More than 50 Texas House Democrats fled the state in an effort to halt the redrawing of the state’s congressional maps, sparking a major political standoff. Democrat Rep. Jolanda Jones is one of them, but its what she compared the proposed map to that’s getting her dragged online everywhere you look. Now, she’s speaking out.
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For context, the House Democrats left the Lone Star state to block a vote on a new congressional map sought by President Trump. With the new proposed map, Republicans would create five new GOP-leaning congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The politicians’ fleeing is called a quorum, a tactic used by a minority party to prevent the legislative body from having enough members present to conduct business.
On Tuesday’s episode of “The Don Lemon Show,” after Rep. Jones called the proposed redistricting map racist because it targets districts with majority minority voters, she compared it to the Holocaust. “They don’t accept us. They are showing us who they are, and we should believe them. And we better have the courage to stand up, otherwise we will fall for anything,” she said. “And in this country, we will be defeated, deported. I mean, we will lose all of our rights. And if you think it can’t happen, it can.”
Jones, 59, went on to say that the Holocaust was able to happen because “good people remained silent or good people didn’t realize that what happens to them can very soon happen to me or somebody I love.” She also argued that lawmakers have an obligation to help others, lest they too become targets.
Jones, who represents the 147th district, immediately came under fire for her Holocaust comparison. But now, she’s admitting her comments went “too far.” She told Fox News that she was emotional about what she called “Trump’s attempt to disenfranchise Black and Brown people.” She confessed her remarks were “a mistake and I apologize for it” before “retracting that comparison.”
The Holocaust was a genocide during World War II in which Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, systematically murdered approximately six million European Jews. The genocide was carried out through concentration and extermination camps, forced labor, and mass shootings.
On Monday (Aug. 4), civil arrest warrants were issued for the missing Democrats as they face a daily fine of $500 for each day they are absent. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) even asked the FBI for help tracking them all down who crossed state lines to avoid a vote on redistricting.
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