How Rep. Gene Wu is leading Texas lawmakers in the fight against gerrymandering

Democrats routinely and rightly catch flak for big talk backed by inaction; you can tell from their press releases that the party’s old guard establishment are the types to run in a fight. It’s therefore a delightful irony that the best recent instance of Democrats taking a stand against the Republican administration’s nonstop efforts at skirting democratic processes in pursuit of its violent nationalist and authoritarian agenda involves exactly that: running.

On July 9, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special legislative session scheduled for July 21. If Abbott’s to-do list kept only to addressing the monumental screw-ups that directly resulted in the deaths of 100 Texans and counting, with innocent children attending summer camp included in the tally, this wouldn’t seem unusual. But this is Texas—the place where born-again Christians on death row get twice the three-drug protocol, and where no one in power genuinely cares about kids other than as an excuse to get up to no good—and “no good” comprises the bulk of Abbott’s scheme. His true intentions were to draw up new congressional maps, more than a year ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

No more naked a power grab has been attempted in President Donald Trump’s second presidency to date. Traditionally, states redistrict once every 10 years upon the completion of the census. It is 2025. Maps were redrawn at the start of the new decade. Thus, Abbott’s goal in calling the legislative session isn’t at all about flood warnings. It’s about pouring contempt on the law in the hope of currying favor with Trump. Redrawing maps now would secure up to five new Republican seats in Texas, and in so doing, a better-cushioned right-wing majority in the U.S. House of Representatives come the midterms. The move is underhanded. It’s scummy. It’s mercifully transparent. And Texas Democrats weren’t having it (and still aren’t, as of this writing).

Led by Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the Texas House Democratic caucus, Texas’ Democrat lawmakers took a hike out of state on Aug. 3, knowing full well that doing so would break quorum and prevent the Texas House from voting, and as such, from redrawing the maps. As of now, they appear to still be in Sacramento, hanging out with California Democrats, who in turn are cheering on their Lone Star counterparts while they threaten to use the Republicans’ tactics against them with a counter-redistricting plan at home. (That’s a story for another time, but in short, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has expressed his will to give his state’s maps a politically lopsided remodel himself.)

It’s fitting that Democrats should take a stand in this particular context; they’re taking indirect accountability for a problem their party created in 1812, when Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry gave the a-okay to his subordinates’ own redistricting plan—a hideous monster stitched together to provide maximum benefit to party candidates. We have a term for this, gerrymandering, a practice named for Gerry himself and which to this day remains one of politics’ nastiest maneuvers. The concept is elegantly simple: state legislatures have control over the process of redrawing maps, and parties with dominion in any given state can exploit that duty to set up districts for themselves that cut sharply along party lines. Effectively, this inverts the voting process by allowing candidates to pick their voters and not the other way around—and it’s precisely what the Texas Republicans sought to achieve in this special session. Not only have Wu and his fellow Democrats acted with courage by decamping from Texas, they’ve righted history, too.

As expected, Abbott and his cronies are steaming mad at Democrats’ resistance to their skulduggery, though of course Wu’s the one in their crosshairs. Yes, every MIA Democrat is being fined $500 for each day they’re absent, according to rules passed in 2021—a reaction to a similar protest from Democrats against a Republican plot to overhaul voting protocols. No, Wu’s peers aren’t likewise being singled out by Abbott, whose petition to the Texas Supreme Court to vacate the truant Democratic officials’ seats a mere 48 hours after they’d decamped on Aug. 3 specifically mentions Wu, and not his colleagues. Grant that Abbott wants to give all of these representatives the boot. Grant also that pointing a finger at Wu, a 1.5 generation Chinese expat presently serving his seventh term in office—is a deliberate choice. Forget the fact that even Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a man suspended from his post for four months in 2015 when a state grand jury indicted him on three criminal charges—two counts of securities fraud and one for failing to properly register as an investment advisor—thinks Abbott is punching above his weight class. In a state where Asian Americans are the fastest growing minority group at six percent of the total population, but only three percent of its total lawmakers, targeting Wu is a discriminatory, and foolish, miscalculation.

Any fretting over Wu’s status is needless. If Paxton won’t get behind Abbott’s abuse of power, then there’s a reasonable chance the Texas Supreme Court won’t, either, despite Abbott having appointed six of its nine justices. There’s no precedent for his ploy to remove Wu from his seat. Maybe that’s a small comfort. Precedent and democratic norms don’t mean much to the Republican administration, in Texas as well as in the White House. For the time being, the law is on Wu’s side, even if Abbott assuredly isn’t.