Bulwark Takes - Rep. Cesar: Texas Gerrymandering Could Backfire Badly

Episode Date: July 19, 2025

Rep. Greg Casar joins Lauren Egan to discuss the aggressive push to redraw congressional maps in Texas ahead of the 2026 midterms, an effort that could violate the Voting Rights Act, suppress minority votes, and set a dangerous precedent nationwide.

Hi there, my name's Andy. And my name's Anna. And we are two of the four hosts of the podcast No Such Thing As A Fish. We present every week the most amazing, wonderful, insane, hilarious, bizarre facts you've ever heard. Facts like, did you know America has a national grocery bag packing competition? Did you know, Anna, the company Volkswagen sells more sausages than it does cars? Yes, we've got those two facts and about a billion more in our podcast archives for you to listen to.

We chat about them, we laugh about them, we make the occasional terrible pun. It's great fun. It's called No Such Thing As A Fish. Why don't you listen now? What's up, guys? It's Lauren Egan at The Bulwark and I've got Representative Greg Kassar here with me today. He is the chair of the House Progressive Caucus and he represents a Texas district that includes part of Austin and San Antonio. Congressman, welcome to The Bulwark. Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, of course. So I wanted to talk with you today because there's honestly just like some crazy shit going on in Texas right now with Redistricting can you just set the table for us get us up to speed on what's been happening? This is a five alarm fire with the chance of spreading outside of Texas all over the country It's the biggest thing happening in American politics right now that you haven't heard about Donald Trump just got done, as we know, ramming through a bill to kick 17 million people off of their health care, giving money to his billionaire buddies,

doing all sorts of corrupt stuff, and he has no plan for winning the midterm elections, but this is his plan for rigging those elections. And he's starting off in Texas, and then he's set himself, if you don't elections. And he's starting off in Texas. And then he's said himself, if you don't believe me, he said himself, he then wants to go do this in other parts of the country. He's demanding that Texas Republicans do his bidding, radically change their own districts in order to basically,

as he said, claim five more districts for himself, for Republicans. But in doing so, he wants to, in ways we've never seen before, violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965, change districts in ways that have been illegal for about 60, 70 years, and chop up communities of color to suppress their votes, get rid of Democratic members of Congress, and then actually leave very vulnerable sitting members of the Republican Party in Congress. And those folks, those sitting Republicans have to decide whether they want to stand up for their own constituents and for voting rights laws and stand up for their own districts

or just be Trump's water boys. And at this moment, it looks like they're just going to be Trump's water boys. And so folks need to speak up and speak out in a really big way, because if they're able to try to steal and rig elections by changing the rules in the middle of the game here, five seats in Texas, and then multiple ones in Ohio, and then they want to go to other states. We, a lot of us have been talking about how we could maybe hold Trump accountable in the midterm elections. They could be trying to prevent that from ever even happening starting next week. Yeah. So just to drill down on how this all went down, basically Trump and his political team has been putting pressure on governor Abbott, as I understand it for quite some time, to call this special session and to redraw the congressional maps

there. And then last week Abbott caved and he did it and he called this special session. Were you surprised that Abbott decided to go along with this or did you have any hope that maybe Republicans would tell Trump no? There's always some small hope that Republicans could do the right thing, especially in the face of such death and disaster and destruction here in the Texas Hill country. Uh, you know, there are people, I'm sitting in Travis County right now where we had multiple people, including children die in the July 4th floods.

And so this special session should be about rebuilding and relief not about redistricting and we heard for a little while that maybe they weren't going to go and make this whole thing about politics but then the rumor that I've heard is that Donald Trump called Governor Abbott and went and called Texas Republicans and said, no, you guys work for me and I need you to deliver these seats for me. And these Texas Republicans don't want to change their own districts. They don't want to go represent a whole different part of the state in order to change the Democratic districts adjoining to them.

That puts those Texas Republicans at electoral risk to a Republican primary challenge from the new areas they suddenly represent. They stopped representing some towns, now they represent whole new ones. It puts them at a real legal problem because to do this they have to even further violate the Voting Rights Act beyond the already gerrymandered, racially gerrymandered maps. And it also could leave them more vulnerable to a Democratic challenger. But Donald Trump is not thinking about the law, he's not thinking about long-term, he's not thinking about the Republican Party, he's just thinking about himself and he's basically just calling the shots. And I just haven't seen Texas Republicans find a backbone ever since Donald Trump was

elected again. And I'm not going to hold my breath. Yeah. And I mean, just like a quick refresher, typically redistricting happens once a decade after the new census is done. Right. It just happened a few years ago. Right.

Like it's 2025. We're like a good five years away from when this is supposed to happen again. Have you talked to Your colleagues in the Republican caucus about this. I'm just curious. Like what are they saying if you're even having conversations with? Oh, yeah, I mean look I respect private conversations With everybody even my Republican colleagues But what I'll tell you in general from the many of them that I've spoken with is that they all Oppose this as far as I can tell but nobody None of them have been able to or seemingly willing to speak out publicly to stop it

And so here's what I think the plan is to stop this first. We need a delay. We need time this. First, we need a delay. We need time. Second, we need to use that time to mobilize people not just in Texas, but around across the country. And then third, if they do do this, we need to hold them accountable for it. So delay tactics include filibusters and busting quorum, which means Democrats walking out, because if 50 Democrats walk out of the Texas House, you shut down business. We have a long tradition of filibusters in the Texas Senate. You could remember when Wendy Davis famously filibustered anti-abortion laws in Texas. We need to use that to delay and buy people time because most folks listening at home right now probably haven't heard about this until today. And then second, we've got to use that time. One part of the news we

haven't talked about yet, for example, is now that this is becoming public and Trump isn't able to do this in the dark of night, Governor Gavin Newsom in California has started saying, well, maybe California needs to look at its map. If Texas is going to look at its map, those are the sorts of things that we can start to have a real conversation about if we buy some time, because now California Republicans are starting to say, hey, what is Texas doing? You could put us at risk. legal case against these maps because if they're able to get rid of four or five of these democratically held districts, this would be a monumental change for the entire country. Because there's not five democratic districts in Texas. There's about 12 Democrats currently elected from the Texas delegation. There are 12 minority opportunity

districts, districts that are overwhelmingly people of color in Texas. And if they're able to come and basically decimate five of those, that sets a horrible precedent for the entire country. If Greg Abbott and Donald Trump get their way and the US Supreme Court rubber stamps that, it would have huge impacts for the whole nation. So we've got to be able to, like I said, delay, use that delay to build pressure all across the country about what this could do and we could hopefully stop the maps. And if we don't fully stop the maps and they are able to implement some of this, we've got to hold them accountable.

Changing five democratic districts likely changes all 38 districts in Texas. And that creates big opportunities for Democrats and independents, people of conscience, whether you're progressive or conservative to say voters should be picking their politicians. Politicians got to stop being able to redraw maps and rewrite the rules to pick their voters. We should be investing millions of campaign dollars in a way we haven't seen in my lifetime in Texas to target every Republican member of Congress that goes along with this scheme and let voters in these newly drawn districts pick who they want to elect. Yeah, I mean, there has been like a lot of conversation about that element of it in the sense that this is really, you know, kind of worrying that Trump and the Republicans are trying to do this, but at the same time,

and you've talked about this, they could be shooting themselves in the foot and making, you know, you've got to move voters into some districts. So if you take voters out of a really red district and you put them in a blue district, well, then that really red district is now a little bit more purple. Do you actually think that that could happen though? Because that seems to me, you know, just at first blush to be a bit of wishful thinking. But how are you thinking about whether or not that could actually happen? I think that these folks that are drawing these maps are all in the White House. Traditionally, in partisan and even racial gerrymandering,

it is people in their home state, in our case, in the state of Texas, those representatives drawing up the maps. But what you have is a couple of operatives in Washington, D.C. and in the White House drawing up maps. And they're taking their best guess not being in Texas about how Texas voters are going to vote this time around. And while I do believe that their goal is to shield Trump from accountability and get rid of five Democrats, I don't think these are always the most competent people. And so I do think

that Republican members of Congress should be deeply worried that they could lose in a wave election like 2018 if somebody in Washington, DC miscalculates and, you know, doesn't know about the voting patterns in Texas. I also think those Republican members of Congress should be worried because if they have to be radically redrawn, they don't just have to look left before crossing the street. They've got to look right because, look, if you represent one part of rural Texas, but then suddenly you're representing a totally different suburban part of Texas, there might be longstanding state reps and state senators on the Republican side that have represented that area much longer than you if you're a Republican congressman.

So I do think that if they get this plan through, they will likely take out some Democratic members, but they may wind up taking out some of their own either on the left or the right. You mentioned what Gavin Newsom is proposing in California. Do you think other blue states like in New York, which also has a lot of congressional districts, do you think that they should be looking at doing something similar? I think that those governors and blue states should be telling Republicans that they will likely reap what they sow. I ultimately let those governors and legislators speak for themselves. But here's what I've seen. I don't think that California having an independent commission

is like a shining light on the hill that inspires Governor Greg Abbott to establish an independent commission himself. That's not how this works. I believe we should have independent commissions and an end to gerrymandering across the nation. How do we get there? The way we get there is either by electing a majority in Congress and in the Senate with a president to do it nationally. I support that. Donald Trump is opposed to that. other plan is we have to get those states that have commissions to actually make sure that there's a cost to people like Greg Abbott for not having a commission. We can no longer keep on playing this game where people in righteous states do the right thing and therefore reward those governors that want to gerrymander their states.

So I think it's really important for blue state governors to take a very hard look at what's happening in Texas and for Republicans to know that they will reap what they sow. And if they keep on going forward with these radical and extreme gerrymandering plans, other people could do the same thing. Have you talked with anyone from the New York delegation or like the Colorado delegation about putting pressure on their governors to do something? Well, you know, if you I know that there's I myself also prefer Hulu and Netflix over watching C-SPAN.

But if you turn on C-SPAN, you'll see that we are all packed into that room. Day after day, night after night on the House floor, we were there up until one in the morning yesterday, and all the Democrats in Congress are talking about this. But so are the Republicans, because I've heard just yesterday that Republican congressmen and congresswomen from California are having emergency meetings and are starting to feel the heat and feel the consequences. And so that's why it's so important for everybody watching at home to call their members of Congress, call their state representatives, call their governor's offices and tell them

that we want voting rights for everyone across the country and we aren't going to let Donald Trump just get away with escaping accountability in the midterm elections. Look, when people ask me all the time, how do you have hope in this moment? You know, there's all this terrible stuff happening in Congress. I mean, just last night, nine billion dollars cut from basic things like public radio stations in rural America, making sure that we provide food in war-torn countries. Basic stuff like that. When I tell folks, you know, we recently voted on this bill to kick 17 million Americans off their health care, I tell folks we have a chance in these midterm elections to start to stop this horrible stuff. We have a chance in these midterm elections to start to stop this horrible stuff I think I was naive in saying that because we can't just wait till those midterm elections because what if

Trump is able to rate her rig those midterm elections right now as We speak so we need everybody to speak up about this. We're talking to people like I said, I'm talking to Members of Congress in each and every one of those states, but they aren't just accountable to their colleagues in Congress. They've got to hear from their voters. And so it's an important time for you to support your members of Congress in doing the right thing on this. You mentioned the independent commission in California and a lot of blue states do have something similar. New York has one, Colorado has one. Do you think in hindsight that that was short-sighted? Because I get the instinct, Democrats want to be the ones that are

fair. They want to play by the rules. Gerrymandering, y'all believe, is anti-democratic. Therefore, the commission makes sense to get politics out of it. But that assumes that Republicans are going to play by the same set of rules, But that kind of, you know, assumes that Republicans are gonna play by the same set of rules, which they do not. So do you feel like Democrats need to be a bit more ruthless about wielding power and not worry so much about playing by the rules and potentially just kind of ditch the independent commissions going forward where they can?

This is what I would have advocated for in California and New York. I would have advocated for in California and New York. I would have said California passes an independent commission, but it goes into effect the day that Texas passes an independent commission. New York should have passed a law saying New York will have an independent commission, but it will go into effect the day that Florida gets an independent commission. That's the way that this should work so that the entire country gets rid of gerrymandering. We shouldn't have a

situation where say a Colorado gets an independent commission and therefore disincentivizes an Alabama from ever having one. We need to recognize that if we show up with a butter knife to a gun fight, we are not representing our constituents well. Congressman, thanks for being here. Appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Hi there. My name is Andy. And my name is Anna.

And we are two of the four hosts of the podcast, No Such Thing As A Fish. We present every week the most amazing, wonderful, insane, hilarious, bizarre facts you've ever heard. Facts like, did you know America has a national grocery bag packing competition? Did you know, Anna, that company Volkswagen sells more sausages than it does cars? Yes, we've got those two facts and about a billion more in our podcast archives for you to listen to. We chat about them, we laugh about them, we make the occasional terrible pun.

It's great fun, it's called No Such Thing As A Fish. Why don't you listen now?