Texas house passes redrawn electoral map aiming to help Republicans keep majority in 2026 midterms – US politics live

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.

We start with news that the Texas legislature’s lower chamber passed a contentious new electoral map on Wednesday that aims to help Donald Trump’s Republican party retain its razor-thin US House majority in the 2026 midterm elections, AFP reported.

The vote had been delayed by two weeks after Democratic legislators fled the southern state to halt the redistricting drive, which carves out five new Republican-friendly districts.

More than 50 Democrats walked out, stalling legislative business and generating national headlines as they sought to draw attention to the rare mid-decade redistricting push.

The Democratic lawmakers returned this week, but not before their protest had set off a national map-drawing war, with Trump pressuring his party’s state-level officials to do everything they can to protect the majority in the US House of Representatives.

The stakes are sky-high for Trump, who will be bogged down in investigations into almost every aspect of his second term if Democrats manage to flip the handful of districts nationwide needed to win back the House in next year’s midterm elections.

Trump hailed the “Big WIN for the Great State of Texas“ on Wednesday night. “Everything Passed, on our way to FIVE more Congressional seats and saving your Rights, your Freedoms, and your Country, itself,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Texas never lets us down.”

The president also suggested Florida, Indiana and other states were looking into pursuing similar redistricting to benefit Republicans while once again calling to “STOP MAIL-IN VOTING.”

Trump – who has long railed against postal ballots, even though they have benefited his party and he has voted by mail – said in a separate post:

END MAIL-IN VOTING, AND GO TO PAPER BALLOTS. 100 additional seats will go to Republicans!!!”

In other developments:

• The vice-president, JD Vancethe defense secretary, Pete Hegsethand the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, staged a photo op with National Guard troops at Union Station in the nation’s capital. They were roundly booed and jeered on their way in and out of the station.

• A federal judge denied the justice department’s bid to unseal records from the grand jury that indicted Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. US district judge Richard Berman said the small number of documents seen by the court pale in comparison with the 100,000 records the government already has on Epstein and that disclosing them could harm victims.

• Lisa Cookthe Federal Reserve governor Trump has called on to immediately resign over an accusation that she falsely declared a property she obtained a mortgage on was her primary residence, responded on Wednesday that she has “no intention of being bullied to step down”.

• Trump has bought at least $100m of bonds since he returned to office in January, according to a CNBC analysis of new filings from the president with the US Office of Government Ethics.

• A young American citizen who was violently arrested by federal immigration officers in Los Angeles county in June, after he objected to the arrest of an older man in a Walmart parking lot, was charged with conspiracy to impede a federal officer.