Posted on 05/18/2003 2:54:01 PM PDT by Dog Gone
Just beneath the partisan tug-of-war at the Capitol that has Republicans pushing redistricting and Democrats resisting it is another struggle. This one pits white Democrats against African American and Latino Democrats.
Tom DeLay and company masterfully exploited those tensions when they introduced a new plan to redraw congressional districts for Texas.
In explaining the need for new congressional districts, Jim Ellis, a DeLay spokesman, said weeks ago: "We believe the court map is deficient because it underrepresents Hispanics and African Americans and Republicans. "That's what we are trying to fix."
Regardless of what you think of DeLay, you must admire his political acumen. DeLay, R-Sugar Land, the majority leader in the U.S. House, didn't like the outcome of 2002 congressional elections. Texas voters, he said, elected Republicans to all statewide offices, so its congressional delegation should reflect that reality. It doesn't. Democrats outnumber Republicans 17-15 in the U.S. House delegation.
It's no accident that the GOP map he inspired carves districts for minorities at the expense of white Democrats. Some minority lawmakers, anxious to see the title "congressman" before their names, lunged at the bait. Privately, they asserted they were helping minorities by enhancing their political clout. But that seems far-fetched in light of the proposed new congressional districts House Republicans favor.
"Based on our analysis, MALDEF has concluded that (the GOP plan) creates no new Latino districts," said Nina Perales, a spokeswoman for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
There are seven Latino-majority districts in the state and that wouldn't change under the GOP proposal, Perales said. But the GOP plan carves a new congressional district in the Gulf Coast of South Texas that seems ideal for Texas Sen. Eddie Lucio, D-Brownsville. To create that district, other majority Hispanic districts were sliced up.
Perales said the GOP plan forwarded by the Texas House "severely fragments Latino communities of interest in South Texas without a voting rights justification."
Similarly, the plan creates a new district that runs from Houston in Harris County to Beaumont in Jefferson County from which several African American Democratic lawmakers could run, including Reps. Ron Wilson and Harold Dutton, both of Houston.
But the new district isn't a sure win for an African American. And creating this district requires ripping the Fifth Ward from the 18th Congressional District led by U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston. That would no doubt shake the bones of the late Barbara Jordan — the first black woman elected from the South to the U.S. Congress and who represented the 18th district — and Mickey Leland, the well-known Texas legislator who died in a plane crash in Ethiopia in 1989. Both hailed from the Fifth Ward.
The new plan also carves downtown Dallas — the financial heart — from U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson's district in Dallas. And even if minorities were able to gain a congressional seat or two under the GOP plan, their power would be diminished overall because Democrats would drop from 17 congressional districts to 11 or 12. That would decrease their political effectiveness in Washington.
Tensions between white Texas Democratic lawmakers and their African American and Hispanic counterparts have long simmered beneath the surface as the ranks of white Democrats have shrunk at the Capitol. Hispanics and African Americans now make up a majority of Democrats in the House and in the Senate.
DeLay played on the infighting among Democrats — forcing each to decide between party and self-interest — to leverage a partisan plan that assigns quotas for Republicans. Republicans want to change the system because they failed to win a majority of Texas congressional posts on their merit. They lost to Democrats in districts that went Republican in 2002 elections for the U.S. Senate and governor and in the 2000 election for president.
This time, Democrats defeated the GOP effort to redraw congressional districts by sticking together. Fifty-one white, black and Latino Democrats fled to Oklahoma for four days to deny Republicans the quorum they needed to bring up the new proposal.
For now, the redistricting plan is dead. But it can resurface if a special session is called. You can bet DeLay will again push a quota bill for Republicans. Hopefully, he won't again dupe Democrats whose ambitions feed their gullibility into thinking they are helping minorities.
I think Republicans will be able to exploit these "tensions" within the DemocRAT party if not this year, then over the next several years.
We already are. And often, we don't have to do anything at all but sit back and watch. That's how Bloomberg got elected in New York, for example. There were white, black, and Hispanic RAT candidates, and they all fought each other dirty, pandering to their own racial constituences and playing the race card on each other, like the RATS they are. So much animosity was generated that by the time the primaries were over, none of them were even speaking to each other, endorsements were withheld, and RAT voters stayed home in November.
Similar situations have been playing out all over the nation, and will probably take place to some extent in the RAT presidential primaries. Those decades of sucking up to special interest groups is finally coming around to bite them on the ass now that they don't have enough government pork goodies to keep everyone happy.
I can only think of one, the Midland Reporter-Telegram, and it's hardly a major newspaper.
Instead, we have to read crap like this every single day.
You're so right. Which leads me to question this statement...
There are seven Latino-majority districts in the state and that wouldn't change under the GOP proposal, Perales said.
Did Perales (and the reporter, Alberta Phillips) consider Henry Bonilla to be a Latino congressman? Or is Henry just "another mean-spirited Republican"...???
The GOP plan creates another hispanic district in south Texas, which would undoubtedly become a Democrat seat, so Texas would be sending more hispanic Democrats to Congress.
Alberta Phillips doesn't want the public to know about that.
I have a dream. At the moment Governor Perry calls for a special session, a Texas Ranger will ring the doorbell of each legislator, produce a summons and escort his charge to Austin. GOP members will be packed and ready to go; the Dems will soil their diapers...
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