An Illinois judge on Aug. 13 denied Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s request to enforce civil arrest warrants for Texas House Democrats who left the state to try to block a mid-cycle redistricting effort that could give Republicans five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Judge Scott Larson of the Eighth Circuit Court of Illinois ruled that his court lacks the jurisdiction to do what Paxton was seeking.
“As the Petitioner has failed to present a legal basis for the court to obtain subject matter jurisdiction over this cause of action, this court is without jurisdiction to grant Petitioner’s emergency motion to rule on pleadings,” Larson wrote in an Aug. 13 ruling.
Dozens of Texas House Democrats left the Lone Star State on Aug. 3 and have assembled in Illinois and other states in an attempt to stop the redistricting by denying the state House of Representatives a quorum. Last week, Paxton asked the Eighth Circuit Court of Illinois to enforce civil arrest warrants, signed by Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows, for the fleeing Democrats.
After several Texas House Democrats appeared with California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently, Paxton filed a similar request in the Golden State.
Paxton and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also asked the state Supreme Court to remove some of the fleeing lawmakers from office. While Texas’s high court declined to immediately rule on the request this week, it has set a deadline for early September to receive responses from both sides before making a ruling.
“I’m authorized to call a special session every 30 days. It lasts 30 days. And as soon as this one is over, I’m gonna call another one, then another one, then another, then another one,” Abbott told “Fox News Sunday.”
It’s not clear how long the House Democrats will stay out of Texas. On Aug. 13, state Rep. Gene Wu, the House Democratic Caucus chair, told reporters that he believes their walkout has inspired Democrat-led states such as California and New York to respond to Abbott’s efforts by redrawing their maps in retaliation.
“[When] I first talked about it, we thought and we discussed that maybe it was a kind of a grand, maybe too ambitious or high-minded, that we’re going to try to excite other people, to get other people into action, to start a fire in this country that will help take our country back,” Wu said.
“In the past week, we have heard from California, we have heard from New York, we have heard from Illinois that people are ready to stand up. People are ready to fight back.”
President Donald Trump said that Republicans could pick up as many as five House seats through the mid-cycle redistricting effort in Texas.
These gains would help the GOP retain control of the House in the 2026 midterm elections. Historically, the incumbent party in the White House typically loses seats in Congress during the midterms, as happened in 2018 and 2022. Democrats have accused Trump of encouraging Texas’s redistricting in an effort to mitigate potential losses in next year’s elections.
On Aug. 2, a Texas House committee advanced legislation that would redo the map. The next day, enough Democrats fled Texas to deprive the state House of a quorum.
States usually redraw their congressional maps after each census, with Texas’s last map being produced in 2021. In response to Texas Republicans’ redistricting plan, some Democrat-led states such as California proposed doing the same in retaliation.
On Aug. 14, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would convene a Nov. 4 special election to put a new congressional map before Golden State voters.
“We can’t stand back and watch this democracy disappear district by district all across the country,” Newsom said, adding that he believes the effort would net Democrats five more seats in the House of Representatives in 2026.
Critics of mid-cycle redistricting allege the efforts amount to “gerrymandering,” which is the practice of purposefully drawing districts to give an advantage to one political party over another. Some groups in California have already said they would sue to block Newsom from redrawing the state’s maps.
Other states, including Republican-led Florida and Democrat-led New York, are also threatening to rewrite their congressional districts mid-cycle in response to both Texas and California.
