Quote:
Originally Posted by txdot-guy
You obviously don’t remember the last time Democrats fled the state to protest mid decades redistricting back in 2003. It was a shitty thing to do back then and it’s a shitty thing to do now. Austin was cracked into multiple districts stretching hundreds of miles just to dilute the most democratic region in the state.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by txdot-guy
Here’s a good article on the topic.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08...court-removal/
Click the link for the full article. An excerpt is seen below.
Abbott’s bid to expel the House Democratic leader goes to a court filled with his appointees
The Texas Supreme Court said in 2021 the Constitution allows members to thwart legislation by leaving the state. Abbott wants them to reconsider.
Texas Democrats had been out of state for less than 48 hours when Gov. Greg Abbott moved to have their seats declared vacant.
The emergency legal filing represents an unprecedented escalation of Abbott’s effort to pass a new congressional map that adds additional GOP seats, as demanded by President Donald Trump. It flies in the face of Texas’ own founding documents, centuries of legal precedent and a recent Supreme Court of Texas ruling, legal experts say.
Even Attorney General Ken Paxton, a fellow Republican, threw cold water on Abbott’s strategy, filing his own brief saying that while he “appreciates the Governor’s passion,” he does not have the authority to bring this type of case. |
I agree that they shouldn't be trying mid decade redistricting. It would be kind of like the U.S. Senate abandoning the filibuster -- legal, but contrary to precedent and tradition, and unwise, for not only the country but maybe for the Republican Party. Blue states will try the same thing, then more red states will jump on the wagon. Before you know it, you've got something like the arms race during the cold war. If all the states would agree on a nonpartisan algorithmic method of determining district boundaries, it would make a lot of sense. But that probably never will happen because of legal and political considerations.
You can get an idea of how fair allocations of House seats are by comparing a party's % of representatives to its % of the popular vote in the House. Somebody at the left-of-center Brookings Institute did this, for 1946 to 2018,
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content...s_ch2_tbl2.pdf
Take a look at the last column, "Difference between Democratic percentage of seats and votes won." I pulled the House popular vote from the Cook Political Report, and this is what the difference in the last column is after 2018,
2020 0.7%
2022 1.2%
2024 1.6%
Lo and behold, Democrats did a much, much better job of gerrymandering from 1948 to 2008. The Republicans had the edge from 2012 to 2016. And since then, neither party has really had a commanding edge although Democrats may have done a little better.
I suspect that Abbott doesn't have any expectation of succeeding at what's described in your second post (Texas Tribune link), and is only doing it to curry favor with President Trump and likeminded MAGA supporters, including people like Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks who pull the strings in Texas and who could have him axed in the next election. BUT, he's going to piss off Democrats in the process. And pissed off Democrats are more likely to vote. We learned that from the 2021 Senate runoffs in Georgia and the 2022 mid term elections, in the aftermath of Trump's attempt to steal the 2020 election. Democrats were the more motivated voters.
And it's not solely the attempt to remove Democratic legislators and redistrict in Texas that has the Democrats riled. It's the belief pushed by the media that they've gotten screwed by gerrymandering in red states and would usually have control of the House if the elections were just fair. Which of course is bull shit, as shown by the analysis above. During the period since at least the end of World War II, although not recently, it's the Republicans who've gotten the short end of the stick.
When all is said and done, will the extra seats in Texas outweigh the additional votes Democrats will get because they'll redistrict in blue states have a more motivated base? I suspect not.
