The fight over Republican efforts to redraw congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections has escalated sharply. On Tuesday, Texas Senator John Cornyn publicly urged the FBI to intervene and arrest the Democratic state legislators, who fled the state to deny the legislature a quorum.

On Sunday night, just over 50 Democrats in the Texas House left the state to delay attempts by Texas Republicans to gerrymander five seats primarily located in and around the larger urban centers. Last month, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, at the behest of President Donald Trump, called a special session to force through the new maps before the 2026 midterm elections.

In a letter sent to FBI Director Kash Patel on Tuesday, Cornyn asked Patel to “locate or arrest potential lawbreakers who have fled the state.” Cornyn concluded that these “legislators have committed potential criminal acts in their rush to avoid their constitutional responsibilities and must be fully investigated and held accountable.”

As a matter of fact, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that legislators are permitted to leave the state to prevent a quorum. It is not a state or federal crime, and the FBI has no lawful role in such a dispute.

In a press conference held Tuesday afternoon, Trump was asked about Cornyn’s demand and declared that the FBI “may have to” get involved and physically seize the Democrats.

A reporter asked, “Do you want the federal government and the FBI to help locate and arrest these Texas Democrats that have left the state?”

Trump replied, “Well, I think they have abandoned the state, nobody has seen anything like it even though they’ve done it twice before. And uh, in a certain way it almost looks like they’ve abandoned the state, it looks very bad.”

The reporter pressed, “If the FBI should get involved?” Trump said, “Well, they may have to. They may have to.”

He added, “I know they want them back, not only the attorney general, the governor wants them back if you look, I mean the governor of Texas is demanding they come back so a lot of people are demanding they come back. You can’t just sit it out. You have to go back, you have to fight it out; that’s what elections are all about.”

The confrontation in Texas over redistricting is not an isolated dispute but part of a nationwide assault on democratic rights following the Supreme Court’s effective dismantling of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That legislation, won through mass struggles of the working class and oppressed minorities, was designed to prevent precisely the type of targeted disenfranchisement now openly embraced by both parties.

An ominous feature of the current conflict is the trend towards regional conflict, with the Texas Democrats fleeing to states with Democratic governors, like Illinois, New York, Massachusetts and California, because Republican governors would honor the arrest warrants issued by Texas.

With Cornyn’s appeal to the FBI and Trump’s evident support, the federal government is now intervening to take sides in this state versus state conflict, raising the spectacle of federal agents grabbing state legislators off the streets as they have been seizing immigrants, by the tens of thousands.

Gerrymandering is an old-fashioned corrupt practice in capitalist politics, in which the office holders choose the voters, rather than the reverse. But with modern technology, including the use of specialized software and artificial intelligence, it has become possible to fine-tune this to the point of outright election rigging, ensuring that broad layers of the population are denied political representation.

For decades, both the Democrats and Republicans have wielded this weapon to entrench their own positions while at the same time safeguarding the two-party monopoly, virtually outlawing any left-wing, socialist and anti-capitalist parties from appearing on the ballot. Urban, working-class, and minority communities have been systematically divided, while safe seats for political insiders have been protected.

The Texas maps currently under dispute were already redrawn in 2021 to cement Republican control for the next decade, locking in districts that bear no relationship to actual demographic realities.

But it is only now, under conditions of an open drive toward dictatorship, that Trump and the Republicans are threatening to arrest Democrats for attempting to block an especially egregious case of gerrymandering.

The current redistricting push is not about “representation” or “process” but about consolidating one-party rule and criminalizing any resistance. Trump’s threats to send the FBI to seize lawmakers engaged in lawful political activity reveal the true nature of the political crisis: The ruling class, faced with deepening social opposition, is preparing to abolish what remains of democratic forms in the United States.

Never before has one party’s leadership threatened to use federal law enforcement to arrest sitting legislators for engaging in lawful parliamentary tactics—in this case, fleeing the state to deny a quorum and block the passage of an especially provocative law.

Trump’s declaration that the FBI “may have to” seize Democratic lawmakers, echoed by Texas Senator John Cornyn’s call for arrests, is not bluster. It is the language of dictatorship.

American history offers warnings. In the years before the Civil War, repeated breakdowns of the legislative process—nearly always involving conflict over the expansion of slavery into new territories—were accompanied by violence in the halls of Congress, armed confrontations in the states, and the use of federal power to enforce the will of the slaveholding elite.

In this fight, the working class cannot rely on either of the capitalist parties, both of which have spent decades perfecting the mechanisms of disenfranchisement. The Democrats’ response to Trump’s threats is not to mobilize mass opposition but to plead to the courts to impose “restraint,” while threatening to further gerrymander states currently controlled by the Democrats.

The Texas redistricting fight is a warning: The methods of authoritarian rule—criminalizing political opposition, weaponizing law enforcement, nullifying elections through rigged maps—are being normalized.