Bulwark Takes - Rep. Fletcher: Trump May LOSE the Texas Map Fight!

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

Sarah Longwell sits down with Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher to break down the Texas redistricting ruling and why a Trump-appointed judge delivered a major surprise. They dig into what this means for 2026 and why the fight over fair maps is far from over. Get 40% off your order during Soul’s Black Friday-Cyber Monday sale at https://GetSoul.com with promo code BULWARKTAKES Take our quick survey and help us make The Bulwark even better. https://bit.ly/bulwarkvideo

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please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everyone. Sarah Longwell here, publisher of the bulwark, and I have the fantastic Lizzie Fletcher, Congresswoman from Texas, here to explain all that's happening with this Texas redistricting case to me. Lizzie, thanks for being here. Glad to be here. Always glad to be with you, Sarah. I can't believe I just called you Lizzie. I should call you Congresswoman Fletcher like a grown-up. The problem is Congresswoman Fletcher and I know each other because we both went to Kenyon and she was five years older than I was. And so we were at reunion together. Yes, we were on a panel. So that's how it started. And honestly, most people call me Lizzie because I put it on everything.

You know, fun fact, I put it on the ballot, even though I was a practicing lawyer, putting Elizabeth on everything, because I was like, but everybody knows me as Lizzie. So, you know, you're welcome. There's a lot of, like, Team Lizzie merch. I can get you singing in that. Sure. And it's all good. So I'm perfectly happy for you to call me Lizzie.

Please do. Okay. I just, I sometimes forget. decorum is still an important part of our system. And you are a congresswoman and a, I know, I know. It's all so sad and depressing. Well, you know what? It looks like to some degree there are still rules. There are still courts. And one of them just ruled there in Texas that the new congressional map for 2026 that the president of the United States pushed on Texas as mid-cycle redistricting. in order to procure more democratic, I'm sorry, we'll cut that, to get more Republican House seats, squeeze them out of Texas, the court said no. They said that they have to stick to the lines passed in 2021. So three judge panel that ruled that.

Can you just unpack sort of, because we talked about this going back when this first broke, and now lots has happened, a lot of stuff has happened since then. but what does this ruling mean and will it stick? Yeah, okay, so huge questions. I'm going to try to break it down a little, but I want to start where you started because I do think it is really important to take a minute and think about this opinion

that this panel just issued. It was a two to one ruling. And I think that there are many things about it substantively that are hugely important to talk about. But I also think, you know, when it came down, First of all, I was so excited to see the court reaching the right result, especially after I know how much hard work the team put into this. When I say the legal team, I mean the lawyers. And as a lawyer, I can say these lawyers cannot get enough shoutouts.

They did an incredible, incredible job. They were ready to go. As soon as the map was signed, they'd been working on this and pouring their heart and souls into this for years. There's a big legal team. And I'm so grateful to them. And I'm also really grateful that the judge who issued this 160-page opinion, it ran in Texas, you know, we elect our judges. He was on the Texas Supreme Court for many years as a Republican judge.

He was appointed to the bench by President Trump. And he issued this opinion that found that Texas Republicans, Governor Abbott, and all of those who were involved in this process, discriminated against. black and Hispanic Texans, not only in what they said about the map, but in the map itself. And so it really gives me not only the substantive appreciation for the result that it brings us, but also a lot of hope that, you know, we don't need to give up hope. There are still really good people out there who are doing the right thing, who are looking at the facts and the law and reaching the conclusions. Everything is not a foregone conclusion.

And as we head into 2026 and we think about the elections and all this stuff that we're working on, like it just gives me a lot of hope we can get there. Like we can we can turn this stuff around. Obviously the elections gave us a lot of that hope, a lot of other things. But I just want to point out kind of starting with, you know, the judge that issued this opinion, this is a real profile and courage. And we don't see that many of those around here these days. And so I think that that is important.

Now substantively what it does is the plaintiffs, there are five different plaintiff groups. that all work together and asked the court to temporarily stop the map that Governor Abbott signed earlier this year, the 2025 map, from going into effect for the 2026 elections, and basically asked for a preliminary injunction requiring the 26 elections to go forward on the existing congressional map, which they were already in court arguing was discriminatory, but that we would use that map for the next election and have the court look at and redraw potentially the 2021 map. But that that, which is the status quo, would stay in effect for the 2026 elections, and then the court will take up the substance and look at the map overall for a permanent remedy.

So that's where we are. The state of Texas immediately appealed. It will have a direct appeal to the United States Supreme Court. So it's headed to the Supreme Court. it is fully anticipated that the governor and the state of Texas will ask the Supreme Court, if the district court doesn't do it, to stay the judge's order. So that's the next thing we're looking for, is to see whether the order, in joining use of the new map and requiring use of the 2021 map, the existing congressional districts we have now,

will get stayed or will continue as the Supreme Court takes up the case. You got any, are we optimistic about the Supreme Court? I mean, you're a lawyer, so you know the ruling that came out from two out of the three judges. Did it make the kind of compelling case that the Supreme Court might be unlikely to overrule or does it seem like there are flaws in it or something that the Supreme Court could, just any little thing they could use to sort of procedurally or technically give Trump what he wants? So my read on it is this is an incredibly thorough, well-researched, well-thought-out, well-articulated opinion. Like I said, it's 160 pages, replete with maps and other things. But it really is kind of a brutal review of what the Texas Republican leaders did in this case. It really systematically exposes how race was used illegally to configure the map and how Governor Abbott and Texas Republicans illegally used race to describe it, to promote it, to justify adopting it. And so I think that it's a really important, clear roadmap as to why this

injunction was issued and why it should stay in place. And I think that the other thing about it is that there was a dissent. And the dissenting opinion is it's very, passionate, but it is not a clear articulation of what's wrong with the evidence. You know, the injunction really lays out all of the evidence and shows why the court reached this result. And the other important thing to know, because there's so many things about voting rights and voting cases, and we can talk about it a lot more. But basically, this case was brought on constitutional grounds. And they only had to reach one finding, which was that the state Texas discriminated against minority voters in Texas with this map and violating the 14th and 15th

amendments of the Constitution. And so it's not a voting rights case. There's no VRA claim that's going to get mixed up with the other VRA case that the Supreme Court's currently considering. So in that sense, it's pretty straightforward. And I am optimistic. I mean, I think the court reached the right result and the Supreme Court should allow this injunction to stand. I'm glad you, you, because we are seeing the Supreme Court kind of got the Voting Rights Act. And that's, so that's an interesting point that I had not considered, which is that they pertain, that you're saying the lawyers specifically tried to stay out of that framework because they know the Supreme Court can get funny about that. And instead, focused narrowly on the law there in Texas. Actually, I want to remind you of something you told me when we talked last about this case because it stuck with me and it seems even truer today than it was when we talked about it, which was even if the Supreme Court were to, you know, overturn, overrule the ruling, which I hope it doesn't.

But if it did, the Republicans can't feel as great about Texas, even with the new maps because Hispanics, more than just about any other demographic are just the bottom is dropping out of them for Trump. And so to the extent that the new maps were redrawn with a little bit of a bullish read on the political realignment that Hispanics could be giving to Republicans, that seems not to be true anymore. And so you told me at the time, hey, Sarah, even if this happens, I still think we can do better than they think we can. Do you still feel that way? Absolutely. I still feel that way. And when you look at what they did, they essentially made two of the districts that Democrats currently hold in South Texas much more difficult based on the assumptions they made coming out of 2024 in the election results in 2024. I think that that was an overestimation and certainly what we saw in the elections in New Jersey, in Virginia, and across the country, you know, local elections in Texas too, you saw a shift back in terms of Democrats. winning and picking up ground everywhere. But also they took those two districts and thought they made them more Republican. We've always thought we could compete. They'll be hard. You know,

they're not easy races. These are frontline races either way. We feel very optimistic that we can pick up the other district in the valley, which is currently held by a Republican, but under either map, we feel really good about our chances of actually picking that up. And then in the new map, they had drawn another district kind of outside of San Antonio. We feel very strong about that one. But certainly, we know that the efforts that they've undertaken to disenfranchised voters are also going to backfire. People are mad. And everybody in Texas should be mad because ultimately what they're doing. And ultimately, the reason people hate gerrymandering is because you want it to matter when you go to the ballot box, right? You want to be able to say, throw the bums out or you're doing a great

job. And it's the people who draw the maps, draw them in a way that it doesn't matter what you do. That's just bad for democracy, no matter who you're going to vote for in the end. It takes away the agency and the beauty of citizenship for all of us who are trying to participate in this process. And so, you know, my view the whole time has been that this is going to anger everyone and it should anger everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike. And I think that that's definitely what we saw in Texas, the pushback against these maps was huge. And so I think they really did overplay their hand. And maybe they should be happy to stop where they are, take the loss and keep going rather than try to fight this in the Supreme Court. Because I think that what they're

trying to do is so undemocratic with a not just a capital D, but a lowercase D, that it's really going to backfire. Yeah. I mean, I hate gerrymandering. But I got to say, and I'm going to, this is maybe, I'm going to push on this a little bit. I was, I've always been anti-jerrymandering, but Donald Trump, because he does not want the oversight of a Democratic Congress, uh, he fears it more than anything else. Uh, he came in, right, and he pushed Abbott to do this. Mid-cycle redistricting doesn't happen, but it kicks off a redistricting, uh, war, right? And so California now passed just in this last election overwhelmingly. Uh, they're going to redo their maps, Abigail Spanberger, with her overwhelming defeat in Virginia,

she could redraw her maps. How do you, since you, you're taking sort of a, this is bad for democracy, and I believe that, I agree with it, but I'll just say for myself, I spent many years really trying to hold the line on norms, trying to hold the line on just because they're doing it, you know, we can't do it, we got to do what's right, but like, you also can't unilaterally disarm and not do. So how do you see it? Like, should Abigail Spanberger go in there and do the mid-cycle redistricting that she's certainly going to get pressure to do in Virginia and make those maps tilted in Democrats' favor

because Trump kicked off this cycle? Or should she stay pure? Annette, tell me what you think. Well, I love the way that you asked the question. And I think it is true that I not only support the outcome in this case, but I also supported Prop 50. And our volunteers were making phone calls. into California. And I welcomed Governor Newsom when he came to take his victory lap in Houston because what they're doing is important, which is fighting back. And you have to see the bigger

picture. And I think that that's one of the challenges that so many of us have right now is that there are a lot of people that are operating in the way that it was, right? And maybe that's where you were referring to yourself sort of holding on to the before times. And then there's also people who are operating in the how it should be, right? And that's where we all want to be, how it should be. But we have to operate in the how it is. And right now, there is no way we're going to have real democracy reform, real into gerrymandering and other things, unless Democrats take back control of the House and the Senate and ultimately the White House. We have to win in 26. We have to win in 28. And look, I'm not just saying that. When I was first elected to Congress in

2018 and came in in 2019. H.R. 1 was the Democrats' marquee legislation, the very first bill we entered. It's a democracy reform package. It included independent redistricting commissions. It included voting reforms like making election day, a federal holiday, dealing with campaign finance, and really overhauling a lot of the problems that we know are real in our system. But we cannot get there unless we operate in the now. And so we, We have to do everything we can to make sure that we win back the House and that Republicans aren't rewarded for what they did in Texas and what they're doing in Missouri and what they're doing in Indiana.

We cannot unilaterally disarm in this moment and we can't just sort of be happy to be on the high road because we have got so much at stake in these elections. You see it across the country. It's not just norms. administration is doing things that are unlawful, unconstitutional, un-American. We have to turn things around. And so I think it is absolutely fair to say we are going to match the energy. We are going to match and we are going to fight this fight as it needs to be fought. And I think that that is a fair position. That doesn't mean that we don't think that gerrymandering reform is necessary and that

it shouldn't change. And, you know, a lot of people, including people working on this case, have been fighting this gerrymandering for years in so many different ways, in court and other places. But we have to win back the House. We got to win the Senate and we got to take back the White House. That's the only way we're actually going to be able to make these reforms. Yeah. I would have accepted turnabouts fair play. They started it. Any of those, I would have taken any of those as an answer. Because they did, I mean, everybody was, This is why Texas is so important what happened there because it really was a shock to the system to say, oh, no, we're just going to randomly do this redistricting without a new census, the way that it's always done. And so, yeah, there's there's no choice but to fight back.

And I think for people who try to play gotcha with the argument about democracy by saying, oh, well, you're now supported in Virginia, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, say, you know, let's talk in good faith here about what's actually happening. So getting back to the Texas case, I don't know. I'm not deep enough in it to ask you super smart questions. I basically have asked you the ones that I have that as a high level political observer, I don't, but like, is there something you could tell me and our audience about what's happening there on the ground that you think is really interesting or that you think we need to know or you think we need to be looking for going forward?

Like, you want to tell us something nerdy about it? I'll take anything. Oh, my gosh. Okay. Well, I mean, obviously, I can get really nerdy, really quickly. But I think what I would say sort of big picture is what you just said, which was this, what was happening in Texas was sort of shocking to a lot of people. But it wasn't totally shocking to us. Number one, Texas has done this before. Thank you, Tom DeLay. Texas did this 20 years ago, mid-decade redistricting. But I think what was so important in this moment, moment was that the Texans really fought back, right? You had our legislators who were fighting in the legislature, who broke quorum, and they really raised the awareness across the country of what was happening and how bad it was. They also were able to build a record that the lawyers could use in the legislature of why the legislators were doing this, what they were doing, what the intent was. And so they really did an incredible job. And then there are all these people who have just been working so hard as a coalition to take this on. So like I said, we had volunteers who were out responding to this, talking to neighbors during the redistricting, putting in comments,

testifying before the legislator, taking buses to Austin. Like people really mobilized around this. And of course, and you have this incredible legal team. I really can't say enough about how great the lawyers are and the work that they did is just tireless, round the clock. And I think that, you know, my takeaway and all of it is, one, the court reached the right result and it should stand, but two, it should give us all so much hope that when we come together, right, when we mobilize, we really can change things. I think for many of us, this has been a very difficult year. I saw a headline now I can't remember where it was probably on the bulwark now that I say that, but right after the elections, where I was like, okay, Democrats just ended their year-long Shibba. I don't know if you saw that,

but like, it's been a rough year. And I think that like the elections, what we saw in the redistricting is that there are a lot of good people out there trying to do the right thing. And we just need to organize and mobilize all of that energy. And it makes me feel very optimistic that we can move that forward into the 2026 election, certainly, but into 2028. Because it's been a, a crazy year, right? It's been a crazy year and a lot of bad things have happened. And I think a lot of people are worried that this is where we're stuck and this is where we have to be. I think this is where we are and we have to respond in the moment. But I think we can get to a much better place. And I think that the kind of coalition that came together around this should give us all

a lot of hope for the future. That kind of optimism is why people come to my videos. And I'll tell you what, it must, something good must be happening because JVL yesterday, his newsletter was like maybe it's going to be okay, guys, which so some, some kind of tide is turning here. Okay, Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher, thank you so much for sitting down with us, breaking down this Texas redistricting thing, because it is, you know, it's funny. It is a, it's one of those complicated, wonky things, but I'll just say as a matter of communications, tactics, and strategy, one of the things the people did in Texas is they went and, like, left the state after it, right, so that they couldn't do it right away. And I think when they did that, everybody's like, why are they doing this? Like,

why did they run off to different states and they got to get brought back? They raised the salience of this. They showed people what it looks like to fight back and to say, we're not going to just do it. And even though it didn't have like a clear plan of what was going to happen, they weren't going to be gone for forever, they did make this an issue that now has become, even if it's not something that is, you know, everybody understands the ins and outs of. People have understood. that it is one of the ways to really fight back in this moment. And that is really important. So I join you in your hope. And thanks for joining us and bringing it. Thanks, Sarah. It's always so good to be with you. And I appreciate the chance to talk about this.

You know, I love to talk all things, Texas, almost as much as all things Kenyan. So look forward to next time. Well, when we've saved democracy, we'll do our Kenyan podcast where we make people just listen to us talk about, you know, Gambier, Ohio and why it's so great. I love that. I'm right. there for it. Can't wait. All right. Thanks.