Redistricting Texas Part 2

Last week I promised to continue my discussing redistricting and gerrymandering and I’ll get to that in a moment but first I have one very important thing to say; Donald Trump, you’re fired! I’ve been aching to say that for four long years and just had to get it out of my system, now on to redistricting.

Last week I closed by pointing out that in Texas like many other states both parties have been responsible for partisan gerrymandering when the opportunity presented itself.  In 1990, the last time Democrats controlled redistricting the drew maps that allowed them to win 70% of Texas’ congressional seats will only winning 49.9% of the votes while the 47.8% of the votes Republicans received only earned them 30% of the congressional seats in the 1992 election. 20 years later in 2010 Republicans returned the favor by drawing maps that allowed their 50.4% of the votes to earn them 69% of congressional seats while Democrats won 46.93% of the votes but only earn 31% of the congressional seats in 2018, long after the maps had been in place.

After the 2010 Census, 75% of the growth in our population came from the Hispanic community. Texas gained 4 congressional seats, three went to Democrats and one to Republicans in the 2012 election, yielding 24 to 12 seats. 2014 saw Republicans pick up one more to yield a 25 to 11 split that remains today.

We the voters will get no help from the Supreme Court on this issue as they court ruled on case Rucho v Common Cause on June 27, 2019. By a vote of 5-4, the justices ruled that courts should stay out of disputes over partisan gerrymandering. The practice of partisan gerrymandering may be distasteful, the court concluded, but it is a problem that politicians and the political process, rather than courts, should solve. That’s a problem in Texas because at the state level there is no process for voters to petition for change of any kind unlike in Missouri, Colorado and Michigan.  In those states and others a ground swell of voter dissatisfaction encouraged activists to organize petition drives to put non-partisan and citizens redistricting commissions on the ballot either as legislation or constitutional amendments. Those measures passed with overwhelming voter support.  California has had a non-partisan citizens redistricting for a decade now which has drawn much more representative maps than the politicians of either party ever had.

We all pay a steep economic price for a legislative system that has no accountability for results. We end up with legislators that are not responsive to the needs of the people. When legislators draw safe districts for themselves, they essentially move the true race for the election to the primary. Since so few people turnout to vote in the primary, that means less than 10% of the general population are determining who our elected officials are.

Like many activists in Texas I had hoped that this year Democrats would win control of the state House which would have pitted the against the Republican controlled Senate and perhaps given both sides some incentive to compromise by putting redistricting in the hands of a non-partisan body. Now, with no change in the House there’s little incentive to give up power and I’m betting that Democrats will end up with only one of the three new congressional seats when all is said and done.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - November 11, 2020