Welcome to another episode of Lurie Breaks It Down, a podcast where we dig deeply to connect the dots on the issues that shape our world.

I'm Lurie Daniel Favors, author, activist, attorney, and the host of the Lurie Daniel Favors show on Sirius XM's Urban View, Channel 126. If you like what you're about to hear, go ahead and give us five stars and then tell everybody that you know. And if you don't like it, just, child, keep it to yourself and pray our strength. Okay, thank you so much. Also, don't forget to check out my YouTube page, Lurie Daniel Favor's Media, where you should subscribe, like, and share, because then you'll get notified when I post videos from my show, which I do just about every single day and when I go live with my YouTube audience. So I'm going to start today, continuing to thank those members of the Texas House

Democratic Party who did what they could to try to stave off this racist effort to redraw

districting maps that has been launched by Donald Trump, who enlisted the support of Texas

Governor Greg Abbott. Now, many of us were concerned and frankly a little disappointed to see that several of

the Democrats ended their two-week walkout. They came back into the state. Many of them who came

back, because again, not all of them did. Some of them have stayed in undisclosed locations.

But of the ones who came back, all of them, but for Texas House Representative Nicole Collier,

had to sign a slip, a paper, to basically request their freedom papers. And that paper is going

to ensure that they are trailed, they are followed, they are monitored, they are being

surveilled by state officers who are going to track their every move. Now, this is an extraordinary

waste of

governmental resources in the state of Texas. But as I said yesterday, Republicans suck at governing.

And Texas has been in the hands of the Republicans from the governorship to the state Senate to the

state house for decades. And so everything that's going wrong in Texas right now, we understand

that it is because Republican policies suck.

But yes, the Texas Democrats did end their two-week walkout.

And this was an effort that very successfully stalled the Republicans' goal of drawing these district maps at the midpoint level in a way that was going to basically get by without any scrutiny.

As a result of the two-week walkout, the Democrats from

the State House were able to ensure that this had national attention. They have nationalized

the topic of racist redistricting and gerrymandering and done so in a way that now has other

governors of Democratic-led states in the fight in ways that simply would not have happened before.

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