As Texas Republicans try to muscle a rare mid-decade redistricting bill through the Legislature to help Republicans gain seats in Congress – at President Donald Trump’s request – residents in Austin, the state capital, could find themselves sharing a district with rural Texans more than 300 miles away.
The proposed map chops up Central Texas’ 37th Congressional District, which is currently represented by Democrat Rep. Lloyd Doggett, will be consumed by four neighboring districts, three of which Republicans now hold.
One of those portions of the Austin-area district was drawn to be part of the 11th District that Republican Rep. August Pfluger represents, which stretches into rural Ector County, about 20 miles away from the New Mexico border.
I will never understand how this obvious manipulation has been legal for decades.
The pretense is gone now though, which is fascinating. And scary.
It’s literally just partisan warfare with legal exploitation, and voter bases apparently think it’s justified. I mean, what are they gonna do, side with the other party over it?
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when lawmakers break the law and nobody enforces the law, it stops being the law.
And so many things were just ‘common sense,’ and not enshrined in laws because the thought was that anyone breaking them would be held accountable by the populace. We now have a critical mass of stupid, self absorbed, or malicious people that laws don’t matter, much less norms.
We also have mechanisms of communication, propaganda, and control that were beyond imagination 249 years ago.
I mean, a second Trump term means that any “but surely they wouldn’t accept somebody who-” is out the window. His two impeachments weren’t for affairs or for perjury. They were EACH for betraying the damned country in totally different ways.
Yeah, but “he tells it like it is” /s
They always forget that the laws they pass to punish their enemies or enrich themselves goes both ways.
If they start acting like the law is anything they can get away with without going to jail, then the same can apply to the rest of us.
Laws still apply, just not to the people in power.
centuries*
Federal government won’t do anything about it. States control their own elections and therein lies the conundrum. Texas is proving very willingly that it doesn’t care about the rules as long as they win.
GOP, not all of Texas.
Won’t matter unless the progressives of the state get organized.
And you pretend that the Democrats haven’t been doing this since they were the Democratic Republican Party.
We’ve lived in a fascist country for a long time.
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Over a century. It all started with the Democratic Republican Party that eventually became the Democratic Party.
It started in 1812. Although the Democratic-Republican party did evolve into the current Democratic party over the course of two centuries, it’s hardly fair to call them the same party. That’s eight generations between then and now and the political landscape has changed dramatically.
As for the “both sides do it” whataboutism, like so many “both sides” issues the current Republican Party benefits far more from gerrymandering than the current Democratic Party, and this is before this especially egregious Texas mid-census redistricting.
It’s such a silly and disingenuous argument. The most recent version of gerrymandering arguably began with REDMAP in 2010, which was in response to Obama winning. Before that, it was used almost exclusively to disenfranchise black voters before the voting rights act in 1965. Before that, it was used by both parties in unison to maintain the supremacy of incumbents.