From today’s The Guardian:
A plan for Texas to redraw its congressional districts and gain five additional Republican seats barrels through flimsy legal arguments and political norms like a rough-stock rodeo bronco through a broken chute.
But the fiddly process of drawing the maps to Republicans’ advantage for 2026 may require more finesse than cowboy politics can produce.
“It is more than redistricting. It’s really theft,” said Democratic representative Al Green, whose Houston-area congressional district is likely to be one targeted by Republicans in a redrawn map. “It’s the kind of election theft that you use when you realize that you can’t win playing with the hand that you’ve been dealt. So, you decide that you’ll just rearrange the cards so that they favor you.”
The attempted power grab comes at a time when the state legislature is meant to be focused on the floods that killed more than 130 people just two weeks ago.
Texas has 38 congressional districts, and Republicans hold 25 of those districts today. All but one of those districts has a white voting majority. And every one of those districts was won by double digits.
While Republicans hold two-thirds of the seats, they only won about 58% of congressional voters last year. In 2018, the midterm of Donald Trump’s first term in office and a Democratic wave election year, Texas Republicans barely cleared 50% statewide, and lost two of those seats. In 2022, after a harsh gerrymander that voting rights groups challenged in court, Republicans reclaimed those seats.
Texas is the only state that explicitly permits more than one redistricting in between decennial censuses. But even accounting for that, the strategy exploits the end of pre-clearance requirements for new maps under the Voting Rights Act that the US supreme court eliminated in the Shelby county v Holder decision in 2013.
“They are willing to enact, frankly, illegal, racially discriminatory maps, even while their current maps are in court,” said Sam Gostomski, executive director of the Texas Democratic party. “They know if they just cheat, they can break the law … They can just do this every couple of years and kick the ball down the road, because every time they draw new districts, those cases have to be litigated, and that takes time, right?”
Read the complete story here.