Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is rolling out the red carpet for Democratic state lawmakers who fled Texas as they push back against a move by President Donald Trump to add five Republican-controlled congressional seats in their state.

"I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that they're welcome here, that they have the ability to stay as long as they need to and want to," Pritzker, a Democrat, said on Sunday evening as the lawmakers arrived in Illinois.

The lawmakers fled Texas in order to prevent the quorum needed in the Republican-dominated state legislature to vote on Monday on the new redistricting maps, which passed a committee vote this past weekend along party lines.

But veteran Republican strategist Matt Whitlock argued that the decision by most of the Democratic lawmakers to head to Illinois - with a few others decamping in two other blue states, New York and Massachusetts - was "cartoonishly dumb."

Tom Bevan, the RealClearPolitics co-founder and president, wrote on X, "The idea that Texas Democrats would flee to Illinois, a state where Dems have abused gerrymandering to comical levels, is perfection."

"To protest ‘partisan gerrymandering’ Texas Democrats are fleeing to…Illinois," Republican Missouri Senator Eric Scmitt wrote on X. "You can’t make this up."

Republicans point to the move four years ago by Pritzker and Illinois Democrats to eliminate two Republican congressional seats in the state, to help bolster the party.

Illinois, which lost a seat in Congress due to population changes in the last census, went from 13 Democrats and 5 Republicans to 14 Democrats and 3 Republicans in their congressional delegation.

And Whitlock, a longtime GOP communicator and veteran of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, questioned the optics of the Texas Democrats fleeing to Illinois, which he called "the Mecca of partisan Gerrymandering."

Trump and his political team are aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House, when Democrats stormed back to grab the House majority in the 2018 midterms.

"Texas will be the biggest one," the president told reporters recently, as he predicted the number of GOP-friendly seats that could be added through redistricting in the reliably red state. "Just a simple redrawing, we pick up five seats."

Photo: Reuters