US governor threatens Democrats with bribery charges for stalling Texas vote

Texas governor Greg Abbott has threatened to file bribery charges against Democratic legislators who fled the state to prevent a vote on a controversial redistricting plan that would significantly favour Republicans.

At least two-thirds of the 150-member state legislative body must be present to proceed with the vote. The quorum became unreachable when 51 Democratic lawmakers left the state.

The proposed congressional map, unveiled last week by Texas Republicans, would create more Republican seats in the US House of Representatives where they hold a slim majority currently.

Abbott warned that lawmakers who refuse to return to vote on the map could face second-degree felony charges.

"It would be bribery if any lawmaker took money to perform or to refuse to perform an act in the legislature," Abbott said on Fox News on Monday. "And the reports are these legislators have both sought money and offered money to skip the vote, to leave the legislature, to take a legislative act. That would be bribery."

The governor also issued a letter to Democrats asking them to return to Texas by Monday afternoon.

"This truancy ends now," he wrote. "The derelict Democrat House members must return to Texas and be in attendance when the House reconvenes at 15:00 local time (20:00 GMT) on Monday," Abbott said in the letter released on late Sunday evening.

Earlier, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, had threatened to have the Democratic leaders arrested.

Paxton wrote on X that the state should "use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law".

Most of the Democrats fled to Illinois where the state's Governor JB Pritzker said he was "going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them" amid arrest threats from Abbott.

The Democrats said they planned to stay away from Texas for two weeks until the end of a special legislative session.

"We will do whatever it takes. What that looks like, we don't know," Gene Wu, the Texas House Democratic Caucus leader, said.

Texas Republicans currently hold 25 out of 38 congressional seats in the Lone Star State.

They hope the new maps could increase that number to 30 - all in constituencies that President Donald Trump won last November by at least 10 points.

Trump's party currently has 219 of 435 seats in the House, while Democrats hold 212. The redistricting could help pad the slender Republican majority in the House, which is the lower chamber of Congress.

Both Republicans and Democrats have been acuused of manipulating boundaries of an electroal constituency - commonly known as gerrymandering.

A few Democratic leaders in other states have suggested they may redraw their own legislative maps to counter the proposed losses of seats in Texas.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she was exploring a constitutional amendment to move up the timeline to redraw legislative lines in her state.

New York - alongwith California, Colorado and Washington - assigns redistricting to non-partisan, independent commissions, rather than the state legislatures.

States typically undergo redistricting every 10 years, when voting maps are redrawn to account for population changes.

The most recent US Census was in 2020. Redrawing district lines in the middle of a decade is unusual.