Messing with Texas

On Thursday night, a middle-school teacher posted a video to social media about the redistricting push that is currently underway in Texas, where Republican lawmakers are attempting to draw a map that could give them as many as five more seats in the US House of Representatives after President Donald Trump called on them to do so. (“We are entitled to five more seats,” Trump said on CNBC last week.) “When politicians draw their own lines—when they draw our districts into these crazy shapes, when they crack and pack communities of color—it’s called ‘gerrymandering,’” the teacher explained. “It’s basically politicians manufacturing the outcome they want.” Both parties engage in the practice, the teacher continued, but “not this brazenly…at the direct request of the president of the United States. This is not an issue of party. It’s an issue of power.” At the end, he tacked on a mini history lesson: about the time that Abraham Lincoln, while serving as a state lawmaker in Illinois, attempted to deprive his colleagues of a quorum by jumping out of a window.

This was relevant because the teacher—or former teacher, at this point—was himself in Illinois and breaking quorum: the video was posted by James Talarico, a member of the Texas House who, along with his Democratic colleagues, recently left the state in a bid to stop the Republicans from passing the gerrymander; those Democrats have since faced a fusillade of legal reprisals from the state’s Republican leadership and a pair of bomb threats phoned into the Illinois hotel where they’re staying. Talarico is not that well-known nationally, but that appears to be changing, in part due to his knack for posting compelling videos online; even before the redistricting attempt took center stage, those came to the attention of the hugely popular podcaster Joe Rogan—perhaps the most coveted interlocutor for Democrats right now, given his perceived influence in Trump’s election last year—who invited Talarico onto his show and suggested that he run for president. According to the Texas Tribune, Talarico did twenty-five media interviews in the first twenty-four hours of the quorum break; according to Politico, by Thursday night, his tally had risen to forty-eight, making him “something of an unofficial spokesperson” for the fleeing Democrats. All the attention might also be boosting Talarico’s own ambitions: he’s considering a run for US Senate next year, and has recently inquired with TV stations about advertising rates, per the Tribune. “The attention economy is defining everything about our politics right now,” he told Politico, “for good and for ill.”