Texas Redistricting An Exercise In Racism

The Texas legislature is once again in special session, this time to draw new maps congressional, state senate, state house, and state board of education districts. The maps proposed are an exercise in using power to maintain power in that the districts are drawn to increase the number of districts that likely to be won by Republicans who already hold a majority that is not supported by the actual vote counts.

The Republican leadership has employed an out of state expert whose primary qualification for the job is successfully slicing up communities to enable Republicans to win more districts with fewer votes. The techniques for doing this are known as packing and cracking. Packing is when the mapmaker jams as many voters of the opposing party into as few districts as possible so while the opposition is guaranteed to win those seats they don’t have enough voters in other districts to win any others. Cracking is when the mapmaker spreads out opposition voters across enough districts that they can’t possibly achieve a majority in any of them. Careful use of such tactics has enabled Republicans to hold 64% congressional seats with only 52% of votes going to Republicans in 2020.

The newly proposed maps, providing two additional seats to Texas as required by the decennial census results, preserve the unwarranted Republican majority. Those two additional seats were necessary due to the population growth of which 95% was among people of color. It’s bad enough that Republicans skewed the maps to maintain a stranglehold on the vast majority of districts but they made it worse by doing it in the most disrespectful way possible. The 2020 census shows that Hispanics make up nearly the same percentage of the population as white Texans yet the new maps include 23 majority white districts and only 7 majority Hispanic districts. The new map removes the only Black majority district and one of the previous 8 Hispanic majority districts thereby diluting their voting power and reducing the opportunity to elect a representative of their own choosing.

House Speaker Dade Phelan admonished legislators not to use the term racist in their discussion of the maps yet looking at the demographic makeup of the proposed districts it’s hard not to conclude that there was racist intent in the process of drawing them. Until the Supreme Court gutted the bi-partisan Voting Rights Act the Department of Justice would have had to review and approve Texas maps. There is still hope that Congress will pass The Freedom to Vote Act which among other important provisions imposes new standards prohibiting partisan gerrymandering including maps drawn prior to passage.

Texas Senators Cornyn and Cruz both oppose The Freedom to Vote Act as do every other Senate Republican therefore passage through the Senate will require suspension or elimination of the filibuster something West Virginia senator Joe Manchin opposes. Our democracy is imperiled by power hungry Republicans supported by their Trump cultist voters. If this nation is to stand as a beacon of democracy for another century we must all hope that The Freedom to Vote Act is passed this year.