NYS AFL-CIO: ‘We Stand with Texas’
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By Steve Wishnia
Eight state labor federations, including the Texas and New York branches of the AFL-CIO, have joined together to protest President Donald Trump’s push to have Texas gerrymander its congressional districts to enable Republicans to gain five seats in the 2026 elections.
“The future of our unions, our democracy, and our freedoms is at stake. Donald Trump is desperately trying to rig the rules in his favor by demanding a corrupt, rigged redistricting process in Texas, and he won’t stop there,” they said in a statement released Aug. 5. If people are “robbed of their voting rights in Texas” and Trump keeps control of Congress, it added, “working people will pay the price.”
“We stand in complete unity with our Texas AFL-CIO union family, shoulder to shoulder in their battle against an administration determined to manipulate the rules to maintain power,” New York State AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento said in a statement to Work-Bites.
The other state leaders who signed on were Rick Levy of the Texas AFL-CIO; Lorena Gonzalez of the California Federation of Labor Unions; Kimberly Holdridge of the Florida AFL-CIO; Tim Drea of the Illinois AFL-CIO; Jacob Hummel of the Missouri AFL-CIO; Tim Burga of the Ohio AFL-CIO; and April Sims of the Washington State Labor Council.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, prodded by Trump, in July called a special session of the legislature to enact the redistricting plan. But on Aug. 3, the day before the state House was scheduled to take it up, Democratic members left the state, denying the two-thirds attendance needed for a quorum. That stymied the scheme at least temporarily.
The plan would redraw two Democratic-held congressional districts in the Rio Grande Valley and “crack” three others in the Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth areas. Cracking is a type of gerrymandering in which urban areas (typically Democratic and often heavily nonwhite) are divided and the parts combined with generally Republican rural areas. In the Austin area, it would put Rep. Lloyd Doggett, now serving his 16th term, in the same district as second-term Rep. Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
“This is a five-alarm fire for our democracy,” Casar told CNN Aug. 4.
“We are entitled to five more seats,” Trump told CNBC Aug. 5.
The Constitution requires states to redistrict every 10 years, after the census. It’s not unconstitutional to do it more often, but that’s rarely done except to resolve voting-rights lawsuits. However, Texas redrew its congressional districts in 2003 under pressure from then House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, enabling the Republicans to gain five seats in the next election. Rep. Doggett’s district was stretched from Austin to the Rio Grande Valley, more than 300 miles south.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon—a legal adviser for Trump’s 2020 campaign who repeatedly claimed that Democrats had stolen the election—gave the Abbott administration both a tacit order and a legal fig leaf on July 7. She sent a letter telling them that four majority-nonwhite congressional districts, in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston areas, were “nothing more than vestiges of an unconstitutionally racially based gerrymandering past” which “must now be corrected by Texas.”
That was the exact opposite of what the state had been arguing in its defense against a lawsuit alleging that the districts it drew in 2021 discriminated against Black and Latino voters, the Texas Tribune noted.
Several other Republican-controlled states, such as Ohio and Missouri, are mulling similar gerrymanders. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said July 31 that he was “very seriously” considering it. He specifically cited the “Fair Districts” amendments to the state constitution approved by voters in 2010, which say that districts cannot be drawn in a way that impairs racial minorities’ ability to “elect representatives of their choice.” “It mandates having race predominate,” DeSantis said.
Some Democratic state governments are considering their own gerrymanders to counteract that. This would be more complicated, because California, New York, and others have delegated districting to independent commissions. In New York, it would require amending the state constitution, which would likely delay any redistricting until the 2028 election.
“I cannot stand by and let this happen while Donald Trump and his co-conspirator Greg Abbott erode our democracy and drag us toward authoritarianism,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Aug. 4, welcoming six of the fugitive Texas Democrats to Albany. “If Republicans are willing to rewrite these rules to give themselves an advantage, then they're leaving us no choice, we must do the same.”
She said she was “exploring with our leaders every option to redraw our state congressional lines as soon as possible.”
“In our blue states, we’ll support any and all efforts to make sure that workers' rights across this country are protected, including fighting to redistrict ourselves if that is what it takes,” the eight union leaders said. “In our red states, we will fight for fair maps and strongly stand against the corrupt political actions in Texas, because we know any one of us could be next.”