One would think that with Texas still reeling from a natural disaster that’s killed more than 100 people, with many more still missing, the state legislature would focus solely on rebuilding and recovery efforts, right? Nope. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has asked the state legislature to begin redistricting in what critics are calling a blatant gerrymandering attempt.
According to CNN, the Texas state legislature set a special legislative session for July 21, ostensibly to address the fallout of last week’s flood. A closer look at the docket reveals state Republicans are taking advantage of the tragedy to further pursue their legislative agenda. While the first few items revolve around improving flood warning systems, emergency communications, and relief funding, buried deep in the docket is an order to begin redistricting. The official reason given is to address “constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice,” though critics have quickly labeled this as an effort to gerrymander the map.
“While Texans battle tragic and deadly flooding, Governor Abbott and House Republicans are plotting a mid-decade gerrymander,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote on X. “They should be modernizing emergency response, not rigging maps.”
Gerrymandering is when an electoral map is manipulated to favor one political party. This is done through either “cracking,” where districts are divided to dilute the electoral power of certain demographics (aka Black people), or “packing,” where groups likely to lean towards a preferred candidate are placed into specific districts. Gerrymandering is deeply undemocratic, to the point you’d think it’d be illegal. Yet in 2019, the Supreme Court ruled redistricting for party advantage can’t be challenged in federal court.
Texas was quick to take advantage of that ruling as the state legislature crafted an electoral map in 2021 that explicitly undermines the votes of Black and Latino voters. While electoral maps can’t be challenged over favoring a party, Texas’s electoral map has faced considerable legal challenges for potentially violating the Voting Rights Act. Texas’ gerrymandering is so racist that even a Trump-appointed circuit court judge called it “egregious.”
Mid-decade redistricting is exceedingly rare, as maps are usually redrawn every 10 years. President Trump’s political advisers have repeatedly requested the move to improve the GOP’s chances of maintaining Congressional control. Republicans control both halls of Congress by thin margins, as Democrats need only gain three seats in the House for control to flip next year. Such a shift would seriously hamper Trump’s ability to execute his agenda through the last half of his term.
Republicans currently control 25 of Texas’s 38 seats in the House, and the new map will likely be drawn to move Republican voters into reliably Democratic districts. There’s concern by the Texas GOP that they’re overplaying their hand and the new map could potentially stretch their voters thin. Especially since a similar attempt to gerrymander the map in 2010 eventually blew up in their faces.
From the Texas Tribune:
A recent test case unfolded after the 2010 U.S. Census, when Republicans who controlled the Texas Legislature looked to maximize their party’s seats across the map by drawing reliable GOP voters into nearby Democratic districts and turning them red.
By 2018, a Trump midterm election year, that aggressive approach came back to bite them. With a favorable national climate and explosive population growth driven almost entirely by people of color, Texas Democrats picked up 12 seats in the state House, ousted two longtime GOP members of Congress and narrowed their losing margins in statewide races.
“What looked like a solid gerrymander by the end of the decade had become almost a dummymander,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said. “The lesson from 2010 is that you can stretch yourself too thin, that you can be too smart for your own good. And when the politics change, you get bitten in the you-know-where.”
With Trump’s approval ratings in the toilet, the reality of what mass deportation really looks like hitting, and the impact of both the Big, Beautiful Bill and ongoing trade war sinking in for voters across the country, it wouldn’t be surprising if folks are just over it by year two.
The Texas GOP appears clear-eyed that their only path to victory is gerrymandering the map to favor the rich white folks who gain the most from their tax plan, and the poor white people who care more about lowering the quality of life for Black and brown people than improving their own. Time will tell if their gamble pays off.
SEE ALSO:
NAACP Drops Tennessee Lawsuit Over Fayette County Redistricting Map
Post a Comment
0 Comments