THE TALK OF THE TOWN

The Texas legislature meets every Two years for a hundred and forty days, but there's an old joke that the state's governors, who never object to less legislative deliberation, would prefer that it meet for two days every hundred and forty years.

- Jonathan Blitzer

Early last month, Greg Abbott, arguably the most powerful governor in Texas history, called a special session of the legislature and added an agenda item at the behest of the only Republican who's more dominant in the state than he is. Donald Trump wanted his party to gain five seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in next year's midterm elections, and he had a plan: Texas legislators should redraw the state's congressional maps. "We have a really good governor, and I won Texas," Trump said.

"We are entitled." Trump and congressional Democrats are alike in one conspicuous respect: the public roundly disapproves of them both.

But the party of a sitting President usually suffers losses in the midterms, and Democrats need to flip just three seats to retake a majority in the House. Divided government, painful to any President, would be especially treacherous for Trump, who, in his second term, has routinely flouted judges' orders and the Constitution's checks on using the office of the President for personal enrichment.

"Democrats would vote to impeach him on their first day," Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, recently predicted.