Gov. JB Pritzker open to Democratic remap retaliation if Texas GOP moves lines: 'Everything is on the table'

Gov. JB Pritzker on Friday suggested Illinois and other Democratic-controlled states could respond in kind if Texas Republicans redraw their legislative maps under pressure from President Donald Trump to boost the number of GOP-held seats in Congress.

After hosting a roundtable talk with several Democratic Texas state legislators who traveled to the South Side to discuss the Republican remap effort, Pritzker said “if they're going to take this drastic action, then we also might take drastic action to respond.”

“They want to change the rules in the middle of the game. We're not suggesting we want that,” Pritzker said at Northeastern Illinois University’s Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies.

“But we are suggesting that if you're going to attack democracy by going state-by-state — here they're starting in Texas, but you've heard it talked about for other places, too — then the rest of us are going to have to say, ‘Well, what can we do?’”

Texas Republicans called a special state legislative session at Trump’s urging this month to consider redrawing their political maps outside of the usual post-Census redistricting period in an effort to carve out five additional congressional districts that would be more favorable to GOP candidates in the midterm elections.

Moving the lines in Texas could give Trump more breathing room to advance his agenda in the U.S. House and Senate, where Republicans hold razor-thin majorities.

“What attacks the people of Texas is attacking the people of Illinois,” Pritzker said, keeping the door open to retaliatory mapping efforts by Democrats.

“Everything is on the table. We've got to preserve democracy. I don't want to make any changes. I've made this clear. I would like us simply to keep the lines that we have in Texas,” he said.

Pritzker’s callout drew eyerolls from Illinois Republicans who for years have complained of state maps drawn by and for Democrats who hold all statewide offices and wield supermajorities in the General Assembly.

“Democrats from Texas are in Chicago for a roundtable with JB Pritzker to complain about ‘Republican gerrymandering’ — yet they’re sitting with the guy who signed one of the most extreme gerrymandered maps in the country,” Illinois House Minority Leader Tony McCombie said in a statement. “Apparently, they don’t think gerrymandering is wrong, they just want to be as good at it as Illinois’ own governor.”

The Illinois Supreme Court earlier this year rejected an Illinois GOP legal effort to scrap the state’s current map approved in 2021 and authorize an independent districting commission.

That map led to Illinois Democrats picking up an additional seat in Congress for a delegation now totaling 14. Republicans lost one and now have three U.S. House members hailing from Illinois.

Pritzker rejected GOP accusations of hypocrisy.

“We followed the law, and we have a diverse population in the state of Illinois, and we made sure that the districts represent that diverse population — that was the purpose of the map that we passed,” Pritzker said. “There were swing districts that Democrats won in 2022. Republicans lost fair and square, but now they want to complain.”

Contributing: Associated Press