TRANSCRIPT
"Members, may I have your attention. The roll has been called and a quorum is not present."
That's Dustin Burrows, the Speaker in the Texas statehouse at the centre of a political storm that centres around the upcoming fight for the federal House of Representatives.
Recently, US President Donald Trump has urged the Texas legislature to redraw its congressional map to create five new Republican-friendly seats before the 2026 midterm elections for Congress, where the Republicans currently hold a majority.
Texas currently has 38 congressional seats on offer, and they hold 25 seats in the federal House.
Texas Republican State Senator Phil King says they are well within their rights to improve their chances of keeping control.
"My first objective in adopting the House map and presenting this map today, my first objective is to create a plan that elects more Republicans to the U.S. Congress. In contrast to the complications involved with race-based redistricting, political performance in this case, my objective of electing more Republicans to the US Congress is a permissible basis for drawing electoral districts."
Only a handful of states in the US have independent commissions that decide the makeup of seats - most others leave it up to the Parliament.
Partisan redistricting - or gerrymandering - operates under a principle that has become known as "packing and cracking."
Officials redrawing the districts in any given state "pack" opposition voters together so that they win big in a tiny number of districts.
Then they "crack" the rest more thinly across the remaining districts to ensure losses there.
It isn't inherently illegal at the federal level unless electoral districts are redrawn along racial lines - and Democrat representative Armando Walle says that's exactly what is happening here.
"These five seats in Texas, these particular five seats, four of them a majority of them are represented by Black and brown communities. OK? It's no coincidence that when the governor picks up, when the president picks up the phone and calls Governor Abbott he moves, swiftly, and targeted these four to five majority minority seats."
Re-districting is usually done just once per decade, not long after the federal census conducted under the Constitution.
Democrats say this latest push is nothing but a power grab and a way for Trump to avoid a repeat of his first presidency, when the 2018 midterms restored Democrats to a House majority that blocked his agenda and twice impeached him.
Nationally, current maps put Democrats within three seats of retaking the House — with only several dozen competitive districts across 435 total seats.
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin says it's time to draw a line in the sand.
"Our constitution is under assault. Voting rights are being completely violated. Now is not the time for one party to play by the rules while the other party has completely ignored them. So, they've decided to cheat, and we're going to respond in kind."
The Texas chamber needs at least 100 of its 150 members to do business.
Accordingly, dozens of Democrats have left - and stayed outside - Texas state lines, in order to deny their GOP colleagues the attendance required to vote on the change.
Senator Carol Alvarado is one of them.
"Our state's leadership is trying to redraw congressional lines in the middle of the decade with no new census, no new data, and no legitimate reason except to serve one man's political ambition."
Their ploy has been met with fury by Republican Governor Greg Abbott.
He's called the Democrats “derelict", and while this special session of the Texas parliament ends on August 19, the governor has threatened to keep calling them into special sessions until the Democrats return.
Republicans have also issued civil warrants for the arrest of the representatives under legislative rules - but they are out of state, so are beyond the reach of Texas authorities.
The Texas Speaker says the Democrats cannot hold out forever.
"You can go to another city, another state, even another time zone, but you cannot escape your responsibility to the people of Texas. Eventually, you will be here."
Democratic representative Josey Garcia is among those to say - watch me.
"So for everybody that's asking why we are here, because we had no other choice."
But the fight is not limited to Texas.
Republicans in Missouri and Ohio are planning their own redistricting to boost their representation in Washington, while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has made noises about adding seats in Florida.
Democrats in other states have anticipated this, and are preparing their own counter-offensive, including New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Illinois's JB Pritzker.
"We’ve all got to stand up and do the right thing. So as far as I’m concerned, everything is on the table."
But the biggest challenge will potentially be in California, a state where redistricting power has belonged to an independent commission since the 2010s.
If the Texas redraw moves forward, the Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has said he wants his state to carve out five more Democratic seats in retaliation.
Zoe Lofren is the chair of the Democratic Congressional committee.
"When we saw that Texas was going to create the most segregated map in Texas since the 60s to eliminate all of the minority districts that they could so that they could create five Republican districts, we said, could we create a map that eliminated five Republican districts, but that was true to the Voting Rights Act? And we found that we could. And so as we went through the details of the possibilities, I'm happy to report that every single member of the California delegation is willing to support a plan to do that."
California's Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom says he will ask voters to approve a ballot measure in November redrawing the state's congressional map in a way likely to create five more Democratic seats.
But he says he will not pursue new district lines in California if Texas and other GOP states stand down.
"We tried to play by a higher set of standards and rules with our independent redistricting, and we believe in that. And we are not talking about eliminating that commission. We are talking about emergency measures to respond to what's happening in Texas, and we will nullify what happens in Texas. We will pick up five seats with the consent of the people. And that's the difference between the approach we're taking and the approach they're taking."
