In what at least one legal expert called long shot litigation, Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton and Illinois state Sen. Jil Tracy said Friday they asked a court in downstate Quincy to compel Illinois law enforcement to enforce civil warrants issued by the speaker of the Texas House against Democrats who fled their state.
Tracy, a veteran Republican lawmaker from Quincy, said she was deputized by Paxton as an uncompensated assistant Texas attorney general. She electronically filed the petition in Adams County Circuit Court, and said she thinks the Texas Democratic legislators “neglected their duty” by leaving their state weeks after they began a special session.
“It’s our job. You may not like the map. You may not like a bill. You vote ‘no.’ And you do your job. And you work to express your opinion and those of your constituents at the same time as to why you support or do not support a bill,” said Tracy, who has served on and off in the Illinois General Assembly since 2006. “But you have a duty under your oath of office.”
By filing the petition in Adams County in rural west central Illinois along the Mississippi River, Republicans may be looking for a more conservative court to try to make their case, rather than filing it in the Chicago suburban region where the House Democrats have relocated.
For a second day, their heavily secured St. Charles hotel was the subject of a bomb threat, but local law enforcement found nothing.
The court filing sought an emergency hearing on the matter.
The court petition is the latest development in the escalating national battle between Republicans and Democrats that boiled over when Texas House Democrats fled to Illinois and other northern states to deny Republicans a quorum to enact a mid-decade redrawing of Texas’ congressional districts to flip five Democratic seats to Republican.
The unusual Republican remap effort is being done at the behest of President Donald Trump, whose administration is encouraging similar actions in other Republican-led states as a means of holding the GOP’s slim majority in next year’s midterm elections for the remainder of Trump’s second term. Governors of Democratic states, such as California, are plotting countermoves with their states’ maps. Typically, political maps are redrawn only once per decade following the U.S. census, and Texas Democrats have called out Republicans for trying to change the rules and disenfranchise Texas citizens for purely political reasons.
The Republican speaker of the Texas House, Dustin Burrows of Lubbock, issued the civil warrants to compel the chamber’s Democrats to return to Austin for a special session set to end Aug. 19 that was ostensibly called to act on relief for the deadly July Fourth floods that killed more than 130 people in Texas’ Hill Country.
But the civil warrants are enforceable only within the boundaries of Texas. The absent House members have not been charged with any criminal activity, which could be the trigger to allow for their arrest out of state.
“Texas requests and is entitled to the assistance of its sister state, the State of Illinois, to enforce the quorum order and quorum warrant as to each of the Texas House members breaking quorum and evading civil arrest in Illinois,” the petition filed by Paxton and Tracy said.
“Texas seeks enforcement of the rule of law in Illinois, the assistance of Illinois law enforcement officials, and this court’s assistance, to lawfully return to Texas the Respondent legislators who fled to Illinois to evade their duties to participate in the ongoing special session of the Texas Legislature,” the petition said, naming 33 House Democrats as respondents.
The petition “requests that this court issue civil warrants directing the appropriate Illinois law enforcement officials to effectuate the civil arrest of Respondents and coordinate with the Sergeant of Arms of the Texas House of Representatives and the Texas Department of Public Safety to return them to Texas.”
The petition cites the U.S. Constitution’s “full faith and credit clause” as well as the legal principle of “judicial comity” in respecting the laws and court decisions of other states.
But former federal prosecutor Ron Safer said both provisions cited by Texas Republicans entail other states respecting “judicial” decisions issued by courts — not political actions of enforcing legislative civil rules.
“There are various safeguards present in judicial proceedings that are simply absent in legislative proceedings,” Safer said. “So, often, a state court’s opinion is being asked to be respected by another state. That’s not this case.”
Safer said, “anybody can file a lawsuit, anybody can get a hearing for anything. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to get what they want.”
Texas Democratic state Rep. John Bucy, who is among the lawmakers cited in the petition, dismissed the filing as “one more thing that’s not really worthy of our time or attention.”
“We’ve got Texans that are in need, Texans that need Republican lawmakers to remember they serve them and not Donald Trump, and instead they’re playing political games and wasting time,” said Bucy, who represents the Austin area.
“(Texas Republican Gov.) Greg Abbott right now has executive power to help the people of Texas, to help the flood victims. And instead, he’s continuing to use their memories in a disgraceful approach to force Donald Trump’s rigging (elections),” Bucy said. “They’re not going to get a quorum soon. That won’t happen.”
Texas state Rep. Gene Wu of Houston, chair of the Texas House Democrats, said he was “frankly embarrassed for our state that our attorney general filed that in Illinois. … I cannot believe that our elected officials are that stupid or believe that people out there are that stupid that they will believe all this.”
But Abbott, in an interview with NBC News, vowed to call “special session after special session after special session” if the current session expires without the House Democrats’ return. He also threatened a new map that could flip as many as eight Democratic seats to Republicans if the absent lawmakers don’t come back.
In a separate legal move, Paxton asked Texas’ all-Republican Supreme Court to remove 13 of the absent Democratic lawmakers, contending they had abandoned their office.
Abbott on Tuesday had asked the court to remove Wu from office. Wu’s legal team responded to that effort, contending Abbott lacked standing to bring the case and that the court’s intervention would violate the separation of powers between the judicial and legislative branches.
“These petitions are flat-out unconstitutional, which is why none has been tried in 150 years of Texas history,” said Chad W. Dunn of Brazil & Dunn, counsel for Wu.
“They have come to the wrong court, with no evidence, asking for a remedy the constitution explicitly leaves to the legislative branch. The power to discipline a legislator for breaking quorum belongs to the House of Representatives, not the governor’s office or the judiciary,” Dunn said. “This is a foundational principle of our democracy, and the governor’s coordinated legal attack is a dangerous assault on the separation of powers.”
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance, who during a visit to Indianapolis on Thursday encouraged Republicans in neighboring Indiana to redistrict, told Fox News that Republicans were seeking redistricting to make up for states like California, whose large congressional contingent he said was inflated by the federal census counting “such a high population of illegal aliens.”
“Taxpayers in Ohio and Indiana and elsewhere, they have fewer congressional representatives because of what California has allowed to happen. That’s ridiculously unfair,” Vance said in remarks released in advance of the airing of “Sunday Futures” on Sunday at 9 a.m. “And the only real way to fight back against it is for us to redistrict in some ways as aggressively as these hard blue states have done.”
Northwest Indiana U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan, the most likely of the two Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation to see his seat flipped to favor Republicans, said after Vance’s visit that he thought a remap in his state was a “done deal.” But he vowed to fight for reelection “no matter what district they put me in.”
In California, six of the Texas House Democrats met with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, U.S. House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and members of the California congressional delegation and state legislature.
Newsom vowed an effort to counter the attempts by Texas Republicans to pick up five seats and the California Democrat laid out plans to ask that state’s voters this November to suspend the state’s independent mapmaking commission through the end of the decade and enact a new congressional map that would flip five districts from Republican to Democrat. The new map is to be unveiled next week.
“It’s not about lines. It’s about drawing a line, and it’s all about elevating the deeper consciousness of the line that Donald Trump continues to cross. It’s not about him playing by a different set of rules. There are no rules for Donald Trump. This is a serious moment in American history, and so we are here to meet this moment head-on, and we look forward to a successful campaign,” said Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential contender.
“We are trying to defend democracy, as opposed to see it destroyed district by district,” Newsom said. “And we will stand firm, and we will stand tall.”