What to know as a Texas lawmaker protests police escorts and California takes up redistricting

Other Democratic lawmakers have joined a colleague in staying at the Texas Capitol rather than accept around-the-clock police escorts meant to prevent them from blocking a vote on a Republican plan for redrawing congressional districts as President Donald Trump wants.

Republicans insisted on having Department of Public Safety officers shadow Democratic lawmakers if those Democrats wanted to leave the House floor. Democrats ended a two-week walkout Monday that had prevented any action on new maps.

Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier, who represents a minority-majority district in Fort Worth, wouldn’t agree to being shadowed and stayed on the House floor Monday night and Tuesday. Two other lawmakers joined her overnight, and several others who’d previously agreed to escorts changed their minds.

Texas Democrats returned to their Capitol after California Democrats heeded Gov. Gavin Newsom’s call to redraw that state’s congressional district to counter Texas. A committee advanced a proposal Tuesday, but its meeting turned into a shouting match.

Here’s what to know.

Democrats are back in Texas, but there’s still a protest

Democratic lawmakers said state Department of Public Safety officers followed them around the Capitol on Monday and Tuesday and tailed them when they left. They had to sign what they called “permission slips” and accept the surveillance to leave the building.

Collier described it as an attack on her dignity and an effort to control her movements. She refused to sign and so had to stay in the Capitol. On Tuesday, other Democrats who’d initially signed permission slips ripped them up and went onto the House floor.

“We’re not criminals,” said Houston Rep. Penny Morales Shaw.

Republicans are trying to prevent a repeat of the walkout that denied the House enough members to meet and prevented it from doing any business. Dozens of lawmakers fled to Democratic-led states, including California, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York, to stay out of the reach of Texas law enforcement officers trying to bring them back.

Trump is trying to avoid a congressional check on him

Both Trump and the Democrats are looking ahead to the 2026 midterms knowing that they often go against the president’s party, as they did during Trump’s first term in 2018. Republicans currently have a seven-seat majority in the 435-member House.

State legislatures draw the lines after each U.S. census in most states — including Texas — and only a few dozen House districts are competitive.

In Texas, Republicans hold 25 of 38 seats, and they’re trying to increase that to 30. In California, Democrats have 43 of the 52 seats, and they’re trying to boost that to 48, to wipe out the advantage the GOP would gain from redrawing lines in Texas.

California is more complicated for Democrats

In some ways, the nation’s most populous state, California, is a reverse-mirror image of the nation’s second-most populous state, Texas. Democrats are even more firmly in control of state government there than Republicans are in Texas, with Democratic supermajorities in both California legislative chambers.

But California’s districts were drawn by an independent commission created by a statewide vote in 2008 after years of intense partisan battles over redistricting.

Democrats are trying to avoid legal challenges to a new map by asking voters to approve it as an exception to the normal process, which would require a special election in November. Texas has no such commission, so its Legislature doesn’t have to seek voters’ approval for its maps.

Though California Republicans can’t stop Democrats from putting a proposal on the ballot, Assemblymember David Tangipa, one of two Republicans on the committee considering the proposal Tuesday, spent 30 minutes asking questions and shouted for more time when the committee began voting.