Marc: Trey Martinez Fischer, welcome to Defending Democracy.
Trey Martinez Fischer: Thank you for having me. Such an important message.
Marc: Yes, it is very important, and I want to jump right into it. You and your colleagues in the Texas legislature have chosen to leave the state of Texas to break a quorum. Can you just start by telling us what the latest is on things?
Trey Martinez Fischer: Thank you for having me. This is a great platform because it's about voting rights. It's about our democracy. It's about waking this country up to recognize that this is being robbed right before our eyes, and we have to do something about it. We are in the Illinois area. We have been here for some time now. Today is day four, and the legislative session ends on August 18th.
Despite all the threats that we have, not just from Trump and the FBI and our Governor, we had a bomb threat at a place we were staying at just yesterday. We have increased our security. We are here as a guest of Governor Pritzker, and he and his team have been tremendous in looking out for our safety. We have hunkered down and tightened our security, but we are not giving up our ability to talk to people like you on these platforms, so they know just how much we're sacrificing for this democracy and how we're all in this together and how we all need to do our part.
But as it stands right now, Texas cannot adopt a map unless they have 100 House members on the House floor. And as of today, they are denied that number because of our quorum.
Marc: Let's start with kind of the beginning, which is that Republicans gerrymandered the state of Texas in 2021. Republicans come at this, from my standpoint, with a lot of dirty hands to begin with. These folks had really screwed over Texas voters and particularly minority voters in what they'd done in 2021. When did you get a sense that having done what I called was an obscene gerrymander, they now wanted to do a grotesque gerrymander?
Trey Martinez Fischer: I had two flags. We had the Speaker, the Governor, and Lieutenant Governor all lock arms and say that they were going to give Trump this redistricting do-over. That was flag number one. Flag number two was maybe a week before that. The Department of Justice said, "By the way, we're looking at your congressional districts, and it looks like you used race when you made these things, so you have to go fix them." And the reason that was a flag, is that Senator Joan Huffman and all the Republicans that were in charge of drawing the initial map had already testified under oath, not before just one federal judge, but before three federal judges under oath and said these maps are completely legal and had nothing to do with race. My first question was, "Who's lying?" Is the Senator lying in federal court? And that's a big problem. Or is the Trump DOJ lying? So flag number one, then the big three leaders, all Republicans, said, "We're going to do this."
And this is all happening while...
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