Inside Texas Politics | Full interview with State Rep. Gene Wu

Joining us now is Representative Gene Wu of District 137 in Houston. He's also the chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus. Representative Wu, thanks for being with us. I know these are busy times right now. You all were expecting a gerrymandered map. Was this map that came out this week as bad as you thought it was going to be? No, absolutely. We knew that it was going to be bad. We had no idea it would be this bad. And I think you have to understand that since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, Texas has been found in violation every single time. I mean, literally every time they did this, Texas used illegal racial gerrymandering to do what they wanted to do. And this last time, in 2021, it was no different. Those maps are in the courts right now. I mean, we finished up a trial just about a month ago to say the existing maps, the maps we're using right now, are illegal and racially gerrymandered and discriminatory and violate the Constitution. And before that ruling is even completed, Donald Trump says, hey, you know what would be really nice? If you gave me five more seats and the only way for Republicans to give Donald Trump five more of your seats is to do an even more extreme racial gerrymandering. And to the point where now, right now, as of this moment, under the current laws, 65 percent of the state is being governed by 40 percent, right? Because of the racial gerrymandering, because of how lopsided everything is. And it's going to be under this map, under the map that they just proposed, it's going to be 87 percent of the state will be ruled by the minority. So, Representative Wu, Republicans, though, will point out that, well, we created, though, two majority black districts for the first time in Texas and we increased the majority Hispanic districts by one. What do you say to that argument? It's all on paper only. It's words only. Those districts, time and time again, the way they set them up, you actually have to look at the numbers. Those Latino, there are quote unquote Latino districts, somehow never end up electing Latino. It's kind of funny how those things kind of work. Like, you know, time and time again, what they say is they created Latino districts, but without looking at the fact that most of those districts have very young populations. Their CVAP, their citizen age voting population is actually way, way too low to support an actual candidate of the community's choice. And they know this. This is a game they've played for decades. Representative Wu, so the question now becomes, what are Democrats going to do about this map? So one thing I'm going to want to be really clear about is this is not a fight for Democrats, right? This is not a D versus R kind of normal politics thing. This is so far outside the norm. This is very much extraordinary. And what it is, is at the end of the day, this is cheating. This is cheating when you know that you're going to lose. And that's exactly what's happening. And when you say when you know you're going to lose, you're saying that Republicans are fearing that they're going to lose the U.S. House of Representatives in the next election cycle. And so they're trying to goose the numbers. Yeah, they're not. No, no, no. Wait. They're not fearing they were going to lose seats. They know they will lose seats because they know how wildly unpopular their positions are in Texas, cutting school funding, voting for vouchers, banning THC, banning all these different things, going just not taking care of the state. Literally, the bill that would have helped Kerrville put an alarm system in was killed by the Republican Senate, period. All right. That bill passed out of the House almost unanimously. And the Senate, Dan Patrick, killed that bill. And they know this. In Washington, D.C., Trump's big old mess of a bill slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs of Americans, doing things that hurt Texas farmers, just hurt Texans overall. And they know this. They know what's coming. They know that the public outrage that is brewing of this, their simple refusal and their blocking of the release of the Epstein files is huge. They know that they're losing support from even their own voters, and they know they're going to take a bath on this. So the only way they can save themselves is by cheating. So, Representative Wu, in this particular situation, though, to fight this particular map that the Republicans are working on in Austin, do Democrats, I mean, it's been talked about a lot. Do Democrats leave the state? Do enough Democrats from the legislature get out of the state so that there are not enough folks to call a vote there in the House and prevent this or at least delay this from As every national leader and state leader and local leader that has come talk to us about this, the message is the same. These are extraordinary times and extraordinary times calls for extraordinary action. And I'm not going to say what we're going to do. There's a whole host of options on the table, but Democrats are committed to saving this democracy. We're committed not only to saving Texas, but to saving America. Because if this is allowed to happen, if this is allowed to go unchecked, if you allow cheating without any recourse, without any repercussion, and saying it's perfectly fine, then the system is broken. The system is done. It's game over. If you can cheat and get away with it, why would anyone ever do things the right way again? America will not be a land where we reward hard work and fair play. I understand that you all can't really show your hand right now and explain in detail what you're planning to do here. But if you did get enough Democrats to leave the state, to break quorum, to not have enough people to vote in the House, wouldn't that only drag it out? I mean, the governor could call multiple special sessions. How long, you know, conceivably, again, I'm not asking you to reveal any plans, how long, conceivably, could Democrats stay away? I mean, I don't know how you want me to answer that, because you're asking us, what are you willing to do to defend our nation? What are you willing to do to save the last remnants of the public's power, the public's voice? Once they're able to do this, once they can say, like, we don't care who our voters are, we can always find a way to cheat and win, once that happens, the rest of everything else doesn't matter anymore. Because why would they ever care what you say? Why would they ever care what you want ever again? They already don't care now. Tons of people called in to complain about what the Republicans are doing in their own districts, their own supporters and voters, and they still did it anyways. And this is going to keep happening. It's going to get worse. If we don't stand up, if the people in this country do not stand up against it, then it's done. Again, hypothetically speaking here, if you all did leave the state, you would need 51 of the 62 Democrats in the House to be willing to do that. Of course, there's this new rule that says that each member could be fined $500 a day for being absent. Did the rough math on that. That's $25,500 per day. That's pretty steep. Yeah, so look, we don't do this. We don't take on any of this stuff. We're not making these decisions lightly. And members understand what sacrifices and what pain they have in store. But as we keep talking about within Among Ourselves, is that whatever pain that we will feel, whatever sacrifice that we will make, it is nothing in comparison to the pain that Americans will feel and Texans will feel across this nation. If the voice of working class people no longer matter, if they can just simply do whatever their bosses tell them to do every single time and our voices don't count, the pain that the American people will feel will be nothing in comparison to ours. So in this special session, Republicans put redistricting first on the agenda in front of flood warning improvements, even after what happened in the Texas Hill country. Wouldn't they be able to possibly turn that around on Democrats if Democrats were to leave the state and prevent anything from going forward in the House and say that your absence is preventing progress on that issue? I'm sure they will. But just like we couldn't stop them from killing that same legislation during the regular session, just like we couldn't stop them from ignoring $50 billion worth of disaster preparedness plans, just like we couldn't stop them from ignoring all the cries of the families, cries of the families at the Uvalde shooting, Santa Fe, and all those other disasters that were preventable, we can't stop them from doing this again. We know that Greg Abbott could fund the entirety of what Kerrville is asking for for the whole state from his own discretionary funds for this very purpose today. But he's not going to, because the whole point is to use this tragedy, use the deaths of these hundreds of Texans and these children, to use it as a cover to force Democrats to be here, to force people to pass these laws that only benefit themselves, that only help them and their buddies. Attorney General Ken Paxton has said that Democrats should be found and arrested no matter where they go. His office stands ready to assist in, quote, hunting down and compelling the attendance of anyone who abandons their post and their office and their constituents. What do you say to that language there? That's pretty strong stuff coming from the Attorney General. Sure. I mean, if it didn't come from probably easily the most corrupt politician that Texas has seen in a very long time, you know, I'm not sure, like, maybe when he's in the state and not at one of his four or five houses around the country that he just found, that he just reported on his ethics reports, or dealing with the multiple allegations of corruption, I don't know when he would have time to come deal with us after dealing with all that other stuff, dealing with whistleblowers and, you know, and his divorce. Representative Wu, Democrats in big blue states like New York and California and Illinois have been threatening to, you know, basically do their own redistricting. Given the criticism that Democrats have had for Republicans doing this, you know, calling it cheating, is it the best idea to do the same thing? Look, I mean, we have gone to other states to talk to them, not about telling them what to do, but to say, like, this is not a fight for Democrats. This is not just a fight for Texas. This is a fight for the entire nation, because what happens in Texas will carry out through the rest of the country. Other states, Missouri, Ohio, they're watching Texas right now. They're making rumblings as well. They say, hey, if Texas does this, we're going to do it too. And this is something that is going to spread across all red states. We know this. What's Trump going to do with five seats? Not a whole lot in a wave year. But what's Trump going to do five seats from every state? Quite a bit. And they will protect him and insulate him, maybe even give him a third term as president. You all have probably looked at some of the math on this, though. Do those blue states have the ability to redistrict in such a way as to be able to match what some of these red states are doing, including Texas? Every state out there is different. The issue is we need to at least get them to the place where they're taking this seriously. And I think that's what we're doing right now. The Democrats in Texas are going around to other states. We're talking to other states, bringing this issue to the front and saying, this is no longer normal politics. This is now incumbent upon every American, man, woman, and child, whether you're Democrat or Republican or nothing at all, that it is incumbent upon everyone who believes in this nation to get up and fight, for us as individuals to do everything we can and as leaders to prepare for what is coming, to prepare to deal with Trump and prepare for this coming to their own states, whether it's a blue state or red state. And look, we have said that racial gerrymandering, political gerrymandering should be illegal. And all these blue states have created commissions and doing all these things to do that. And we have, in not so many words, unilaterally disarmed while the Republicans are continuing to do this. And we're saying, we don't want to do this. I would tell states, this is not something that we should be doing. But if we don't have a choice, if one side decides to launch nukes, you cannot simply say, we won't respond, that that is not a viable option to say, we are being attacked, we're going to be destroyed, and we just won't respond. Let me ask you one more thing here, Representative Wu. So Republicans are looking at this map that really carves up a lot of districts in the Houston area, Dallas, Fort Worth, the Austin area, and down in the Valley. You all have studied this map that was put out earlier this week. They had to move voters around to be able to move these lines like this. And I'm just curious, from your vantage point and the studying that you all have done, do you see any districts where, even though that they've drawn these lines to be more favorable to Republicans, where they might actually end up still being vulnerable or being newly vulnerable to a Democratic candidate? Yeah, again, I know where you're trying to go with this question, right? Are they going to make a mistake and actually help Democrats? We're not concerned about helping Democrats. We're concerned about communities being torn apart or being made powerless. That's the real concern, right? If communities, we absolutely agree that communities should be allowed to pick the candidate of their choice, and if the candidate of their choice is not us, then so be it. But what we're saying is, just like in Houston and Dallas and all these different places, Latino populations, African American populations, their communities have chosen the candidates of their choice. The Republicans just don't like who they're choosing. So in order to split them apart, in order to take power away from them, to keep them from voting for people that they don't want them to vote for, they're just going to say, well, we're just going to make it so your vote won't matter anymore. And that's what the real concern is. I'm not concerned about protecting members. We're concerned about protecting communities and protecting the state and protecting the nation from this. Well, Representative Wu, these are extraordinary times here in Texas, and I think everybody is sort of getting the sense that it's going to become more extraordinary in the days and weeks ahead. Thanks for taking the time with us. We will have to check in as this continues along. We really appreciate it. Thank you.