AXIS Moondy

AXUS Moondy Welcome to a special edition of

I'm Brado Nishi, the author of Preparing for War,

The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, and the founder of Axis Moody Media, here with Forrest Wildler,

senior writer at Texas Monthly to talk about what is happening in Texas. And there's a lot happening,

so we'll cut right to it, Forrest. The Democrats have left the state. They've broken quorum.

What started this whole maelstrom?

Well, Trump basically asked the Texas, GOP control Texas legislature to do him a big favor at 2026 midterms coming up.

And I'd say it's pretty far out, but in general, they don't necessarily look super favorable for Republicans.

So he wants to have a more favorable playing field and has basically asked or ordered Texas Republicans in the legislature

to convene a special session or add the added this agenda item to the ongoing special session

to do redraw the maps for congressional

seats in Texas that were already drawn and frankly pretty seriously gerrymandered in 2021.

To say this is highly unusual, it's not unprecedented to have a sort of mid-decade redistricting here that happened in 2003,

but the stakes are much higher now.

Needless to say, this is not a normal political event, even in Texas, where we do lots of

crazy stuff.

Just to put this in context, there were obviously devastating floods in the hill country

in your state recently.

And to my knowledge, the GOP led and dominated legislature has not put forth a bill or passed any legislation regarding those floods, regarding anything, whether it's safety, whether it's response.

They seem to have spent the entire session on

tactics like this one to, in a surprise move, redraw the districts. Is that a fair assessment,

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