Explaination of the dispute

Unmedia has an excellent explaination of the redistricting dispute among other comments on the Democrats walkout:

The GOP agenda is to ignore the grievous need for a sane state budget (Texas is in the throes of such a severe crisis that the Governor demanded that ALL state agencies - underfunded as they are, cut 7% from their budgets for next year), and push instead of this outrageous redistricting bill that does nothing to establish fair representation of constituents, but rather simply serves to buttress GOP control of the Texas Legislature. The Burnt Orange Report has a detailed summary of the propsed bill and why this was such a brilliant move.

Imagine that Texas had 50 million Democrats and 1 million Republicans. The principle behind gerrymandering is to draw the boundaries of the congressional districts in such a way that all the Democrats (in this case, blacks and hispanics especially) are concentrated in a select few districts. This could mean that even if the GOP was outnumbered 50-1 they could still have a majority control. This inequality arises because control of the state government is determined at the granular level of districts, not counties (larger) or towns (smaller) as the basic unit. That's an essential feature of the way our government works, but it is open to abuse, as the GOP has demonstrated. It's also why GOP cries of outrage at the Democrats supposed subversion of the "true majority" is so laughably hypocritical. The GOP wants the politicians to choose the voters, instead of the other way around.

Gerrymandering has long been used as a way of changing the makeup of Congressional districts to either reduce or increase the effective power of either a part or a certain demographic group. In this case, it appears the Republican goal is to minimize the impact of minorities and increase the power of Republicans.

Gerrymandering based on race has been found to be illegal by the courts, but in some cases it can be hard to prove that race is the primary factor in the design of the redistricting. Even if it can be done, having a redistricting plan tied up in courts is a contentious business, wasting both the court's time and the state's money, neither of which Texas can easily afford right now.

Posted by thorswitch at May 13, 2003 12:53 PM | TrackBack