Democrats warn Texas governor to either do his job or ‘keep serving Trump and face the consequences’

Dozens of Democratic lawmakers from Texas who left the state to stop a Republican effort to redraw voting districts are planning their return after being away for ten days. The legislators, who stayed up late to discuss their next steps, have said they will not go back to Austin until the first special legislative session officially ends. As the session comes to a close, the Democrats have started to list their demands for Governor Abbott and have also begun calling their protest a success.

The Texas House Democratic group recently released a statement saying they were working on a plan to return. As found by MSNBC, the chairman of the state Democratic Caucus, Gene Wu, shared a new statement defining their success as having stopped a quorum from ever being reached during the first special session.

He celebrated the fact that “blue states nationwide are ready to take action if Abbott moves forward” with the redistricting plan. The chairman then said Texas House Democrats would lay out their demands for a second special session and warned Governor Abbott that he must either “govern for Texas families, or he can keep serving Trump and face the consequences we’ve unleashed nationwide.”

Texas democrats have won for the most part, and are issuing demands

While they were gone, the Democrats successfully stopped the state House from having enough members present to pass laws. However, the Republican-led state Senate was still able to approve the redistricting plan because its group of eleven Democrats could not fully break quorum. Republican leaders have remained firm, vowing to hold “special session after special session” until their agenda passes. Even so, the Democrats’ ability to delay the redistricting process during the first special session is now being called a victory by their side.

A key aide to one of the Texas House Democrats explained that their main goal was never to stay out of Texas forever but to bring national attention to the issue. According to the aide, the protest has worked, with the whole country now focused on the situation.

The Democratic protest has not been without political costs. House Speaker Dustin Burrows has publicly criticized the Democrats for being absent, saying it has stopped the legislature from working on other important bills, including aid for flood victims near San Antonio. Burrows warned the Democrats that the political price of their absence was growing and would be “paid in full.”

Democrats, however, have pushed back, saying Republicans were wrong to focus on redistricting first and that Governor Abbott could have approved flood relief on his own. A Texas Democratic strategist, Luke Warford, summed up the Democrats’ goal as being to “slow things down, make it painful, and explain their actions to Texas voters.”