On this episode of the Washington Monthly politics roundtable, editors Matt Cooper, Paul Glastris, and Bill Scher discuss the ongoing redistricting chaos in Texas, the implications of recent economic turmoil, and the shifting dynamics of GOP support for Israel amidst the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
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This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Matt Cooper:
Good morning. Well, we have a lot to cover. Let’s start with the crazy redistricting scene in Texas. Since the last day or so, Democratic lawmakers have fled Austin to avoid having a quorum so that Republicans can go ahead with their very unusual mid-decade redistricting, a response to President Trump insisting that they come up with more Republican seats. Democrats obviously oppose this somewhat radical move because redistricting is usually a once in a decade process right after the decennial census, but Republicans are trying to carve out more seats to prevent losing the House next year. Bill, you wrote about this last week.
Bill Scher
Well, there was an analysis done by the Texas Tribune with Washington Monthly alum Gabby Birenbaum having the byline for that piece. And they’re trying to squeeze out five more Republican districts that would be majority Hispanic. Now, we know there’s been a big rightward shift amongst Hispanic Latinos in the 2024 election and really over the course of this Trump era. But when you’re redistricting, typically you’re trying, you’re not basing it on just the most recent election.
You’re not basing it on what swing voters did in recent elections. You’re trying to move in your known hardcore partisans to ensure to get that flip. And we also know from the Texas Tribune, a different article, that a lot of Texas Republicans were getting pressured by Donald Trump to do this. And their response was that this seems kind of dicey. We’ve already kind of pushed this map to the limit and we could spread our voters out too thin, and get caught in a backlash in a bad year, which 2026 looks to be, but of course they did it anyway.
And so we have other evidence in polling nationally that Hispanics are shifting back left. The Texas governor is underwater, which he hasn’t been for about three years. I mean, this is all kind of expected. Again, you have pendulum swings and Donald Trump is a very active president to be charitable. That’s the kind of situation that tends to cause backlash.
Matt Cooper:
Circumstances change. You got ICE roundups. Trump’s had popularity problems generally. Paul, let me ask you, I’m putting you on the spot a little bit, but Democrats are trying to run out the clock because they’re in a special session because of the flooding on the Guadalupe River that caused so many tragic deaths earlier this summer.
Democrats are hoping to run out the clock. The governor said he’s going to try to replace them. I don’t know what the laws are in Texas, if that’s even feasible. The impeached attorney general Ken Paxton has vowed to try to arrest the Democrats, but his authority doesn’t extend out of state and the Democratic leaders in Chicago this morning holding a press conference. I’m putting you on the spot here, but do you think the Democrats can prevail in stopping this thing?
Paul Glastris:
Well this is not the first time the Democrats of Texas has gone out of state to deny the Republicans a quorum. It’s worked before to delay votes. I’m not aware of any time that it’s worked to stop them altogether, because eventually miss your spouse, right? You can’t just live in a crappy hotel room in Cook County forever
Whether they can stop this vote, I have my doubts. Whether Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton can arrest these folks, I also have my doubts. But I think that the problem is, as Bill wisely pointed out in his story on Friday, that the Texas Republicans’ hearts are not in this. They know that it might not work.
They’re doing it because they’re bowing to Donald Trump, not because they’re all fired up.
And in addition to the walkout of the Democrats, you have three Democratic state governors saying if Texas redistricts to add Republicans, we’re going to redistrict to take away Republicans. That’s Illinois, New York, and California. And that is not easy in any of those states to do, but it is possible. So there’s a mutually assured destruction going on here. And that’s what I suspect might in the end kind of lead to a peace agreement.
Matthew Cooper:
Bill, let me ask you, because as Paul mentioned, these Democratic governors are saying, look, we may have to fight fire with fire. And over the weekend, Eric Holder, the former attorney general who has led a big campaign for more nonpartisan redistricting methods said, well, normally that’s what I favor, but this is an emergency.
Do you think, especially in California where they’ve already gone to a commission system, do you think Democrats, assuming Texas goes ahead, they are going to be able to respond to this in kind?
Bill Scher:
I don’t know if they’ll be able to match Republicans one to one across the board, because there’s not much opportunity, there are legal obstacles.
As you guys know, I’m a fairly bipartisan person, I’ve talked about bipartisanship in positive tones in the past. Not that bipartisanship is always awesome. But legislatively speaking, it’s often, it’s often necessary. And when you can do it, those, those policies tend to stick. But I’ve never been a bipartisan when comes to redistricting. I’m all for gerrymandering warfare. I think in the end of the day, it all ends up being a wash.
They don’t really hold the fort when the waves come. So it’s not like you never can win an election ever again. When someone tries to gerrymander, we’ve been doing this for literally centuries. So it doesn’t bother me when everybody does it. It doesn’t make sense to unilaterally disarm. So if Democrats try to fight fire with fire and if they can’t get Republicans totally even-steven in this cycle, perhaps they can mitigate. But you’re talking inches, you’re talking a handful of seats. And sometimes it comes down to that. So I understand why you would go to the wall with it. But in the average midterm, the president’s party loses 25 seats and Democrats only need three to take back the House. I mean, Democrats have to really blow it to not take back the House this time. And I don’t think the redistricting wars are going to be what saves Republicans.
Matthew Cooper:
Let’s move on a little bit. Now, we had this situation last week where there was a smattering of different economic news. But if you look closely, almost all of it was bad. We have an excellent piece in the Washington Monthly this morning by Robert Shapiro, who was the Under Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration, which explains why we had the disparity last week between a robust GDP number and a very, very weak jobs report.
But in response to these weak reports, Trump acted with great maturity and wisdom and fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a part of the Labor Department, in a move that hasn’t been done since the Hoover administration and is widely deplored by economists on both sides of the aisle for breaking the thermometer because he didn’t like the temperature.
Do you see any fallout from this politically or are we just coming to accept that this is Trump?
Bill Scher:
Politically, I imagine this is too deep in the weeds for the average voter to pay attention to—that’s not the kind of thing really grabs you. I deeply worry about what it means economically if the entire business and financial community can’t trust the numbers that the federal government puts out.
How do we make any kind of planning and budgeting and investing decisions in that case?
Paul Glastris:
It’s like firing your radiologist, right? Because he’s not giving you a reading of your cancer that you like. It’s crazy.
Bill Scher:
It’s totally crazy, which is why I think even pretty conservative Republicans didn’t take that step before because they would think two, three steps ahead. Donald Trump is not a two, three steps ahead kind of guy. He does what he wants to do in the moment and how this damages the credibility of the federal government or the Republican party is just not a concern of his.
I think politically this is probably low on the list of things dragging him down But in terms of things that are going to make the economy even more unstable which will have a political impact, this strike me as pretty big.
Paul Glastris:
I agree with Bill. I don’t think that the firing of the head of the BLS is a huge political deal. And by the way, I don’t think it’s going to even have that much effect because, as Bill said, these numbers are put together by teams of civil servants and the head of BLS does not have the ability to change the numbers.
And if that somebody new comes in and tries to do it, there’s going to be scores, hundreds of people blowing the whistle on it.
The big concern is the economy, right? We have a much weaker economy than we thought on Thursday. Or let me put it a little differently. There was great scratching of heads by a lot of people about how the economy seemed to be doing so well. And what we now know is the economy’s not doing that well. It’s actually losing steam.
Matthew Cooper:
Speaking of political change, let me turn to the situation in the Middle East and the fallout from the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. We’re seeing a real collapse, according to the polls, in Democratic support for Israel generally and on this Gaza mess in particular with something like 7 % of Democrats approving of Israeli policy in Gaza.
This week three prominent podcasters—the Pod Save America fellows who were all Obama administration veterans all said we’ve got to cut off aid to Israel, and that would include defensive weapons like Iron Dome. On the Republican side, I don’t know if she’s a leading indicator or not, but the very outspoken representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia, a fierce Trump voice is saying that this is genocide.
Let me ask you about the domestic US politics of this. Is this a permanent shift? Or is it something that could evaporate if the situation in Gaza returns to something resembling normal?
Bill Scher:
I wouldn’t call it permanent because the Israeli government can change.
I’m no expert on Israeli political dynamics but if the next election would actually bring in a more moderate government, support for Israel in America could fall more or less along party lines. Of course, you point out, there’s faction of Republicans who are isolationists.
So it definitely makes things very scrambled politically. And I think most importantly has set back any hope of having a two-state solution, who knows how long. But that to me is where the North Star should still be. But it’s very hard to see how you get from point A to point B when you have an Israeli government that has literally zero interest in it. And you also have an Hamas leadership that has no interest in it.
Paul Glastris:
Well it’s not just Democrats who are upset with the starvation in Gaza. It’s Donald Trump—he just seems very, very rattled by this. And it’s curious because, know, a few weeks ago, he was sitting down with Benjamin Netanyahu agreeing with a policy of ethnically cleansing the Gazans. Well, starving the Gazans is how you ethnically cleanse them. So very, very confused policy coming out of the White House. So I really don’t know where domestically this all goes. Certainly there is more support for Netanyahu and the current Israeli policy among Republicans than Democrats, but things could change as Bill said in Israel very quickly too.
Matthew Cooper:
I should note news over the weekend that all the former, except for a few, but pretty much all the living former heads of Mossad and Shinbet, the Israeli intelligence services, wrote a letter to Netanyahu saying that this is a crazy policy, that he walked into Hamas’s trap, essentially, that Hamas wanted a humanitarian crisis. They’ve never had much regard for their own civilian population by putting their tunnels and missiles under mosques and hospitals and schools. And that he had walked into this and that this policy aimed at having every last Hamas militant wiped out has created a diplomatic and military catastrophe for Israel.
There are lot of pro-Israeli voices that are very uncomfortable with where Netanyahu has led this. And of course, there is a belief in Israel that Netanyahu, who faces legal peril there, is very eager to stay in office to avoid that legal peril.
Well, gentlemen, thank you. Appreciate it. We will see you next week. Quiet August or not, bring your blue polo shirt and your beard and we’ll see you next time. Thanks.
