Texas governor signs controversial redistricting plan

AUSTIN, Texas (CN) — Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Friday signed into law a new congressional redistricting plan, ending a bitter fight in the state legislature and setting up a high-stakes legal battle.

In a video posted to social media, Abbott called the plan a “big beautiful map” — a reference to the tax and spending plan that Trump called his big beautiful bill.

Abbott claimed House Bill 4 will create fairer representation for Texans in Congress. Under the new map, Republicans are favored to pick up an additional five seats in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.

“Texas is now more red in the United States Congress,” Abbott said in his video, holding up the bill to show his signature.

With his signing of HB 4, Abbott has answered President Donald Trump’s call for the state to give him and Republicans five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In a statement following the signing, Kendall Scudder, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, chastised Abbott for giving Texas over to Trump.

Abbott and Texas Republicans “love to boast about how ‘Texas Tough’ they are, but when Donald Trump made one call, they bent over backwards to prioritize his politics over Texans,” Scudder said. “Honestly, it’s pathetic.”

Throughout the legislature’s consideration of HB 4, Republicans have repeatedly stated that their goals in redrawing the lines were purely political. They said they wanted to flip at least five seats currently held by Democrats.

However, in the latest legal challenge to the map, filed on behalf of 13 Texas residents, the nonprofit League of United Latin American Citizens or LULAC argues HB 4 is illegally discriminatory.

Their 67-page supplemental complaint builds upon a federal case brought by LULAC in 2021, which challenged the state’s redistricting following the 2020 census. The residents argue in the filing that HB 4 violates the U.S. Constitution and Section Two of the Voting Rights Act by engaging in racial gerrymandering.

“Even a cursory look at the new districts in HB 4 confirms the obvious — that the legislature engaged in race-based districting by targeting both individual voters based on their race and particular districts based on their racial composition to dilute the vote of Black and Latino Texans,” the residents state in their complaint.

State Republican lawmakers have defended HB 4 by saying that race was never a factor in drawing the new districts. They argue the map better reflects the gains Trump made among Latino voters throughout the state, especially in South Texas.

At the start of Texas’s redistricting efforts in July, an El Paso court was just beginning deliberations in the underlying case concerning the last maps.

With this new addition to the case, it is unclear when the court will issue its findings. The residents have asked for a preliminary injunction and argue the maps are unconstitutional.

The battle over the passage of HB 4 gave also rise to several other ongoing legal fights.

Those stemmed from Texas Democrats’ two-week-long walkout in protest of HB 4. As those Democrats traveled to states like Illinois, New York and California to prevent a quorum, Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, also a hardline Republican, sought to have the absent lawmakers expelled from office.

In petitions filed with the Texas Supreme Court, Abbott and Paxton argued the Democrats had abandoned their seats and should be removed from office. Both of those cases have been consolidated and are currently being briefed. Even though the Democrats have returned and the redistricting plan has been signed into law, Paxton has held firm that the members who left must face consequences. He plans to continue pursuing their removal. Abbott has also asked the legislature to assess penalties against those members who fled the state.

In addition, Paxton filed a suit against former El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke and his nonprofit, Powered by People, accusing them of bribing lawmakers to leave the state. He is seeking to revoke the group’s charter, which would effectively shut down its operations in Texas.

Texas’ effort to redraw its congressional map also ignited a redistricting push from Democrats in California. Lawmakers in the Golden State approved a plan to have voters decide in November whether the state should adopt a newly drawn map that gives Democrats a better chance at flipping five seats currently held by Republicans.

Several other states are currently weighing whether to follow Texas and California, sparking what observers are calling a redistricting arms race.

The current special session ends on Sept. 13. While Republicans in Texas have now succeeded in getting one of their top priorities passed, their work for the session is not done yet. They also want to restrict which restrooms transgender Texans can use, further limit people’s ability to access abortion-inducing drugs, tighten regulations on the state’s cannabis market and address the July 4 floods.

Follow @KirkMcDanie1