Between the Lines
The budget crisis? Peanuts. Voter ID? A trifle. The most contentious political issue this session may well be redistricting, which will determine how elections are won and lost for the next decade. Silly voter, you didn’t think you were in control, did you?
Illustration by Thomas Fuchs
Flush with a resounding victory, exuberant supporters of Republican Bill Flores jammed into his election-night victory party on November 2, standing shoulder to shoulder on the brown plaid carpet of the banquet room of Bryan’s Best Western Atrea. It was a night to savor the triumph of their collective efforts. That day, voters from the Seventeenth Congressional District, which stretches from College Station through Waco to the rural counties south of Fort Worth, had roared their disapproval of twenty-year Democratic congressman Chet Edwards and the party he represented. Only a few years after his name had been floated as a possible running mate for Barack Obama, Edwards would now join the swelling ranks of America’s unemployed.
“Ultimately the voters sent a clear message that they want a new Congress that will help the economy recover,” declared Flores as he stood behind a lectern flanked by flags. Later that night a supporter would capture the room’s mood with a spirited Facebook message: “CONGRATULATIONS Congressman Bill Flores!!!!!!!!!!!! We’re behind you. Constitution and conservative principles . . . our guiding lights. Make us proud sir!!!!!”
Surely this moment was cause for exclamation-point abuse: A 25-point trouncing of Edwards represented democracy at its finest! The voters threw the bum out!!! Didn’t they?
In truth, Edwards’s defeat was engineered less by the tea party backlash of 2010 than by Texas’s unprecedented redistricting plan of 2003. Never before had the Legislature adopted boundary lines without the benefit of a new census (which occurs only once a decade, in the years ending in zero) or the threat of a court order. But following the lead of then–House majority leader Tom DeLay, an exterminator by trade, lawmakers in Austin had seized upon the historic election of a Republican Speaker in the Texas House as an opportunity to adopt a Democrat-zapping map and produce a Republican majority in Congress. Though DeLay had no official role in the process—the task falls under the purview of the Legislature, not the U.S. Congress—he and his allies in the Texas House went to work on the congressional maps, targeting every single Democrat, regardless of voting record or the importance of committee assignment. Party was the only thing that mattered.
Most people remember the 2003 session for what happened next: In a desperate attempt to thwart DeLay’s scheme, Democratic legislators decamped to Oklahoma and New Mexico to deny their Republican counterparts a quorum. But resistance was futile. The Legislature ultimately adopted a new map that was brutally effective at advancing DeLay’s aims: Of the ten Democrats who were targeted, five were defeated, one resigned, and another switched parties.
Chet Edwards and the story of how his district was carved up provide a good example of what might happen when lawmakers take up redistricting in the new legislative session, which begins on January 11. With surgical precision, DeLay and his associates separated Edwards from the people who had faithfully elected him. As a Democrat in a conservative district that was home to George W. Bush during his presidency, Edwards had always had a balancing act to perform. He voted against Obama’s health care plan, stimulus package, and cap-and-trade proposals, and he skillfully courted the support of the military community in and around Fort Hood. As chairman of the House Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Subcommittee and co-chairman of the House Army Caucus, Edwards was instrumental in securing funding for the base, and voters in the area were reliably in his camp.
Then his district was redrawn, and the results were easy to predict. Consider this e-mail from one of DeLay’s associates, who gleefully anticipated Edwards’s demise under the new congressional maps: “Chet loses his Killeen–Fort Hood base in exchange for conservative Johnson County. They will not like the fact he kills babies, prevents kids from praying and wants to take their guns.”
Ah, redistricting. It has always been a toxic task, one that creates warring factions with long memories of past abuses. Yet the term is so bureaucratic-sounding, so yawn-inducing, that it is easy to forget that its purpose is to provide the essential foundation of democracy by ensuring that the ballot of each qualified voter counts equally. As population patterns change, redistricting is designed to draw maps that make certain that each office you vote for—from your representatives in Congress to the members of the House and Senate in the Legislature to the officials on the State Board of Education—reflects fair districts that protect the sacrosanct notion of “one man, one vote.” Or at least that’s what the textbooks say. In Texas, redistricting has become the process by which politicians choose their voters and, in Edwards’s case, deny their enemies support. Silly voter, you didn’t think that you chose your representative, did you?
The process could be as contentious as ever during the 2011 session because of what is at stake. In the past decade, 3.9 million people moved to Texas, making it the fastest-growing state in the country. That means we could gain three or four new congressional seats, which will entitle us to more from the federal government: more representation, more money, and more clout.
Of course, that also means more partisan warfare. For example, startling demographic shifts will spark battles between regions of the state. Since the previous census, Texans have been fleeing rural areas and settling in roughly the middle of the state. It is as if someone collapsed a game board and spilled its players along Interstate 35 from the suburbs of Dallas and San Antonio and back east to Houston. While suburbanization is not new, the phenomenon has accelerated dramatically in the past ten years. More than half as many counties lost population than in the previous ten years. This spells disaster for incumbent politicians in rural areas, who simply don’t represent enough people to justify their existence.
Meanwhile, an explosion in the state’s Hispanic population has created legal and political pressure to draw at least one new congressional district that can be controlled by Hispanic voters. Hispanic residents account for 63 percent of Texas’s historic population increase. Without them, Texas’s population growth would not have been sufficient to claim any new congressional seats. But where the new district is drawn could prove contentious. For example, there are now more Hispanics living in the Dallas area (1.8 million) than in the entire Rio Grande Valley (1.04 million).
If history has taught us anything, the pressure to draw new lines and protect incumbents will set off a protracted, consuming, and nasty battle steeped in partisanship and racial politics. The November elections reinvigorated Republicans for combat by delivering a breathtaking 99 to 51 majority in the Texas House. Quite simply, the electorate made the dreams of the GOP faithful come true. As the saying goes, in love, comedy, and politics, timing is everything. And getting spanked by the voters during a census year is unimaginably bad for the Democrats.
Which brings us back to Edwards. After 2003, he survived a few election cycles, but in the end the Fort Hood for Johnson County swap was fatal. Flores creamed Edwards in Johnson County by nearly 14,000 votes. Residents of the current district, swept up in the national conservative tidal wave, may think they threw Edwards out. But his fate was sealed in 2003, when Republican leaders threw his voters out.
Gamesmanship has defined redistricting at least since 1812, when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry inked a salamander-shaped district to help elect a political ally. That map introduced the term “gerrymander” into the political lexicon to describe the art of drawing a district whose reptilian boundaries absorbed friendly voters and slithered around unfriendly ones. Over the years, the game grew in complexity and developed new strategies: “packing” (jamming one voter type into a district), “cracking” (dispersing a community of cohesive voters into several districts), and “pairing” (putting the homes of two incumbents in the same district to force them to run against each other).
For generations, the game was played exclusively by elected officials and their patrons. Two things changed that. First, in 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court inserted itself into the process by ruling that districts must have equal numbers of people. Then, in 1975 a congressional amendment to the Voting Rights Act required Texas to prove that new boundary lines did not diminish the strength of minorities. For the first time, the average person got to play. If voters (or, more accurately, their advocates, like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund or the Republican Party of Texas) didn’t like the districts drawn by the politicians, they could take the maps to the federal courts for review.
Over time the technology for identifying voters and drawing increasingly sophisticated maps changed as well. Inkwells were abandoned for calculators, which were in turn abandoned for computer software. Today a click of the mouse can reveal a district’s voting-age population, voting history, and minority population, not to mention its country clubs, school districts, and churches. Redistricting now resembles a high-body-count, multiplayer computer game.
Each state plays with its own set of rules. In Texas the Legislature gets the first crack at drawing maps, and redistricting bills make their way through both chambers just as any other piece of legislation does. However, the process becomes more complicated if lawmakers cannot agree on new maps. If that happens, the Legislative Redistricting Board (LRB), which comprises the lieutenant governor, House Speaker, comptroller, attorney general, and land commissioner, assumes responsibility for the state House and Senate districts; federal and state courts draw the lines for congressional seats. In any case, because of the Voting Rights Act amendment, all Texas maps must get a thumbs-up from the U.S. Department of Justice, known as a Section 5 preclearance, to ensure that minority voting strength has not been damaged.
Strategy is often influenced by the party affiliation of those in charge at the various levels. For instance, a clever move for Democrats would be to try to compromise with their Republican colleagues in the House and Senate, because they are certain to get hosed by the LRB, whose members are all Republicans. But that doesn’t mean that Republicans can do anything they want. The Democrats’ only leverage this session will be their constant reminder to the majority party that the DOJ is now led by Obama appointees. That means the Republicans don’t want to get too greedy and risk being smacked down by the feds. (Republicans do have another option, one that would allow them to bypass the DOJ by going directly to a Washington, D.C., court to seek preclearance. That decision rests with Attorney General Greg Abbott, who will decide where he believes the state’s plans will be best received.)
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