Opting to use what Texas politicians called a nuclear option, dozens of Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives arrived in Chicago on Sunday under threat of fines, arrest and removal from office to deny Republicans the quorum they need to redraw five congressional districts aimed at helping President Donald Trump and the national GOP maintain its narrow U.S. House majority in next year’s midterm elections.
A supportive Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker met the Texas Democrats after they landed Sunday evening at O’Hare International Airport. At a late-night news conference, Pritzker praised the Texans for displaying “a righteous act of courage” as he called Trump a “cult leader” and “would-be dictator.” The Illinois governor also criticized Texas Republicans for using a special legislative session in Austin, aimed at providing relief for last month’s flood victims in the state’s Hill Country, to please Trump and use it “as political cover to push through a racially gerrymandered congressional map.”
“Let’s be clear, this is not just rigging the system in Texas. It’s about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come,” Pritzker said at the news conference, held at the west suburban Carol Stream headquarters of the DuPage County Democratic Party.
Pritzker vowed to do “everything we can to protect” the visiting Texas Democrats from threats of arrest by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton because “they’re doing the right thing.”
“They are attempting to cheat. And you know, I think we all know, Donald Trump is a cheater. So is the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, in so many ways,” the Illinois governor said, referring to Paxton’s wife alleging adultery against her husband in court papers filed in June. “The cheating here is the fact that we are midstream in 2025, and they want to rewrite the map and for only one reason — the cult leader of their party tells them to do it because he knows he’s going to lose control of the (U.S.) House of Representatives.”
Texas state Rep. Gene Wu of Houston, the chair of the state’s House Democratic caucus, said the decision of his members to leave the state was “not a decision we make lightly, but it is one we make with absolute moral clarity.”
“The only thing we have in our minds is, what do we need to do to protect Texans? What do we need to do to protect Americans? And what each and every one of us has said is that we will do whatever it takes,” Wu said. “What that looks like? We don’t know but we’re here. We’re committed to this.”
Wu added that the group of lamakers was leaving Texas “to fight for Texans.”
“We will not allow disaster relief to be held hostage for a Trump gerrymander. We’re not walking out on our responsibilities; we’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent,” Wu said. “As of today, this corrupt special session is over.”
Although Wu did not have an exact count of Texas House Democrats who came to Illinois, he acknowledged some were traveling to the New York state capital of Albany and others were headed to Boston for the National Conference of State Legislatures’ annual conference.
By coming to Illinois, the Democrats from Texas left a place where Republicans dominate and now find themselves in a state where the opposite is true.
The 150-member Texas House has 88 Republicans and 62 Democrats, with 100 members required to be present for a quorum call to conduct legislative business. The Texas Democrats left the state after a House panel on Sunday scheduled the full chamber to vote on the new map on Monday — a roll call that now seems unlikely to occur.
Pritzker blasted Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, saying the walkout denies a quorum “to pass his rigged redistricting scheme,” which was encouraged by Trump’s political allies.
“The tool they’re using is a racist, gerrymandered map, a map that seeks to use racial lines to divide hard-working communities who have spent decades building up their power and strengthening their voices,” Wu said of the Republican governor and the GOP members of the legislature. “And Governor Abbott is doing this in submission to Donald Trump so that Donald Trump could steal these communities’ power and voice.”
In a statement, the Texas governor belittled the House Democrats by saying, “Real Texans do not run from a fight” and then warned he would seek to remove them from office and use his gubernatorial power to name their successors.
Setting a deadline of 3 p.m. Monday when the Texas House is to reconvene, Abbott warned that for “any member who fails” to show up, he would invoke an attorney general’s opinion to remove them for having “vacated their office” for breaking quorum. Abbott acknowledged a district court would have to deem whether they had abandoned their office.
Abbott also contended the absent legislators risked felony bribery prosecution for soliciting and accepting funds to cover any fines levied against them.
“I will use my full extradition authority to demand the return to Texas of any potential out-of-state felons,” Abbott wrote.
Pritzker and Abbott have clashed often in the last few years over the Texas governor’s decision to bus and fly thousands of immigrants from the southern border to Chicago, in part to mock state and city sanctuary policies, resulting in Illinois and the city spending tens of millions of dollars for services.
Pritzker said discussions about Texas Democrats seeking help from the governor began on June 28, when Pritzker attended a dinner for the Oklahoma Democratic Party. There, Pritzker met with Kendall Scudder, the head of the Texas Democratic Party, and the two spoke about the challenges facing Texas Democrats. Pritzker said he vowed to support and defend them if they came to Illinois.
The topic came up again a little more than a week ago when the governor met on Chicago’s South Side with some Texas Democratic lawmakers to discuss that state’s GOP midterm redistricting effort.
It’s not the first time Texas House Democrats have fled the state capital in Austin to deny a quorum. In July 2021, when Republicans in the state pushed for tighter restrictions on voting, they spent five weeks in Washington, D.C. The move prompted a Texas House rule of $500 per day fines for any such future absences.
But the Texas Tribune reported that in recent days, members of the state’s Democratic congressional delegation were contacting their campaign donor base to put together funds to compensate missing members for fines as well as their accommodations in Illinois. One estimate put the cost at $1 million per month.
Paxton, the Texas attorney general who is mounting a primary challenge to GOP U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, offered the services of his office in “hunting down and compelling the attendance of anyone who abandons their office” to deny a quorum.
“Democrats in the Texas House who try and run away like cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately,” Paxton wrote on X. “We should use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law.”
Pritzker, who is a billionaire, said he has no plans to pay for the Texas Democrats’ stay in the Chicago area, but his campaign staff was working to make hotel recommendations and helping with other logistics, according to a source close to Pritzker. Pritzker did not indicate if he would be among the fundraising donors to help.
The move by Democrats came a day after a Republican-led Texas House panel voted along party lines to advance a draft congressional map altering current district boundaries to create five districts that favor Republicans at the expense of Democratic seats. The GOP currently holds a 25-12 advantage among the 38-member congressional delegation, with one vacancy.
While the U.S. Department of Justice under Trump sought to offer legal justification for redrawing the map, contending four districts were unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered, Texas House Republicans flatly stated their goal was to increase GOP representation in the state’s congressional delegation.
“Different from everyone else, I’m telling you, I’m not beating around the bush,” said state Rep. Todd Hunter, the Corpus Christi Republican who sponsored the remap legislation. “We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance.”
Texas Democrats said the new map would come at the expense of representation for Black and Latino voters who would either be packed into new districts or widely dispersed among them.
It’s not the first time Illinois has become home for another state’s Democratic lawmakers. In 2011, Indiana Democrats crossed the border and stayed for five weeks in the Champaign-Urbana area to deny a quorum over a Republican push for union-weakening legislation and creation of a school voucher program. A right-to-work bill passed the following year under GOP majorities achieved through the 2011 remap.
Also in 2011, a contingent of 14 Democratic Wisconsin state senators fled Madison and gathered in Rockford to block a quorum on a GOP effort to strip collective bargaining rights for public employees. They returned nearly a month later, the Senate having already convened and the bill signed into law.
Illinois is no stranger to congressional district controversy. When Illinois Democrats drew and enacted the most recent congressional map, they pushed Republicans into three downstate seats, while giving themselves 14 members in the 17-member U.S. House delegation.
John Curran of Downers Grove, the Illinois Senate’s Republican leader, called Pritzker’s hosting of the Texas Democrats “the height of hypocrisy” since the Democratic governor has supported independent mapmaking and pledged to veto a gerrymandered map.
Curran called the current Illinois congressional map “shameless in its attempt to remove choice from voters.” Illinois Democrats, he said, “should be focused on strengthening democracy here in our state with fair maps instead of chasing national headlines by intervening in other states.”
But Pritzker defended the post-2020 federal census map that he signed into law, saying it “follows the Constitution” and contended the congressional delegation’s huge Democratic majority showed the party was good at “delivering for the people of Illinois” and was different than trying to redraw districts in the middle of a decade.
As for other Democratic-led states engaging in mid-decennial redistricting to counter the efforts of Texas Republicans, Pritzker, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, said, “all bets are off when the cult leader and would-be dictator of the United States tells Texas to midstream change the game when they know they’re going to lose in 2026. All bets are off. Everything’s got to be on the table.”
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