Former President Barack Obama offered a scathing summary of President Donald Trump’s return to office during a call with Texas state Democrats who skipped town to fight Republican efforts to redistrict the state.
During a 30-minute Zoom meeting on Thursday, Obama spoke to dozens of members of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, who fled earlier this month to Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts so that Republicans wouldn’t be able to make a quorum and hold a vote on the new districts.
The maps are usually redrawn once every 10 years, after the census is completed, and not mid-decade. But Trump has called for a “simple redrawing” of Texas that would allow Republicans to pick up five seats in next year’s midterm elections, with the goal of maintaining control of the House.
The meeting was part pep talk and part strategy session, and Obama did not mention Trump by name, CNN reported.
But he called out the administration’s efforts to gerrymander congressional districts, suppress voting, overturn election results, bypass Congress through executive action, militarize cities, and politicize the Department of Justice and the military.
“Those are trend lines that remind us this precious democracy that we’ve got is not a given,” he said. “It’s not self-executed. It requires us to fight for it. It requires us to stand up for it.”
He said Republicans increasingly recognize their policies are unpopular, so they’re trying to “fix the game a little bit” by drawing maps that splinter Democratic voting blocs or that pack Democrats into a single district so they can’t influence other races.
“That’s not fair,” Obama said. “That’s not how democracy is supposed to work.”
