This Week at Democracy Docket: Texas Throws DOJ Under the Bus, and a New Role for a GOP Vote Suppressor

At Democracy Docket, we pride ourselves on monitoring the voting and democracy landscape — and especially the right’s never-ending effort to undermine fair elections — more closely than just about anyone else. That often allows us to shine a light on developments that other outlets missed, but that urgently deserve attention. 

Here’s a great example: We’ve been covering every step of the GOP campaign to rig the 2026 election by gerrymandering as many states’ congressional maps as possible. Nowhere is there more on the line than in Texas, which last month rammed through a new plan that could give Republicans an extra five seats. The scheme drew plenty of national news coverage at the time. But this week, almost no one noticed when Texas made a new legal filing that walked back its entire justification for the mid-decade redraw, and instead offered a completely new one — throwing the U.S. Department of Justice under the bus in the process. Democracy Docket’s Jen Rice explained why Texas’ about-face is so revealing. 

That filing came in a high-stakes legal challenge to Texas’ map, brought by minority voters, to be heard in a federal courtroom in El Paso starting Wednesday*. Jen will be reporting live from the scene. And here she lays out what to expect from a legal battle that could determine control of Congress, as well as whether Texas’ Black and Brown voters get the fair representation they deserve.

We’re also keeping a close eye on redistricting in Utah, where a court recently struck down another GOP gerrymander and ordered the state to draw a new map. But as lawmakers gathered to start that process, Republicans couldn’t resist floating an audacious — and strikingly creative — new scheme that would let them continue to rig the state’s map-drawing far into the future. Again, few in the national media noticed. Again, we did. Democracy Docket’s Matt Cohen provided the details.

Matt also sounded the alarm about yet another troubling piece of voting news that flew under the media radar — this one in North Carolina. The state appointed Dallas Woodhouse, a well-known GOP operative, as a “liaison” to local election boards — which sounds worrying enough. But Woodhouse’s record offers even more cause for concern. While serving as chair of the state Republican Party, he wrote an email that urged local boards to make “party-line changes” to early voting access, including cutting hours and nixing Sunday voting — which, of course, would have prevented Black churches from conducting their popular Souls to the Polls events. 

“Six days of voting in one week is enough,” Woodhouse wrote — as if voting were something to be taken only in moderation. “Period.”

Here’s something else that largely escaped the media’s attention, but that we thought was a pretty big deal: The U.S. Justice Department, which for decades has led the way in enforcing the Voting Rights Act, is now arguing that the law’s ban on racial discrimination in voting should be significantly narrowed, making it much more difficult to protect minority voting rights. As Democracy Docket’s Jim Saksa explained, that stance was revealed in a new filing in a Louisiana redistricting case, to be heard by the Supreme Court next month, that will give the justices a chance to strike a crippling blow against the most successful civil rights measure in our history.

And of course, we haven’t even gotten to perhaps the biggest blow struck against U.S. democracy this week: President Donald Trump’s accelerating drive for authoritarian power.

Earlier this week, Trump forced out a U.S. attorney and replaced him with a handpicked loyalist who quickly filed charges against the former FBI director James Comey, a prominent Trump critic. To put the move in perspective, Democracy Docket’s Jacob Knutson tracked down John McKay, who was improperly ousted as a US attorney by the George W. Bush administration, part of a scandal that ultimately led to the attorney general’s resignation. 

“When I was fired by Alberto Gonzales as U.S. attorney in Seattle, they lied about the reason for doing it because they didn’t want anyone to think they were doing it for political reasons,” McKay told Jacob. “But now, they’re saying it right out loud. They’re saying, ‘We are doing it for political reasons.’ That is unlawful. That is unethical. It violates due process. And we have to speak out against it.”

* The Texas voters are represented by the Elias Law Group, whose chair, Marc Elias, is the founder of Democracy Docket.