Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer and I briefly discuss the 2003 and 2025 Texas re-districting stories on “Then and Now,” our five-minute weekly convos that put current events into historical perspective. Here’s a bit more than what we covered:
With so much attention devoted to California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to fight back, some of the details of the power grab by Texas Republicans have been overlooked. The FBI raid on John Bolton’s house reminded me of one of the worst moments in this re-districting fight—Texas Sen. John Cornyn’s announcement early this month that the FBI should get involved in bringing the Democratic state legislators back from Illinois.
Cornyn is a former attorney general of Texas and a man who once enjoyed a reputation as a relatively-reasonable Republican. He knew damn well that the FBI has no role in state politics. But facing a primary challenge from current Texas AG Ken Paxton —one of the craziest and most corrupt politicians in America, which is really saying something—Cornyn tried to inject the FBI into the re-districting fight. I guess Paxton’s push for the Ten Commandments to be posted in every Texas classroom (a law invalidated this week by a judge) while his wife is suing him for adultery wasn’t a good campaign issue for Cornyn. So hhe had to outbid Paxton in supporting new, lawless missions for the FBI so that it can evolve into Donald Trump’s personal police force.
The FBI didn’t end up going to Illinois, in part because Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker reacted with suitable outrage. This was an important example of how resistance can work. But the fact that Cornyn and Texas Republicans backed such a dangerous idea, combined with the Bolton raid (with no probable cause beyond that Bolton wrote an anti-Trump book in 2020), suggests that Trump and his enablers’ project of turning the U.S. into an authoritarian state is well underway.
