative Wes Virdell, who represents Kerr County, the epicenter of the flooding, and sits on the select committee addressing the disaster during the special session.
“It’s going to take longer for us to to get a thorough review of what happened and ways to possibly respond to it in the future,” said Mr. Virdell. “Whereas redistricting is just the nuts and bolts. It’s just a logistics issue.”
Representatives for Speaker Burrows and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who leads the State Senate, did not respond to questions about the timing of bills during the special session.
With encouragement from some of the party’s national leaders, Texas Democrats have been weighing whether to stage a walkout. They have done so during past redistricting efforts to oppose what they said would be highly gerrymandered Republican maps designed to deprive Democratic voters in Texas’ biggest cities of fair representation. Those previous efforts did not stop Republicans from redrawing the maps in their favor.
But some Democratic members have been hesitant this time, particularly because of new rules in the Texas House meant to prevent a quorum-breaking walkout that would impose fines of $500 a day on each absent member.
At least 51 of the 62 Democrats in the 150-member Texas House would have to join the walkout in order to deny a quorum and stop further action in the legislature. As of Monday, it was not clear the numbers were there.
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On Friday, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, traveled to Houston to meet with the Democratic leaders in the Texas House, offering support.
“If Texas Republicans want a showdown, we will give them a showdown,” Mr. Martin said in a statement.
Mr. Martin also pointed to a vow by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California to respond to any redrawn maps in Texas by seeking to redraw the maps in his state in a way to benefit Democrats. “The D.N.C. is right there with him,” Mr. Martin said.
In truth, it would be next to impossible for California to respond to the Texas gambit in time for the midterms, since Californians voted in 2010 to enshrine in the state’s constitution an independent commission that draws California’s political maps once a decade following the decennial census.
By contrast, Texas Republicans are no strangers to hardball gerrymandering, even if it means redrawing maps in the middle of the decade, driven by political imperatives, not census-mandated demographic changes. In 2003, the legislature did just that, converting a narrow two-seat majority for Democrats into a 21-to-11 Republican advantage.
On Saturday, a few dozen Democrats protested the impending redistricting in the searing heat along a highway in Southwest Houston. Among them was State Representative Gene Wu, who leads Democrats in the Texas House and is under intense pressure over the walkout, both from those in favor and others in his caucus who are wary.
“We’re prepared to take whatever measure is necessary,” Mr. Wu said in an interview. “I know there’s a lot of national people putting pressure on our members to take certain actions, but our members know what to do, and at what time, and we’re going to trust their judgment.”
On Monday, Speaker Burrows named Mr. Wu to the 21-member, Republican-led redistricting committee in the State House. Its first meeting was expected on Thursday.
State Representative Ron Reynolds, a Houston-area lawmaker, said in an interview that Democrats should embrace the “nuclear option,” a walkout.
“My opinion is that we should break a quorum because that’s the only way we’re going to stop this racial gerrymandering,” Mr. Reynolds said.
Lawmakers, at Mr. Abbott’s direction, are also going to be considering legislation on more than a dozen other topics during the monthlong session, including restrictions on mail-order abortion pills, regulations on consumable hemp products and property taxes.
Dave Montgomery contributed reporting from Austin.
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
