Texas state Rep. Armando Walle (D-Houston) decamped to Boston to avoid the vote on redrawing Texas’s congressional maps midway through the special session. Walle calls the vote a “power grab” on behalf of President Trump and Republicans.
Republicans control every level of government in Texas, but Walle said even though he and fellow Democrats — many of whom also left Texas — are outnumbered, they won’t stop fighting.
“We know we’re in a tough fight, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t fight back and to awaken the national consciousness, because your state could be next,” Walle said. “Your votes could be diluted in your community. It could happen here, anywhere across the state. So I’m here to kind of spread the word about that because it’s coming.”
Why are you in Boston? How does this help the cause?
“The reason we’re here is we have a council of NCSL, the National Council of State Legislatures. That conference is being held here. There’s hundreds and hundreds of state legislators from around the country that are here.
“It was an opportunity to spread the gospel about what’s going on in Texas, the power grab that Donald Trump imposed on Texas, just like he did, trying to find 11,000 votes in Georgia. He has ordered Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special session — and he did — to find five more congressional seats that would be catered towards Republicans.”
Are Texas Republicans just doing what lawmakers from both parties have done for decades, redistricting to their advantage?
“I think the difference here is Donald Trump has ordered Gov. Greg Abbott to find these five seats. We’ve done mid-decade redistricting. It’s a bit unprecedented. And so, we felt, as Democrats fighting not just for Democrats, but for independents and Republicans as well, this has national implications because it will determine the control of Congress in the next session in 2026.
“This is just a power grab by Donald Trump and his cronies in the Texas legislature to impose his will and his unpopular views when it comes to immigration, when it comes to the economy and jobs. They want to maintain that power and avoid accountability with the [Jeffrey] Epstein files.
“For us in Texas, what it also does is tear apart communities of interest that traditionally have been together. So, the northern part of Harris County and the eastern part of Harris County, traditional Mexican American neighborhoods ripped apart and their votes are being diluted by being placed in districts that are far away from each other. And so that’s the neighborhood-centric, parochial issue with the way these maps are being drawn. And it’s in violation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. And let me add this — we just had 130 people perish in the hill country floods of central Texas. Instead of dealing with that, we’re having to deal with Donald Trump’s criminality.”
Are you worried about the Texas House issuing arrest warrants for you and other Democrats who left the state?
“I’m not. I’m not. The price to pay for liberty, for justice, for standing up for what’s right. There’s no cost, no threat that will deter myself or my colleagues that are strong against this power grab by President Trump and Gov. Abbott. I’m not worried at all.”
What is your plan for the next few days?
“I’m going to go meet my colleagues in Chicago. There have been different delegations that have been fanned out throughout the state. We’ve been to California. We’ve been to Illinois, obviously. We’ve been to New Mexico. We had a delegation go to New York. I’m going to go meet my colleagues in Chicago, most of them are there, in solidarity with them. And then we will continue to sound the alarm.”
Do Republicans and Democrats need to reform their thinking around gerrymandering?
“The distinction in the way they gerrymander in Texas is this is a racial gerrymander. So, the Department of Justice, just a couple of months ago, sent a letter to Gov. Abbott, to Ken Paxton — the attorney general, who’s also corrupt — sent a letter indicating that they were four to five seats that were racially gerrymandered and that they needed to be redrawn under the current map. And so, what did the governor do? They called the special session to redraw those districts. It’s no coincidence that those four or five districts are majority-minority districts.
“The distinction is that they’re using race in drawing some of these districts, and diluting, cracking and packing communities of color where traditionally they’ve had the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. Look, this is not about any individual member of Congress. This is about the people that are represented in those communities. And that’s the distinction. So gerrymandering, yes, we know that the term exists. It is alive and well. What the distinction is, that this is a racial gerrymander.”
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Hafsa Quraishi produced and edited this segment for broadcast with Micaela Rodríguez. Quraishi produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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