Texas Democrats weigh their end game and Trump makes his mark on D.C.: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, Ben Kamisar and Natasha Korecki report on how Democratic lawmakers who fled Texas amid the redistricting fight are beginning to consider their end game. Plus, Andrea Mitchell explores how President Donald Trump is leaving his mark on institutions across the nation’s capital.

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— Adam Wollner

Texas Democrats plot their exit strategy

By Ben Kamisar and Natasha Korecki

With Texas expected to end its first special legislative session Friday and immediately begin a new one, the dozens of Democratic legislators who fled the state to block Republicans’ redistricting proposal are hammering out a plan for their return home.

Texas Democrats met late into the night Tuesday then again Wednesday, including breaking into smaller groups, to discuss their next steps and what their ultimate exit strategy looked like after spending the last 10 days out of the state, according to four sources close to the talks.

But those sources said the lawmakers do not yet have full consensus on an exit plan. “It’s hard to get folks on the same page,” said one of the sources, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal party strategy.

Still, there does appear to be agreement on one point: The Democrats won’t come back to Austin until Republicans officially bring the first special session to a close. They’re beginning to describe their ability to block Republicans from passing their new map that could net the party as many as five seats in the U.S. House during the first special session as proof of victory.

“Our commitment was only to kill this corrupt special session. What we will do, what we’re going to do in the future, we’re in discussions right now,” Texas Democratic Caucus Chairman Gene Wu said Wednesday on “Meet the Press NOW.”

Wu said they would not finalize their next steps until there was “consensus among our membership.” But he noted Democrats have other avenues to push back against the GOP’s redistricting effort in the courts, through the legislative process and with other states, like California, countering with new congressional maps.

“We can fight this fight for as long as we can do it. But we have other strategies, other methods of fighting it,” Wu said. “It does not have to be just a quorum break, it does not have to be just one thing or the other. We can throw everything at this.”

Republican leaders in Texas have promised to call “special session after special session,” and they need just a handful of Democrats to relent in order to achieve a quorum in the state House so they can move forward with their redistricting plan.

So while it appears likely that Democrats will succeed in delaying the process enough to force a second special session, there is an acknowledgement among the caucus that their protest will need to come to an end some point soon.

“From the get-go, they knew they were never going to stay out of Texas forever. People didn’t expect them to. The goal that the smartest among them set was: We need to bring national attention to this issue so other states are ready to counter if Republicans really do this,” one aide to a Texas House Democrat breaking quorum told NBC News.

Read more from Ben and Natasha →

Related: How redistricting became the burning hot center of Democratic politics

How Trump is reshaping D.C.

Analysis by Andrea Mitchell

President Donald Trump is not just taking over the police in the nation’s capital, with FBI and DEA agents on nighttime patrols in Georgetown and armored vehicles lined up in front of the Washington Monument.

Today, the recently self-appointed chair of the Kennedy Center announced he will be the first American president to host the annual Kennedy Center Honors ceremony in December. The event was originally emceed by Walter Cronkite and then Caroline Kennedy, but more recently by entertainers like Gloria Estefan and Queen Latifah.

Trump also told reporters he was “98%” involved in choosing this year’s honorees for one of the nation’s highest lifetime achievement awards: Sylvester Stallone, Michael Crawford, George Strait, Gloria Gaynor and Kiss. Unlike his predecessors, Trump never hosted the awardees at the White House nor attended the gala concert in his first term, citing criticism from some of the Hollywood stars being celebrated.

Elsewhere in Washington, the administration now plans to put its stamp on eight of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, including American history, African American history, air and space, and the National Museum of the American Indian. They all operate without charge and are among the city’s most popular tourist destinations. The White House says it wants to ensure that the museums are celebrating “American exceptionalism” before next year’s celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary.

The criticism by many, if not most, historians is that this risks distorting the reality of America’s founding, which includes the reality that the genius of the Founding Fathers’ creation was scarred by the reality that they were all white, male and largely property owners — including many slave owners. It spawned a reckoning that eventually led to the brutality of the Civil War, followed by a century of legalized segregation, and continuing generational poverty and second-class citizenship for millions of Americans.

The administration has already had an impact on the Smithsonian, whose board is led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court and by statute also includes the vice president. The widely acclaimed director of the National Portrait Gallery, criticized by the White House, resigned. The American history and African American history museums have both been under fire. According to the 6,000-member Organization of American Historians, the nation’s museums and historic parks are “under assault” by Trump’s March 27 executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” A White House spokesman calls it common sense.

Critics say this culture battle is an outgrowth of a war on facts, with more serious implications when it comes to the recent cancellation of long-proved scientific conclusions about climate change and the efficacy of vaccines. In a phrase coined by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “You’re entitled to your opinion, but not your facts.”

That’s all From the Politics Desk for now. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Adam Wollner.

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