Texas House approves GOP congressional map after two-week delay from Democrats' walkout [View all]

Source: Texas Tribune

Aug. 20, 2025
Updated: 5:24 PM Central


The Republican-led Texas House on Wednesday gave preliminary approval to a new congressional map crafted to hand five additional U.S. House seats to the GOP over fierce opposition from Democrats, who cast the plan as a racially discriminatory attempt by President Donald Trump to stack the deck in next year’s midterm election.

The House tentatively adopted the map, 88 to 52, on party lines, and was expected to grant its final approval later on Wednesday. A Senate panel advanced a similar map Sunday; the full chamber was expected to send the new lines to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk later this week.

Republican lawmakers are pursuing the unusual mid-decade redistricting plan, which has set off a national map-drawing war, amid pressure from Trump to protect the GOP’s slim majority in Congress. The effort comes just four years after the Legislature last overhauled the state’s congressional map following the 2020 Census.

Democrats in the Texas House staged a two-week walkout over the plan in a bid to stall the map’s passage and rally a national response among blue states, where lawmakers could launch their own retaliatory redistricting efforts. The roughly two dozen Texas Democrats who returned to Austin on Monday said they were starting the next phase of their fight: putting the screws on their Republican colleagues and establishing a record that could be used in a legal challenge to the map.

Read more: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/20/texas-house-vote-congressional-map-redistricting-democrats-trump/