Killer Ds
The stakes are different as history repeats itself
For the second time this century, Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives have left the state to prevent a mid-decade gerrymander of the congressional map.
Only this time feels different.
In 2003, fifty-two Texas House Democrats fled to Oklahoma to deny the Republican legislature the quorum it needed to approve a gerrymandered map that would have bolstered the Republican House majority in Washington. Dubbed the Killer Ds, the group remained out of the state until the legislative session considering the gerrymander expired.
Their exodus made them heroes to Democrats and progressives nationally while turning Republican skulduggery into a national story. Ultimately, however, Texas Gov. Rick Perry was able to secure approval for the Republican map in a subsequent legislative session.
On Sunday, that history repeated itself when a different generation of Texas Democrats embarked for suburban Chicago, Boston and Albany, NY to frustrate another mid-decade power grab.
The 2003 gerrymander was conducted at the direction of Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader who saw an opportunity to secure his power by manipulating district lines in his native Texas.
The 2025 gerrymander is being done at the direction of Donald Trump in an urgent attempt to hold on to his tiny House majority despite the rejection he is expecting from a public that has turned against his leadership.
DeLay’s move was opportunistic and came at a moment when Republicans were ascendant in Texas.
Trump’s move is desperate and comes at a moment when Republicans are worried they will lose their tenuous congressional majority unless they tilt the electoral playing field in their direction.
Two weeks ago, in an article about their mid-decade redistricting play, I emphasized how Republicans are operating from a place of weakness. That weakness was on display this week in the unhinged response of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to the Democratic retreat. Abbott threatened the Democrats with bribery charges if they accepted help from outside parties to pay the $500 fine each member will incur for each day they are out of state. He threatened to remove them from their seats for abandoning their responsibilities, and on Monday ordered them arrested. Donald Trump is threatening to get the FBI involved.
Democrats escalated in kind.
DNC Chair Ken Martin took aim at Trump and his party’s past when he said:
This is not the Democratic Party of your grandfather, which would bring a pencil to the knife fight . . . This is a new Democratic Party; we are bringing a knife to a knife fight, and we are going to fight fire with fire.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called the Texas redistricting maneuver an act of war and vowed to explore “every option” to “redraw our state congressional lines as soon as possible.” Similar action has been threatened in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom is looking to advance a voter referendum in November that would set aside his state’s independent redistricting commission and permit California’s Democratic legislature to redraw the state’s map in response to the Republican move in Texas.
This is a departure from how things went down a dozen years ago. Back then, it played out as an aggressive tactic by a party that was willing to play dirty. This time it is a direct threat to a battered and ailing democracy.
Hochul characterized Trump’s directive to squeeze more Republican seats from Texas as “nothing short of a legal insurrection against our Capitol.”
It is questionable if Abbott’s threat to unseat the absent Democrats will hold up in court, and in any event it will face a drawn-out legal challenge if he attempts to make good on it. At the very least, it would raise thorny issues about whether the Texas law on abandonment applies to legislators who left their posts in the interest of denying a quorum, or if abandonment only applies to, say, a Texas official who left the state for a vacation in Cancun when they were supposed to be performing their official duties.
In any event, this escalation by Democrats around Trump’s desperate attempt to rig the congressional map is something we haven’t seen before, because it is taking place in a different environment. It feels like the threat to democracy increased palpably this week.
I have contended that the gerrymander itself should not be overly worrisome, because there are good reasons to believe it either will not take effect before the midterms or that it will backfire and actually weaken the Republican party’s position in Texas—especially in a big Democratic year.
I stand by that assessment. But I do think it is cause for concern that Texas Republicans are recklessly and blatantly trying to fix the game at Trump’s insistence, because it speaks to how far down the road to autocracy Trump’s party has wandered.
Trump has been very clear that he will assault any rule that threatens the enablers who have kept him in power. Abbott has been very clear that he will be Trump’s enabler.
So at this moment, when democracy once again is in the crosshairs, it might be useful to listen to the words of the Texas legislator who led the Killer Ds to Ardmore, Oklahoma in 2003. Even though he was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing the Republican gerrymander, he believes his actions and the actions of his colleagues were effective in elevating the larger cause of democracy.
In Jim Dunnam’s words, “People remember it not as a failure, but as something that got out a message nationally.”
“I think that it strengthened [democracy] in '03 because we didn't see [a mid-decade gerrymander attempt] again for 20 years.”
The power grab is on in Texas and the 2025 Killer Ds are drawing attention to it—this time with the assistance of Democrats nationally. They are shining a light on what’s going on in Texas so that even if they ultimately can’t stop the gerrymander, there will be no doubt about what Republicans are trying to do.
To Dunnam’s point, that’s how you win what Kathy Hochul accurately characterized as a war against democracy.
Trump feels invincible. And he wants things to stay that way. He has the SCOTUS and congress in his pocket. He echoes the words of King Louis XIV in France, who stated that "I am the state". But this is NOT the Ancien Regime in France. This is the USA in 2025. And remember what happened to the Ancien Regime in France later. They were overthrown in the French Revolution in 1789, and the successor of Louis XIV, Louis XVI, and his "let them eat cake" queen Marie Antoinette, were beheaded by the guillotine. The czars of Russia had absolute power for centuries, until the Russian Revolution overthrew the last czar, Nicholas II, in 1917. Nicholas was shot by firing squad in 1918. Both these instances was where an authoritarian regime was overthrown by a revolutionary one. And the sycophant enablers who propped up these autocrats? They were done away with. Apparently. the Republicans in congress, and the conservatives in the SCOTUS, so drunk in their own power-trip, have learned nothing from history. What the Texan Killer D's (love that name!) are doing I feel is the catalyst for another revolution right here in the good ol' USA. They are getting help from others. This time, it may, hopefully WILL, be different. Trump will see the inside of a jail cell one day (not soon enough).
Rock on Killer Ds!