Tom DeLay Ambushes Texas -- And America

Tom DeLay Ambushes Texas -- And America
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/10/con03242.html
by Steven Hill and Rob Richie, Center for Voting and Democracy

Led by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Bush political 
mastermind Karl Rove, Texas Republicans have completed their ambush 
of congressional Democrats. After Delay spent three days huddled in 
private conferences with bickering Republican legislators, they 
gerrymandered U.S. House districts in order to knock off as many as 
seven Democratic incumbents -- and help secure Republican dominance 
of the House of Representatives for a decade.

For months, Texas Republicans tried to re-open the can of worms known 
as redistricting in an unprecedented series of special sessions. 
Twice Democratic legislators fled the state to block a quorum. But 
power-hungry Republicans were relentless, and now they've finally 
crushed Democratic opposition. The battle moves to the courts and the 
Department of Justice, but it's unlikely that the carefully vetted 
map will be overturned.

Simply by rejiggering district lines in Texas, Republicans have 
padded their slim majority in the U.S. House so that they can even 
more brazenly avoid any need to work with House Democrats -- or even 
moderate Republicans. Their dominance has little to do with how many 
votes they win, or how popular Republican candidates are, either 
nationally or in Texas. It's much more the power of computers and 
databases to slice and dice the electorate, creating precisely 
crafted "designer districts" for the candidates of the party in power.

Just as perniciously, the GOP plan is designed to wipe out nearly 
every moderate and white Democrat from the Texas congressional 
delegation. For instance, long-time Democratic House leader Martin 
Frost has been drawn out of a seat that is now 63 percent Republican. 
Richard Murray, a professor of political science at the University of 
Houston, predicted that the GOP plan eventually will leave Texas 
without a single white majority district represented by a Democrat.

"This plan basically envisions all Democrats elected to Congress 
being either from Hispanic-majority or African-American-majority 
districts," Professor Murray said.

And yet voting rights advocates aren't happy with DeLay's 
redistricting plan either. People of color were underrepresented in 
the old congressional map and had a legitimate case for increased 
representation. But even if minorities now pick up one seat, which is 
possible, it will come at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Latino 
and African-American voters now being "represented" by conservative 
Republicans rather than by more like-minded Democrats. In essence, 
the Republicans have sinisterly manipulated the winner-take-all 
districts to pit the electoral opportunities of people of color 
against white moderate Democrats.

Texas is just the tip of the rather gnarly iceberg of gerrymandering. 
With  Republicans at a state level having controlled redistricting in 
such big states as Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and now 
Texas, GOP leaders have encouraged attempts to draw districts that 
not only get rid of white Democrats, but also moderate Republicans. 
The nationwide result has been nothing less than titanic. 
Increasingly, the House is polarized by representatives considerably 
to the left or right of most of the state's voters, even as the 
political center of the House has moved sharply rightward. Safe seats 
have become the rule, two party politics is dead in most districts, 
and entire regions of Red and Blue America have become balkanized 
one-party fiefdoms.

Most alarmingly, these monumental shifts are cemented in for the 
foreseeable future. Nationwide, very few of the 435 House districts 
have any chance of changing parties anytime soon. Only four House 
incumbents lost to challengers in 2002, and fewer than one in ten 
races were decided by less than 10%. And it will get worse throughout 
the decade.

Will Texans really benefit from a polarized congressional delegation 
of 22 conservative white Republicans and 10 liberal minority 
Democrats, as the DeLay plan envisions? Do Texans really want a state 
with a "white party" and a "racial minority party?" Is that good for 
Texas, or any other state? In South Africa, they used to call that 
apartheid.

South Africa, ironically, provides the best solution to this dilemma. 
Post-apartheid South Africa adopted a "full representation" voting 
method in multi-seat districts -- one that allows voters of all 
political persuasions and races to control and define their 
representation, not the map-makers. If Texas elected its U.S. House 
delegation by a full representation method like ones already used by 
such cities as Peoria, Illinois and Amarillo, Texas, a broader 
political spectrum would be elected. Representation of people of 
color would not be pitted against white, moderate Democrats.

Instead, DeLay, Rove, and the GOP have engineered our antiquated 
winner-take-all system to create a new kind of apartheid of 
representation. This cannot help but further undermine confidence in 
our already shaky political system.

A  BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

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Steven Hill is a senior analyst at the Center for Voting and 
Democracy http://www.fairvote.org/
and author of "Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take 
All Politics" (Routledge Press, http://www.fixingelections.com/. Rob 
Richie is executive director of the Center. The Center is the lead 
organizer of the major "Claim Democracy" conference in Washington, 
D.C. on November 22-23 (for more info, see 
http://www.democracyusa.org/.