As Texas House Democrats hunker down in Illinois and other blue states to try to stop a Republican-led redistricting plan in their state, national Democrats and one of their hosts, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, ratcheted up their rhetoric Tuesday, saying anything goes in the face of such Republican aggression.

“We’re fighting for democracy. There are no rules anymore, apparently,” Pritzker said as he stood alongside Texas Democratic lawmakers and the head of the Democratic National Committee. “And so we’re going to have to play by a set of rules that, well, that are being set out in front of us, which frankly none of us believes is the right way to operate.”

The gloves-are-off message comes as Texas Democrats on Sunday fled their state and fanned out to Illinois, New York and Massachusetts to at least temporarily stymie an effort by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Republicans to redraw Texas’ congressional map at the behest of President Donald Trump.

Following Trump’s suggestion, Texas House Republicans were planning to vote on a new congressional map on Monday that could flip five districts to the GOP for the 2026 midterms in an effort to sustain their slim U.S. House majority for the final two years of Trump’s second term in office. But the vote was postponed because the Democratic walkout prevented the House from having a quorum.

In response to the GOP remapping effort, Texas House Democrats have encouraged leaders in heavily Democratic states such as California, New York and even Illinois to actively look at redrawing their own boundaries and abandon the national party’s long-standing support for politically fair maps that counter partisan gerrymandering. And Democrats nationally have faced pressure this year to respond more forcefully to all sorts of actions from the Trump administration — a challenge Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin embraced Tuesday.

“Now is not the time for one party to play by the rules,” Martin said as he was joined by Pritzker and the Texas lawmakers in suburban Aurora. “They decided to cheat, and we’re going to respond in kind.”

Illinois’ congressional map, which Pritzker signed into law in 2021, already gives Democrats a 14-3 majority in the state’s U.S. House delegation.

Still, asked about the idea of a special session to change the map in Illinois, Pritzker maintained Tuesday that “everything is on the table.”

“It is possible to redistrict,” he said later. “It’s not something that I want to do. It’s not something that any of us want to have to do.”

The possibility of a new map faces many potential complications in Illinois, most notably that candidates for the state’s March 17 Democratic primary could begin gathering petition signatures in their districts starting Tuesday. Pritzker didn’t address the petition issue when it was raised in the press conference.

Illinois State Board of Elections spokesperson Matt Dietrich said Tuesday that any discussion about redrawing maps would be speculative.

“At this point, we have not heard anything to the effect that congressional districts in Illinois would be redrawn,” he said. “It’s so hypothetical that it does not seem like this is even in the picture.”

U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Schaumburg, one of three major candidates seeking the Democratic nomination to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, said the ball is in the Republicans’ court over the mid-decade redistricting issue.

“The Republicans have one of two choices. Either they can choose, if they decide to go down the road of redistricting these maps to banish Democrats, essentially, then two can play at that game. That’s one road. The other road is we allow for the decade-long kind of redistricting process to stand and then do it again at the appropriate time. Then we don’t get into this arms race, essentially, of redistricting every other year to try to gain an advantage,” he said after speaking to the City Club of Chicago. “My hope is that they’re going to choose wisely, but if they don’t, then they should be prepared to get neutralized, or worse” by redistricting in Democratic-led states.

Jon Maxson, a spokesperson for Democratic House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, said earlier this week that “there have been no discussions on a new congressional map” for Illinois. And political experts question whether Democrats have the ability to wring out an additional seat at the expense of Republicans from the current map.

If maps were redrawn in Illinois, the signature threshold for candidates in many districts would decrease from 1,000 or more to 600, the requirement in an election after maps are changed, Dietrich said.

The governor, who is a billionaire, said neither he nor his political fundraising operation Think Big America had so far supported the Texas Democratic lawmakers financially as they have camped out in Illinois, though he has signaled openness to the possibility.

Mayor Brandon Johnson, meanwhile, appeared to be doing damage control Tuesday for his Monday comments that knocked Illinois leaders for helping Texas Democrats when “the South Side and the West Side could use that same level of energy.”

“So yesterday, I was wearing my sunglasses … but somehow, perhaps because I was wearing shades, someone thought I was throwing shade,” Johnson quipped to reporters before throwing his full support behind Pritzker and other Democratic governors “doing everything in their power to fight back” against the GOP.

Johnson confirmed that his support includes Democrats in Springfield redrawing Illinois’ congressional map to offset potential losses to Republican redistricting efforts in Texas or elsewhere.

“Good for him. It should be on the table,” Johnson said when asked if he agrees with Pritzker keeping that option open. “It’s well past time that we roll up our sleeves and do whatever is necessary. … This is a moment in history where we get to set the standard of not just what a fight back looks like, but what does a full comeback look like.”

Earlier Tuesday, Trump said on CNBC that Republicans “are entitled to five more seats” in Texas.

Martin, the DNC chair, responded that “no party is entitled to any district.”

“We have to go out and earn the votes, and that’s what democracy is about,” he said.

The president also accused Illinois of gerrymandering, to which Pritzker responded by calling Trump, along with Abbott, “a cheater.”

Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows earlier this week said he would sign civil warrants for each of the Democratic legislators who broke the legislature’s quorum, giving the House sergeant-at-arms and state troopers the power to arrest the missing Democrats and bring them to the Capitol. Abbott followed suit, instructing his Department of Public Safety to make arrests.

But since the warrants apply only within Texas state limits, the moves were largely symbolic since the missing Democrats have relocated to the Chicago suburbs, New York and Boston. And legal experts have questioned Abbott’s ability to engage law enforcement in activities outside of Texas.

“I’ve been saying to these Texas Republicans, if you want a showdown, well, you’re going to get a showdown. And here it is, right now, here in Illinois,” Martin said Tuesday. “This is not the Democratic Party of your grandfather, which would bring a pencil to the knife fight. This is a new Democratic Party. We’re bringing a knife to a knife fight.”

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(Tribune reporters Rick Pearson and Alice Yin contributed.)

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