Originally published at www.gipsytim.com
Once a decade, the local political class in Texas breaks out in a fit of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of the teeth that has no equal. That’s right, its redistricting time again. Most of the time, the state legislators just make the rest of us miserable but slicing and dicing up the Lone Star State into political districts gives the the Texas State Legislature the opportunity to make itself miserable. I’ve always wondered imagined that behind the scenes that the state legislators hold a straw draw to determine who is going to be on the Redistricting Committee. Since State Representative Burt Solomons is in charge of the Redistricting Committee, it looks like he drew the short straw.
The conventional wisdom says that congressional redistricting favors the party in power, which in this case is the Republicans. I don’t necessarily agree with that since the compromises needed to make a redistricting map work in a way that will stand up to almost automatic court challenges that will surely be filed, means that the advantages are somewhat less in reality than theory. A perfect example of this happened in the 2003 redistricting engineered by the master criminal and then Congressman Tom Delay.
A few years before a Texas jury rightly ruled to send The Hammer to the slammer, Tom Delay forced an off-schedule redistricting largely though the application of very large bribes. I was living in the south part of Houston at that time and was actually Delay’s congressional district. For most of my time in Houston, my Senator was John Cornyn, so representation-wise, I was twice-cursed. After the redistricting, some of my church members found that they were no longer represented by Delay but were not represented by the ultra-liberal and ultra-stupid Sheila Jackson Lee. As an Independent voter I was amused by the situation to the dismay of my Republican acquaintances.
Sensing that I didn’t share their sense of outrage, one of them inquired how I could be so calm about the situation.
“Were you for redistricting in an off-schedule year,” I asked.”Yes!”
“Then you have nothing to complain about,” I replied.
Then came more protestations about the unfairness of the outcome. I pointed out that once the redistricting process begins all bets are off and there’s no telling where the boundary lines are going to end up. As it was in 2003, so it is in 2011. At this point the new redistricting map has been passed by the Texas Senate and not goes the the Texas House of Representatives for a vote. I can’t make any predictions about what will happen there but I can guarantee that after the smoke has finally cleared there will be plenty of people unhappy with the result.
Liars of the Left 