Over the past summer, along with war abroad, recalls and a shaky economy at home, another event has gone somewhat under the radar. Though sparsely covered, it deserves more attention; it says a lot about the state of our current political discourse. In Texas, the Democrats are in hiding.
Texas is an odd state, with a strange constitution that, besides giving the Lt. Governor more authority than the Governor, requires two-thirds of the legislature to be present for a quorum, as opposed to the simple majority required for Congress or most state legislatures to operate. Already dominating the state, the Republicans decided that the middle of the decade was a good time to redraw district lines to have more Republican members of Congress. Bear in mind such a power-grab has never been done before; redistricting is confined to happening right after the census or under a court order. In May, the state House Democrats fled to a hotel in Oklahoma, waiting for the legislative session to expire.
The whole thing was quite humorous. While the Democrats were in their hotel, the Texas Republicans actually asked Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry and Attorney General Drew Edmondson, both Democrats, to help extradite the legislators. They were politely informed there were some difficulties about this. Meanwhile, neighboring Governor Bill Richardson, D-New Mexico, declared that he wished they would come to New Mexico instead, where he would have thrown them a party. In the end, the session expired, redistricting was dead, and the \Killer D's"" returned to Texas.
Gov. Rick Perry responded by calling a special session. Taking advantage of the parliamentary rules of a special session, and aided by the state's most senior Republican senator, Bill Ratliff, Democrats were able to beat back the redistricting push. Perry decided to just call another special session, this time taking advantage of some different parliamentary procedures to render Ratliff's move irrelevant. So now the state Senate Democrats are in Albuquerque, where Bill Richardson did in fact celebrate them.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott entertained the notion of sending bounty hunters to New Mexico, so Richardson assigned his asylum-seekers an armed police detail and said any person attempting to forcibly remove them would be tried in New Mexico courts for kidnapping.
This is, simply put, insane. Besides the mental image of legislators fleeing across state lines, perhaps in the General Lee while police are chasing them and a narrator cuts in during the freeze-frame, the very nature of this redistricting fight is simply revolting. The idea that redistricting, whether solved in the legislature or by the courts, should only happen once a decade is a very important rule that exists for a reason. If it could happen at the drop of a hat, then district lines would keep changing every two years, whether by a majority tweaking itself to stay in power or a change in power seeing the new party in government getting its revenge.
In that kind of environment it would be absolutely impossible to work across party lines and get anything done; people would be too busy scheming for power, as the Republicans currently are, to actually govern.
We can see this in Texas right now. The second special session having expired, Perry is just calling another one, and says he'll keep calling special sessions until a redistricting bill is passed. U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, the mastermind of this whole thing, says that there ought to be a new map because of the proportion of Republican votes for Congress is not being reflected in the actual elected representatives. Whether his support for the popular will would extend to, say, Al Gore being president, has yet to be determined. Whatever the other needs of Texas might be, in education, economic growth or any other question, the number one priority of the people governing Texas is simply to re-engineer the state to elect people more like themselves.
If the Texas redistricting goes through, other states will degenerate into the same political power plays. New Mexico, Oklahoma and Illinois, for instance, may see their Democratic state governments retaliating. While necessary on a certain level, it shouldn't come to that, and the people will only suffer in the end. If preventing that new map means keeping such a degeneration on hold, then the Texas Democrats should stay in New Mexico.
