Texas Democrats have relocated the fight to Illinois and New York, building a public case that this redistricting crisis isn’t a local quirk but a dawning national crisis. At stake, they’re arguing, is whether the rules can be rewritten state by state to manufacture Republican majorities in Washington. So far, national Democrats are taking the crisis seriously, but it’s unclear how they will respond. Will we descend into a tit-for-tat redistricting war between red states and blue states with high-profile partisans like Donald Trump and Gavin Newsom as their proxies? Or will we move toward a system buttressed by pro-democracy interventions like independent redistricting boards? The outcome depends greatly on how organizations, labor unions, and regular people organize at this moment.
The labor movement seems to recognize both the opportunity and the responsibility inherent in the current crisis. State AFL-CIO bodies from Texas to California to New York released a joint statement calling the Republican coup what it is: a coordinated attempt to disempower working people. Other labor unions have rightly joined in, claiming the redistricting fight as a working-class fight. Grassroots groups, meanwhile, have begun to stage protests outside of the Texas State Capitol in support of the Democratic walkout.
If the quorum break fizzles and becomes memory instead of momentum, Republicans will only be emboldened to escalate their strategy, and our country will race closer to full-on authoritarianism. But if students, workers, tenants, and local organizers join in to name redistricting as their fight too, that will keep the pressure on. Right now, this issue is strictly an electoral standoff. We need to bring it down to the ground level, generalizing the popular understanding that our democratic rights and working-class power are at stake.
And that is the entire point of the strategy that I’m describing. If it’s “allowed”, then just fucking do it. If everyone agrees it’s illegal, then nobody can do it.