political commentary

Re: The Republican Decade? | Mother Jones

Mug Shot of Tom Delay

Not a fan of your new GOP-dominated House of Representatives? You’d better get used to it. After winning almost unprecedented power over the congressional redistricting process, Republicans are poised to lock in their gains for a decade or more. And there’s very little the Democrats can do to stop them. This year, the Dems could draw less than half the districts the GOP does.

Gerrymander is defined by Miriam Webster as an attempt (1) to divide (a territorial unit) into election districts to give one political party an electoral majority in a large number of districts while concentrating the voting strength of the opposition in as few districts as possible, and (2) to divide (an area) into political units to give special advantages to one group.

Justification for dividing these territorial units has historically been the US Census, the latest one being completed this year. But a census is not strictly required to redistrict. More on this later.

The scariest results of the mid-term elections was the number of State Houses that flipped from blue to red. The how’s and why’s of the takeovers of state legislatures are still being hammered out between all the self-appointed experts and pundits out there. From ABC News:

Republicans took control of at least 19 Democratic-controlled state legislatures Tuesday and gained more than 650 seats, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The last time Republicans saw such victories was in 1994, when they captured control of 20 state legislatures.

Republicans haven’t controlled as many state legislatures since 1928.

Across the country, the map for state legislatures has turned noticeably red as Republicans now control 55 chambers, with Democrats at 38 and the remaining yet to be decided. At the beginning of this week, Democrats controlled 60 of the country’s state legislative chambers and Republicans 36.

If you are worried that the GOP will try something in your state, you should pause and examine your state’s laws concerning redistricting as some states (mostly blue) have an impartial committee or panel convened to draw up the new state legislative, and congressional districts. But in most states, the reigning political party has awesome influence over the redistricting process. This whole issue is moot if the congressional lines are drawn fairly. (Fair means different things to different people. What I mean is that the new districts have demographic data from the census to justify the new lines drawn.) Some states, like Texas for example, can’t be trusted to do a fair job of it, so their redistricting plans have to be approved by the Department of Justice under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Texas is famous for gerrymandering, defined earlier. The most recent and one of the most dramatic cases of gerrymandering, without a recent census to back up the plan I might add, happened in 2003 and involved then Congressman Tom Delay, the House Majority Leader at that time. It seems that Delay wanted more House seats for Republicans, so he went back to Texas and personally lobbied for districts that favored Republicans. From Wikipedia:

Former House Majority Leader Rep. Tom DeLay played an integral role in the Texas redistricting effort. An article in the March 6, 2006 issue of The New Yorker magazine by Jeffrey Toobin reported that DeLay left Washington and returned to Texas to oversee the project while final voting was underway in the state legislature, and that “several times during the long days of negotiating sessions, DeLay personally shuttled proposed maps among House and Senate offices in Austin.”

In defense of his activities, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) stated, “Everybody who knows Tom knows that he’s a fighter and a competitor, and he saw an opportunity to help the Republicans stay in power in Washington.” [10]

The Delay plan focused on diluting the Hispanic vote, especially in their 23rd district which takes up most of western Texas.

What happened after the GOP accepted Delay’s map is the point of the story. In Texas, as in most legislatures, for any business to be accomplished in the state house, a quorum has to be formed on the floor to even bring a piece of legislation there. The Texas Democrats, yelling foul, decided that if there were no quorum, then there could be no vote on the measure(s) in time for the deadline.

Feeling screwed, 50 Texas Democrats secretly fled the state to Ardmore Oklahoma just before the vote. That slick maneuver ended debate on redistricting. The Democrats ultimately appealed the gerrymandered plan that was approved by Bush’s Justice Department saying that there can’t be a real redistricting without a census.

To make a long story short, the US Supreme Court ruled in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, June 28, 2006, that a state could redistrict whenever it wanted to, but they went on the say that the plan for District 23 really did weaken Latino voting and had to be changed and put right in accordance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

So there is  your answer. If your Democratic delegation to the state house feels screwed when they take up the issue of redistricting, they could simply leave. Haul ass. Get on the bus, Gus. Florida looks good any time of the year. Why not? Republicans pull shicanery like this all the time. Why not turn the table on them?