Texas Democratic legislators returned to the state Monday, ending their political protest against the gerrymandering of congressional districts in that state ordered by President Donald Trump and carried through by Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Republican-controlled state legislature.
The Democrats claimed their protest stunt had been successful, as they fled the state to deny a quorum for the state legislature during an emergency session called by Abbott. But the governor called a second emergency session, opening Monday, which is dutifully pushing through the redistricting that could cost the Democratic Party as many as five congressional seats.
The Democrats cited the national attention given to the gerrymander, being carried out mid-decade rather than after the next federal census, and the response in Democratic-controlled states like California, where Governor Gavin Newsom has advanced a plan to gerrymander five Republicans out of their seats in retaliation for the Texas action.
Newsom announced his cynical plan to temporarily bypass California’s independent redistricting commission in order to redraw congressional maps that would counter Republican gerrymandering efforts. Other states, both Democratic-controlled and Republican-controlled, are preparing similar efforts, in a campaign that demonstrates that the capitalist two-party system is fundamentally anti-democratic. Both capitalist parties work to suppress the democratic rights of working people and insure their own political dominance.
Now that enough Democrats have returned to ensure a quorum, Republicans in Texas have already moved to advance their maps and other reactionary items on the agenda, including limiting access to abortion pills and expanding attacks on transgender persons.
“We are done waiting,” Republican Speaker of the Texas House Dustin Burrows declared on Monday after gaveling in the new special session. “We have a quorum. Now is the time for action.”
Backing Republican efforts in Texas, Trump posted on social media his appreciation of Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Speaker Burrows and the Texas legislature for their “GREAT work.”
Not all of the over 50 Democrats who fled have returned to the state, but a sufficient number have to ensure that the Republicans will have a quorum to pass their legislative agenda.
Reflecting the increasingly authoritarian atmosphere that is permeating US politics, Speaker Burrows confirmed that Texas Democrats who fled and returned to Austin will be subject to a police escort to and from the House and that the lawmakers will be billed for any costs related to securing their attendance.
Newsom and the Democratic leadership posture as defenders of democracy, presenting their battle against Republican gerrymandering as a high-stakes fight to preserve the republic. In reality, their maneuvers over district lines are nothing more than intra-ruling class disputes over the apportionment of power within an electoral system that is fundamentally undemocratic and subordinated to capitalist rule.
According to a Politico survey, a strong majority of California voters—64 percent—favor leaving redistricting in the hands of an independent citizens’ commission, while only 36 percent want lawmakers to control the process. Newsom’s maneuver seeks to bypass this commission, even if only temporarily, in order to counter Republican gerrymandering.
The struggle between Democrats and Republicans over redistricting has nothing to do with safeguarding the democratic rights or living standards of working people. It is a fight between rival factions of the corporate and financial elite over the conditions under which they exploit the working class.
The Democrats’ claim that they defend democracy against Trump collapses upon even the most superficial comparison of policies. Far from constituting an alternative to the right-wing program of Trump, Governor Gavin Newsom has moved consistently to the right. His 2025–26 California budget mirrors Trump’s class war policies in many essential respects.
While Trump boasted of his “big beautiful bill,” which combined massive tax cuts for the rich with deep cuts to social spending, Newsom’s budget for the most populous state in the country does the same: billions are slashed from higher education, housing assistance and public health programs; food and income assistance is cut, targeted especially against immigrant workers, adapting to the right-wing position that “undocumented” residents are not entitled to state benefits; and funding is increased for police and surveillance under the guise of “public safety,” even as essential services are gutted.
Trump’s vilification of immigrants and mass deportations expose his fascistic orientation. Newsom, supposedly a champion of immigrant rights, has, in fact, quietly adopted many of the same policies. His budget withholds access to vital state programs on the basis of immigration status, deepening the division of the working class into “legal” and “illegal.”
California’s much-touted “sanctuary state” policies have done nothing to stop deportations. Police continue to collaborate with federal immigration authorities, while immigrant workers face raids, surveillance and detention. By tying rights to citizenship, Newsom reinforces the reactionary framework of the nation-state and maintains a vulnerable, super-exploited workforce while he falsely poses as a benevolent figure.
The environmental policies of Newsom also expose the fraud of Democratic “progressivism.” Trump has dismantled regulations, granted sweeping exemptions to polluters and aligned with fossil fuel corporations.
Newsom, while speaking of a “green transition,” delivers the same substance through expansions of oil drilling permits in the Central Valley, exemptions for major industrial polluters, and promotion of carbon trading schemes that enrich Wall Street speculators while doing nothing to reduce emissions.
He has recently circulated draft bill language aimed at streamlining drilling permits for new oil wells, particularly in Kern County, a move that lays bare his subservience to the fossil fuel industry. The recent exemptions granted by the Environmental Protection Agency to California facilities to emit carcinogenic chemicals underscore this continuity, and Newsom’s silence speaks louder than words.
Newsom’s maneuver to override the independent redistricting commission, despite overwhelming public support for it, underscores this hypocrisy. Even where nominal bourgeois democratic mechanisms exist to curb political manipulation, the Democrats are prepared to cast them aside in order to secure their own advantage.
Their dispute with Republicans over redistricting does not concern the right of workers to vote or to exercise political power. It concerns only the allocation of congressional seats within a system rigged from the outset against the working class.
Behind these maneuvers lies a deeper crisis: the collapse of confidence in the institutions of American capitalism. Decades of social counterrevolution have produced levels of inequality, poverty and misery without precedent in modern history. In California, the fourth-largest economy in the world, workers confront astronomical housing costs, collapsing public education and mass homelessness.
The Democratic Party, no less than the Republican, fears that any genuine mobilization of the working class would escape its control and threaten capitalist rule. Hence its fixation on parliamentary tricks like gerrymandering: they provide the illusion of political struggle while concealing the real antagonism between classes.