Over the past five decades, the United States Supreme Court has developed an extensive and complex jurisprudence on redistricting. The court said that challengers bear the burden of demonstrating that race, rather than politics, was the predominant factor in the design of a redistricting map. The Court’s future orders could also strike down the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against gerrymandering altogether.
Texas Democrats fled Austin on Sunday. A new gerrymandered congressional map that will probably flip five blue districts to red. Those extra seats would give the G.O.P. a much more comfortable majority in Washington.
Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, says he’ll oust Democratic lawmakers who don’t return for the vote.
Republican lawmakers hope to pick up five more seats in the U.S. House, five districts now held by Democrats. Three are in urban areas — in Houston and Dallas, and around Austin and San Antonio. The other two are along the Mexican border, where the majority Hispanic population has trended Republican in recent elections.
The map could also force veteran Democratic legislators to fight primary campaigns against young and promising members of the party. The new Austin seat, for instance, might pit Lloyd Doggett, a veteran congressman, against a rising progressive. Al Green.
The Texan Democrats struck a defiant tone yesterday in response to Abbott’s threats. Several representatives fled to Albany, where they sat alongside New York’s governor in a press conference. “My grandmother says this: ‘If you allow yourself to be a rug, people will step on you”
This strategy is maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time. Lawmakers in Missouri, Florida, Indiana, New Hampshire and Ohio.
For years, Democrats argued that politics had no place in political mapmaking, and they backed independent, nonpartisan panels to decide the boundaries.
Now they may simply retaliate. In New York yesterday, the governor, Kathy Hochul, said that Texas had left Democrats no choice: “We must do the same.”
California’s governor wants to redraw the state’s political map — and have voters approve it. In Illinois, where Democrats dominate state politics, the process would be simpler, but the boundaries are already quite gerrymandered. Still, the governor says, “all bets are off.”
In Texas, the runaway Democrats can stop Republicans from adopting the new maps for a time. But past walkouts failed after Democrats eventually went home. So the fight is likely to find a more conventional venue: the courthouse.
Source: NYT
