Texas Is the Dry Run for the GOP’s Dismantling of Electoral Democracy

As Lone Star State Republicans prepare to do Trump’s bidding, expect the GOP’s gerrymandering war to expand.

by Ana Marie Cox

Kamil Krzaczynski/Getty Images

As Texas Democrats fled the state to protest a redistricting map drawn at Donald Trump’s request—a map designed to all but shut Democrats out of congressional power—I spent the day at a public hearing where the only people left to debate the map were the Republicans who drew it and the everyday Texans begging them not to.

One of them was a familiar face in the Capitol building. Dan Chandler—“Pastor Dan” to some Capitol employees—is a fixture in the marble halls. On Thursday, he parked himself behind a walker draped with U.S., Texas, and Confederate flags, surrounded by placards declaring global warming a lie and “tranny madness” a threat. He wears a white T-shirt covered in Bible verses and a red hat that reads, in gold embroidery, “Ultra MAGA.”

I noticed him when I first walked into the redistricting hearing because of the Confederate flag adorning his ad hoc setup. I wondered if he was there to observe or participate. It turned out to be both.

When he was called to testify, Chandler gave a folksy shrug—retired, didn’t need to be there, could be out fishing. Turning to the matter at hand, he dismissed the earlier pleas to address the deadly July 4 floods. “They talk about the flood,” he said. “You’re doing something about the flood right here.”

Then he revved up: “The best thing you can do for us is turn every district red. The best thing you can do for Black people, the white people, the brown people, all of them—turn the districts red and take it away from these people.”

And then, jabbing his thumb at the woman who’d spoken before him: “The very best thing you could do is take it away from her.”

“Her” name was Lori Jensen. She wore a lavender T-shirt that read, in flowing script, “We Peaked With Ann Richards.” She gawped, pushed the chair between them toward Chandler, gathered her things, and stomped out of the room.

When I caught up with her a few minutes later, state troopers were explaining to her that Chandler had decided to press assault charges. The chair had hit his leg, and because of his age, the charge was a felony. “I’m over 65 too,” she protested. They squeezed handcuffs on her and told her they were taking her to jail.

I didn’t go to the Capitol looking for a viral moment—let alone some kind of impromptu senior citizen cage match. I went because Texas Republicans’ lickspittle acquiescence to President Donald Trump’s demand that they come up with five more congressional seats is the most important story in the country. Such blatant tinkering with the electoral map is the final act in the GOP’s decades-long play for permanent national minority rule—or better yet, the ascendance of an unelected ruling class. Their dedication to this project explains their otherwise nonsensical embrace of objectively unpopular policies. They do not care about being reelected. They are planning for a future when they don’t have to worry about what voters may or may not think or want.

I came here thinking I’d write something about the mechanics of this scheme; the Republican endgame. How the legislature can ignore the public record, how the federal courts have collapsed, how a handful of maps can tip a national balance. But then I watched a man in a Confederate-flagged walker point at a woman and say, “Take it away from her.” And the system obliged.

Many of those opposed to the bill leaned on “Texas nationalism,” a flavor of state pride to which all natives but the most ardent leftists succumb. “I was taught I was a Texan first and an American second,” said one young Latino man. No one against the bill mentioned the Alamo, but one witness added a “Hook ’em” when she cited her University of Texas degree. Mostly, they flicked at the Republicans’ dignity and independence: “This D.C.-ordained map,” “You must divorce yourself from the will of the White House,” “Greg Abbott is letting Trump take over Texas,” “You’re scared of a convicted felon.”

Committee member Senator Boris Miles hit flint against stone the entire hearing, forcing committee Chairman Phil King to admit that the map came from the National Republican Redistricting Committee. Miles marveled at this with theatrical faux wonder. “The man who drew this map, he lives in Virginia,” said Miles. “That’s who drew the map.”

Somewhat parochial about Texas myself, at first I thought these appeals might be the kind of argument that GOP officials could at least hear, if not be swayed by. Certainly, the arguments about the racial makeup of the district held no purchase.

Then I thought about how the hearing itself wasn’t held under the pink granite dome of the Texas Capitol—taller than the U.S. Capitol by almost 15 feet (one witness cited it as yet another example of Texas’s historic resistance to federal power). We were in an extension: the newer, more bureaucratic annex dug underground decades ago. But for the oversize Texas seal on the front wall, the room could have been anywhere—or everywhere—much like this kind of electoral sabotage soon will be. The end of meaningful electoral democracy is coming to a GOP-controlled statehouse near you, soon enough.

They know what they’re doing. In his opening remarks, King outlined his reasons for sponsoring the bill: “My first objective is to create a plan that will elect five more Republicans to the U.S. Congress.” If this sounds scandalous to you, it’s because you are correctly drawing the connection between GOP seats and decreasing representation of people of color, which is exactly what they can’t say. They can be honest about their ends but not their means, though the two are practically the same.

These fuckers can’t be shamed. Maybe that’s the only thing they have in common with their forebears in the Texas legislature, an elected body with the shortest calendar in the country and thus the most scandals per hour served. It used to be that shamelessness was a little more flamboyant. Old-school Texas politics had a sweaty, theatrical quality—men in bolo ties and cowboy boots saying the quiet part with a wink. But today’s GOP operates with a different kind of shamelessness: dull, mechanical, and at the beck and call of a tyrant. While we have the odd sex scandal still (and some of them are very odd), the immorality here is bloodless, cold. They are executing a plan. They’re not worried about losing power. They’re building a system where they’ll never have to ask for it again.

I’d been at the Capitol for six hours before the thing with Pastor Dan happened. I had pages of notes, hours of voice memos. Witness after witness took the mic to explain how this map would hurt them and hurt Texas. It would make aid harder to access, representation more diluted, and invert democracy: It would “allow representatives to select their districts and not districts to select their representatives.” Over the past three weeks, there have been thousands of public comments on this map. Last week, Texas House Democrats lit off to other parts as a last-ditch effort to forestall a vote, and are now being “chased like runaway slaves,” in Miles’s colorful formulation.

And for what? During the hearing, there were passionate speeches and satisfying points scored, but it was hard not to feel the effort of it all: the sheer amount of will and grit it takes to keep coming to the arena every day, knowing it will end in eating dust. It is exceedingly difficult to imagine a scenario where Trump is not awarded his prize.

In one of my forays into the hallway to stretch my legs, I asked a woman whom I’d heard testify, basically, Why bother? “There is the matter of the public record,” she said. It sounds dignified. But it felt like loss.

Once the troopers turned their attention to Jensen, I approached Chandler. He was surrounded by his placards again. Did he really mean it—that they should take Lori’s vote away? First, he said he hadn’t said that. I told him I had it recorded. He shrugged. He said he didn’t remember. Then he pivoted: He was the one under attack. This was about Christian persecution.

Everything you say you want—it’s already true in Texas. Like, what more do you want? And he insisted on the persecution: “She kicked me.” And I could only say, but, but you won. She’s being charged with assault. She’s got handcuffs on. They’re leading her away. He crossed his arms. God had triumphed, he said.

I tried a different tack: If the roles were reversed—if he moved a chair and it bumped someone—would it be fair to arrest him? He shook his jowls: “I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t be her.”

After the troopers took Jensen, there wasn’t much left to the hearing. Senator Miles declared he wouldn’t give the map the dignity of a vote: “This is a farce, this is racism, this is discriminatory, and I will not take part in it.” For his part, Chairman King mused, “Time will tell whether this map elects more or less people of color.”

Earlier in the hearing, a woman warned: “Do not force the American people into armed revolution.” I frowned. More about performance than policy, surely. But by the end of the hearing, I was less sure. The room was full of people trying to reason with a party that doesn’t need reason, just reasons. What would you call a system in which one side makes all the rules and the other gets handcuffed for pushing a chair?

And yet as I walked home, I found myself trying to imagine what it might be like to be Chandler. To be old, unwell, in a wheelchair, convinced that the world has turned against you. I wondered: If I were him, would I have demanded that someone go to jail for nudging lightweight furniture at me?

But it’s my ability to ponder that question that’s the problem, isn’t it? I’m outraged by Chandler engineering Jensen’s trip to County over a very minor shoving match but then curious about my own reaction. I want to examine it for flaws and imagine how I might feel in the other person’s place; both Chandler and King are unbothered by such thought experiments. The GOP in general has refused to engage with any version of “shoe on the other foot” thinking, including when it comes to redistricting.

In fact, nothing illustrates the tragedy of Democrats’ good faith better than redistricting. For decades, Democrats have backed redistricting by independent commissions. California and New York have such commissions, and that’s why Gavin Newsom’s and Kathy Hochul’s threats to create new blue districts to match Texas’s new red ones face actual headwinds, while Texas’s map will breeze through. Even when Democrats win, they too often build systems designed to be fair. Republicans build systems to stay rigged.

The entire point of Project 2025, of the bloody swath that’s been cut through the federal government, of redistricting specifically, is to prevent places from ever being switched.

It didn’t occur to me until much later that if Lori Jensen winds up getting convicted on a felony charge, Chandler will have succeeded in taking her vote away.

Chandler said, “I wouldn’t be her.”

And of course he wouldn’t. He’s never had to be.

The luxury of power is never even imagining what it’s like to have it taken away.

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