Well, howdy there, internet people, it's bell again.

So today, we're going to talk about Democrats leaving Texas for Illinois.

As we talked about before, the Republicans in Texas are attempting to redistrict the state in a way that artificially benefits them.

And doing so mid-decade makes it an incredibly unusual move. The Democratic Party's main strategy to stop this is the courts,

but the plan to delay this is to have legislators leave the state to prevent the Texas State House from achieving quorum. In Texas,

the State House can't do anything unless two-thirds of the representatives are present. At time of

recording, it looks like 51 representatives have left the state, with most of them heading to

Illinois. That means there

aren't two-thirds present. Right now, the legislature is operating under a special session

scheduled to end August 19th, and Democrats can probably run out the clock on that, but there's

nothing stopping the governor from calling another special

session and then another. Representatives who are found to have left the state or are absent for the

purpose of impeding the action of the house can be fined $500 per day. There does appear to be financial support for them to stay out of the

state. The governor is threatening to remove the representatives from office. The idea that he has

that power is based on a 2021 legal opinion from Paxton that is non-binding. Of course, Republicans are threatening

to hunt them down. Now, for the Democratic Party, the reality is that they won't be able

to completely stop the process. Eventually, the move will fail. But realistically, with the midterms not too terribly far away

and the need to get maps in place ahead of time, they might be able to delay long enough

to tie the gerrymandered maps up in court.

That being said, analysis shows the GOP maps have made some areas more competitive,

and more importantly, the math the GOP used relies heavily on keeping the gains they made in

the last election in demographics that may not stick with them.

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