52 Democrats Walk Out of Senate -- Speaker orders Arrest

But, if the roles were reversed, do you think I would say anything different? You may not know me well enough, so I'll tell you: hell no. The Democrats are just as much a bunch of assholes as the Republicans (I'm speaking here of the politicians, mind you). I demand the Republicans be the bigger men in this because they are currently the ones in power. When it was the Democrats in power, I was either not alive or not conscious of what was happening in Texas politics. I wish the Democrats had done something when they had the chance, but they're a bunch of idiots and they didn't do it. Now, the Republicans have a chance. They are also idiots, so I doubt they'll fix it -- the Democrats probably wouldn't even cooperate if they did try because they might miss an opportunity for corruption in the future.

You said

I think you're wrong. There is something very wrong and immoral to redistrict to make it easier for your Party to be elected in the future. That this has "always been done" is irrelevant. If something is wrong, it's wrong; it doesn't matter how long you've been doing it or how many times it's been done to you. And, I can't even see how you can construe it as anything other than wrong to operate a system in which the voting power of the people is diluted in order to deny them representation. It is flat-out, bald-faced corruption. It should be stopped. But, of course, no one in our Legislature has got the balls to try -- and why should they when everyone will make the apologies for them for not trying?

 

There are obviously national concerns here as well and I think the distinction you try to draw is lacking. They want to keep seats precisely to prevent bills they don't believe in from being passed. Delay wants the redistricting done to save his position of power in case the Dems pick up some seats in the next election so he can continue to pass the things he (cough) believes (cough) in. Congressional seats are the means to the end for Dems and Repubs.

But it's never been done in off years for purely political gain. In most case of redistricting outside of Texas, the party in power gets most of what it wants, but there are usually alliances set up to make things easier. Typically, it's between incumbents of both parties, or, after the 1990 census in particular, the alliance in many southern states was between black dems and Repubs to ensure minority-majority districts which also just happened to swing delegations to the Repub side. Doesn't seem to be any multi-party alliances or compromise in this case, and last I looked, Tom Delay represents a few hundred thousand people in his congressional district, not the whole state.

 

I'd also like to say that I think I would be against this if the shoe was on the other foot. To me, it's sort of like FDR trying to pack the Supreme Court.

 

Has the power in the Legislature changed hands in the interim between the 10 year required redistricting?

 

Has the power in the Legislature changed hands in the interim between the 10 year required redistricting?

In Texas, probably not, since we've been Democratic for who knows how long. Throughout the country, I would assume its happened plenty of times, unless all legislature changes only happened on decade years (1990, 1980, 1970, etc).

 

And we've never had a power shift in Texas in the middle of a decade.

I guess the Republicans were just unlucky to take so long to take the House, etc otherwise, they could've been doling out political retribution and everybody would think it was okay.

And I'm sure that if the Republicans had been in charge in 2000 and passed this very redistricting plan then only to have the Democrats come to office in 2002/03, the Dems would simply sit on their hands and wait until after the 2010 elections to even think about changing it.

Split the conservative Panhandle and Amarillo to get a Democratic seat? No problem. You just can't do it in a year that doesn't end in 0. Close an airbase because the public didn't vote for LBJ? No problem. No one will say a word about it or care, except those people who lose their jobs up in the Panhandle and who cares about them. They're Republicans.

But now it's outrageous. And I'm sure when the Republicans use this same tactic at some point when they're out of power, they will be hailed as heroes, as well. Surely they won't be called obstructionist, etc.

These folks have pledged to stay gone until the redistricting is off the table. I guess we could see Gov. Perry just keep calling special sections regarding redistricting for months and months. I'd kind of like to see these people try to run for re-election from Oklahoma.

 

How young are you? The Republicans have only controlled the Texas House for a couple of months.

Yeah, well, it's hard to get all teary-eyed about what's right when you've been on the wrong end of the spectrum for decades. When somebody does this to you simply to prevent your representation, you don't really feel all that magnanimous when you finally get into power.

This is something that has been going on for as long as this country has been around... or at least since the early 1800s when the process got the name Gerrymandering. Maybe it is wrong and immoral, but the Democrats had 150 years to stop it and chose not to. Why you expect the Republicans to all of a sudden stop it is interesting to me.

The voting power of the people is not dilluted. You still get your vote and you still get your representative who goes to Washington. The fact that Austin doesn't have a vote seems immaterial to me. Austin isn't a person and, as far as I can tell, doesn't so much deserve a vote. But your vote still means as much as it always did.

And as much as my vote did when I started voting in the Texas 13th back in the 1980s and Bill Sarpaulis was the man in the seat despite the obvious handicap of being a Democrat representing one of the most converative areas of the country. But he was still our representative, and he still represented us in Congress. Some would even say he represented the part of Amarillo he had well even though we were not the majority population in the district that stretched to Denton, at some points no wider than Highway 287.

I grew up in a district designed the way you complain about Austin being designed now. We still had a vote. We voted. Yes, we couldn't elect a Republican until 1994 even though the city was largely Republican since the 1960s (Amarillo even went Goldwater in 1964), but the people were still represented. Just like I was represented living in Arlington despite it being a Democrat in the my Congressional Seat (in largely a largely Republican area, too. Martin Frost's district was also quite interestingly shaped to prevent Republicans from being elected).

To me, it seems like second nature because that's all I've ever had. We lived with it. We knew that's the way the game was played. The party in charge drew the lines, and we lived with it. Amarillo is no less a city because of the weird Congressional set-up it had until very recently. The people of the city did not lose their vote even though the district was specifically designed to prevent us from voting in a Republican. And the Republicans who were elected didn't run to Oklahoma to prevent the process from happening and the business of government being done. They didn't like it, but they did their jobs and stuck with it. And I doubt there would've been many calls of heroics had the House Republicans run to Oklahoma in 2001 in an effort to get their way.

And while you think that this Republican plan is somehow diminishing the rights of voters, who's to say the current set-up isn't gerrymandered to ensure more Democratic victories, thereby twarting the will of the people?

I mean, Texas has become something of a Republican state. Republicans control all the statewide offices, have both Senate seats, both chambers of the Legislature, voted for President Bush in 2000. Yet, we've got a majority of Democrats in the Congressional Delegation. That strikes me as odd.

So perhaps the Republican plan isn't "fair", but it sure seems like a case could be made that the current plan is rigged, too. And the Democrats up in Oklahoma have no desire to fix that, do they?

Yes, I know the current map has passed court scrutiny, but gerrymandering for political purposes is not against the law.

 

Austin not having a representative of it's own for the first time in generations is immaterial? Well, I'm not going to get into an arguement about whether or not Amarillo deserves it's own seat. I will repeat that the major cities of Texas have traditionally always had their own seat. Perhaps Amarillo wasn't considered in that category... I don't know. I do know that this is a break with tradition in Texas.

I also might mention that all these years of Democratic majority that has been brought up needs to be put in context. The majority of Democrats all those years were conservative, many very conservative... so I would say that people of a conservative bent in most conservative areas had representation in Washington. Austin won't have that choice.

I'll also say yet again that no thought by the Republican leadership, except in the Senate, was given to the affect this would have on any attempt to address the State's budget crisis and a host of other important issues. So it would appear. Or they didn't care about the consequences.

Yes, there is a budget crisis.
It seems to be largely ignored by people who aren't directly affected by it, at least on this BBS. There has been a total lack of leadership, imo, by the Governor and the House leadership. That this redistricting bill was allowed to come up at all, without any public input worth mentioning, is proof.

Anyone familiar with State Government here in Texas knew that trying to push it through now would have an enormous negative impact on doing anything about our $9.9 billion shortfall. I know of what I speak, believe it or not. My significant other is an executive who works for the Legislature. I hear about all of this stuff every evening... if she's not working 'til 1am or later.

The people here on the BBS, in the main, really don't seem to know much about what's coming out of this session, and that's putting aside redistricting. I hate to say that, because I've come to respect so many of you, but you really should get better informed about what's going to happen to state services in a broad spectrum of areas.

Some of the conservative Republicans here who care deeply about children getting health care and a whole host of other important things are going to see the results of this budget. And you're not going to like it.

And I'm talking about the budget that's been bulldozed through over the public outrage of people like Senator Ratliff... a Republican who couldn't be called anything but a conservative. You might remember Senator Ratliff. He was elected by the Senate to serve as Lt. Governor when Bush left to become President and Perry was elevated the the Governor's Mansion.

That Senator Ratliff.


(I'm sorry if any of this came across as preaching or anything of the sort. I'm really a pretty mellow guy. And my better half doesn't agree with me on everything... believe it or not. )

 

In summary,

 

Lol. I'm 27. But, when I was growing up in Texas I was a child and didn't know squat about anything. Then my young adult life was spent in Illinois and I didn't pay much attention to Texas politics. Now that I'm back, I still don't pay too much attention because, obviously, it gets me pissed off and actually pretty depressed when I think about what my "representatives" are doing for me.

As for the districting, I'm sure the current plan is drawn to give Democrats an undue advantage. It should be changed. And the Democrats are a bunch of sissies for running off the Oklahoma. But, I don't want to see the pendulum swing in the other direction. I want a level playing field. And, if these reps were actually representing my interests, that's what they'd be working on. Since they are not, they are worse than useless.

And don't tell me it can't be done. I have a feeling that if our Legislature were in the hands of Thomas Jefferson et al, they'd find a way to make a system that more or less guaranteed fair play.

 

Deckard, good points. I must admit that I'm not very inofrmed about what is happening in Austin. Texas and Houston politics seem boring. Maybe it is just the media coveage or lack thereof in Houston media. I don't know. Perhaps this is deliberate so that the average person won't follow it.

My wife is a school nurse in HISD. Very frequently she referred poor kids with health problems, whose parents don't have health insurance to the CHIPS Program. She tells me that it has been virtually gutted. MHMRA used to screen kids for serious mental problems at the school. Now they too have stopped due to the budget crisis.

I saw in the paper that they have virtually approved the following: 1) $23 hr per credit jump in state college tuition for both of the following two years. $46 per hr increase.
2) The following year they would do a one year experiment and
let the universitities set their own increase. Wierd?

People don't understand that quite a bit of federal money trickles down to the states. When you do things like decrease the inheritance tax on multi-million dollar estates and taxes on dividends for that very small percentage who have dividend yielding stocks in a non-retirment account, it leads to service cuts for poor kids and tuition increases for college students.

 

I love this post! Great post!!! I agree...I wish both parties were above this...clearly neither is. But to run away from this like this is goofy

 

Right now the Dem advantage is 17-15. The DeLay plan gives the Republicans 5 seats. Why noy compromise and give the Republicans 3 seats?

 

You know the ironic part about all this is that the Republican plan is part of a long running Republican strategy that essentially results in affirmative action for state legislatures.

It's been a GOP strategy for the last decade or so to have traditionally democratic voting minorites isolated into majority-minority districts, and away from swing districts, which has the effect of having a few small, highly concentrated Dem. districts with minority legislators, and a greater number of mild to moderately Rep. ones.

 

Well, ok, thanks, I guess. Now I feel a little awkward. Maybe I should retire now and go out on the top of my game.

 

Just a little info about these supposed "gerrymandered" districts that give the Democrats an "unfair" advantage.

District 1: Max Sandlin, Democrat.
42% Democratic
58% Republican

District 2: Jim Turner, Democrat.
44% Democratic
56% Republican

District 9: Nick Lampson, Democrat.
48% Democratic
52% Republican

District 11: Chet Edwards, Democrat.
37% Democratic
63% Republican

I highlighted Chet Edwards in District 11 because it just jumped out at me. If you give these seats with a Republican majority to the Republicans, they have a clear majority of the Texas delegation to Washington.

Maybe, just maybe, a majority of Republicans thought those Democrats were doing a good job and returned them to office, or liked them and decided to vote for them. You think??

For those with a Seinfeld bent, I'll describe what's happening to you. It's a show about nothing.

Tom DeLay wants to be sure he has a majority after the next elections and he doesn't care what this does to Texas and the Session. I hope this provided some with a little clarity.

 

Bingo, the guy knows his hold on Sugarland and other points southwest is slipping. Let's at least look at the source of this mess in the first place.

 

i didn't mean to make you feel awkward...good thing i deleted the part where i asked if you would wear my jacket.

 

Gosh, over 5 1/2 hours and not one explanation about all these Democrats getting elected in Republican districts??
They are returning Friday, for those who haven't heard.

Sorry for quoting myself, but I was surprised to see these numbers myself... I'm wondering what some of you Republicans think of this "problem" now... looks like the courts were pretty fair in drawing the boundaries. Maybe the voters think they are getting good representation. That's a concept.

 

I'm all for this. Not because I'm particularly sympathetic to either party (I'm not), but because it effectively freezes the government. This way the government can't pass any more laws and regulations. The Democrats, intentionally or not, have thrown a giant wrench into the cogs of the State, and for that I applaud them. The less laws and regulations, the better.

Also, it exposes some very fundamental flaws in the democratic "social contract" system of government, but that's an aspect so deep I doubt you'll be hearing much about it in the Chronicle editorials.