The Texas GOP’s ‘Unprecedented,’ Risky Gerrymandering Scheme

In the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature redrew the state s political maps that determine the lines of power in the Texas House the Texas Senate and the representatives in U S Congress Thanks to a decade s worth of population improvement fueled by Latinos Asian Americans and African Americans Texas gained two new congressional seats bringing the state s total to second only to California From a partisan perspective the maps were primarily about incumbent protection one new seat went to Republicans in the Houston area and one went to Democrats in Austin while the rest of the existing seats were all made either redder or bluer From the perspective of racial representation it was a further continuation of the Texas tradition of maximizing the power of conservative Anglo voters at the expense of communities of color especially in Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth Timing-wise that re-mapping was done as it typically is after the decennial federal census Yet just four years later Republicans are upon receiving orders from their supreme leader President Donald Trump coming back to Austin for a second bite at the gerrymandering apple as Organization MAGA hopes to shore up its razor-thin majority in the U S House in Governor Greg Abbott has put redistricting on his call for the current special legislative session which convened Monday citing the need to address constitutional concerns around a sparse specific racially gerrymandered congressional districts in Houston and DFW something Trump s Department of Justice quite conveniently chose to criticize and about which the Texas GOP has never before cared There are reports that Republicans will try to redraw as various as five currently Democratic districts from South Texas and Houston to Dallas and possibly Austin to favor the GOP to flip in the upcoming midterms That s a tall task and a politically dicey maneuver and one we saw years ago The Texas Observer spoke with Michael Li a Texas native and longtime redistricting expert at the Brennan Center about Tom Delay dummymanders and the long history of racial gerrymandering in the state TO Texas was sued in for violating the Voting Rights Act by racially gerrymandering its new maps Can you give a brief overview of what s transpired since then The trial on the challenges to the map just concluded in June The briefing on that will continue into the fall and at various point in the coming months the court will rule But of class in the interim particular of those alleges could be mooted out with respect to the congressional maps So the state legislative map maintains could still go on but the congressional could become moot if the state draws new maps So it s this sort of bizarro world this is the world without Section of the Voting Rights Act where we had preclearance And we re at the point now in where the state s maps have kind of been under litigation for decades now Well every map since the s has been challenged or redrawn in part because they were racially discriminatory or violated the Voting Rights Act This is nothing new for Texas Whether Democrats drew the maps or Republicans drew the maps Texas has struggled for decades to draw maps that fairly represented communities of color And in this decade the map I think to the bulk objective observers underrepresents communities of color who are percent of the population enhancement of the last decade So you already under-represent those communities and by redrawing this map you could make a bad map even worse as hard as that is to believe So there were rumblings over the past month of the Trump administration pressuring Republicans in Texas to redraw the maps again to expand their numbers in the U S House Obviously that has now become a concrete thing But you know we saw this DOJ letter that right before Abbott put out his special session agenda specifically lists racially gerrymandered districts in Houston and the DFW area that the state necessities to correct What do you make of that Was this just a blatant way to create a pretext for Texas Republicans to open up the maps again Well the letter feels very pretexual It s hard to make sense of the letter from a legal perspective Just because you have districts with a lot of minorities and different minority groups doesn t make it a racial gerrymander What you have to do for a racial gerrymander is that race has to dominate in how you decided to draw the map Texas has insisted throughout the El Paso litigation that it couldn t be a racial gerrymander because they didn t consider race Race could not predominate if you didn t consider it The letter doesn t make any sense legally it doesn t definitely make sense factually and the fact that the state is using that letter to reopen up the map-drawing process I think is very pretextual Because if it was true that as the state has claimed there was no racial component to the drawing of the maps then they could ignore the letter and say Sue us Right and in fact Ken Paxton s office even responded to the letter saying No no no we didn t consider race at all We did this for partisanship Well that s fine If you did it for partisan gerrymandering and you didn t consider race at all there is no constitutional concern with these districts But the fact that Governor Abbott has disclosed in his special session call we need to have constitutionally drawn maps certainly their grasping onto the letter feels like a convenient excuse to do something that they already wished to do for other reasons We re hearing that Republicans want to add as a multitude of as five more districts but that does not necessarily mean that they re going to target the ones that are named in the DOJ letter It gets messy very briskly there s all these cascading effects with changing lines and stuff but they can kind of just open up the maps entirely and just start changing everything Yeah I don t think they re bound by those districts alone If you literally redraw the districts that are named in the letter that s just buying like a Texas-sized legal fight You re just inviting the argument that you re intentionally discriminating against communities of color because these are in multiple cases long-standing districts that have been represented by Black and Latino members And it s worth mentioning that last decade Texas was unveiled by a three-judge panel in Washington to have intentionally discriminated when it drew its maps The court in the preclearance event explained like there s more evidence of intention to discriminate than we have room or need to discuss So there s a lot of danger in attacking these districts Reports have reported the GOP s tentative plan to draw new Republican seats would be to target districts in South Texas Henry Cuellar s district and Vicente Gonzalez s Julie Johnson s district in the Dallas area The Houston area and potentially in Austin In terms of just the partisan gerrymandering aspect of this does that strike you as especially aggressive From both a partisan perspective and a racial perspective several of those are majority non-white districts with the exception of Lloyd Doggett s district in Austin So you re talking about targeting the political power of communities of color in a pretty aggressive way But it s also aggressive politically Republicans in Texas already hold two-thirds of the congressional seats If they add another five they end up with percent of the seats in a state where they get around - percent of the vote at best This has dummymander written all over it And again last decade is a cautionary tale Republicans drew the maps very aggressively last decade and it looked pretty good for them And then in they lost the Dallas seat that Colin Allred won and the Houston seat that Lizzie Fletcher won and they almost lost a bunch of seats around the Austin area Texas is growing so fast it s changing so fast it s becoming more diverse so fast So it s really hard to predict what the future electorate of Texas looks like Because when you gerrymander you re making a bet that you know what the politics of a place are going to be And in multiple places that s true because you know they re not changing that much In Texas it s just the opposite of that You can easily be too smart for your own good Right And in with the current set of maps the consensus was it was a Republican-favored map where they expanded their numbers a bit but it was fairly tempered compared to past maps and was more about protecting the current status quo for incumbents And then they saw and where Republicans won at big levels statewide and saw specific gains in South Texas in the Valley and certain backsliding in the suburbs like Fort Bend and Collin counties So it feels like they re kind of looking back and being like Damn we should have been more aggressive And they re at liability of short-term political gain right now based on potentially over-reading or over-interpreting what could be various electoral aberrations Yeah that s absolutely right If you talked to a lot of Democrats after they thought they knew what the future of the state was going to look like They were wrong They were pretty confident that they were going to flip the Texas House in And that didn t happen Right and and were certainly good for Republicans but things have changed One being Joe Biden is no longer President and Donald trump is And if you were trying to be in a good position for the rest of the decade you might not want to be so aggressive But maybe they re thinking this will be good enough for and we may lose seats in or but oh well That is the world that the Supreme Court left us in because they revealed partisan gerrymandering we re not gonna police it So the last time infamously that something like this happened was back in was in with Tom Delay in the mid-decade redistricting where they came to Austin and redid the congressional maps with explicit intentions of packing and cracking Democratic districts really gutting the entire base of the existing conservative rural Democratic members and also urgent up Austin into seven different pieces or whatever What do you see as key similarities and differences with the situation now A key difference is when they redrew the maps in the s it was to replace a court-drawn map The Legislature had deadlocked in because the Democrats still controlled the Texas House and they couldn t agree on a map and so a court drew a map And the court took a conservative approach in terms of not making a lot of changes based on the maps And the map was a fairly infamous and aggressive Democratic gerrymander because Democrats controlled the process in and so by the early s Republicans were winning the majority of the state vote but Democrats still controlled a majority of congressional seats Republicans thought well that seems unfair Whether you agree with how aggressive they were or not they did sort of have a matter This decade it s different right because Republicans drew this map They got what they craved and now they re redrawing it I can t think of another example in the country where a party redraws the map that it drew That s really unprecedented And also going back to the point if you accept the premise of the s that seat share and vote share should kind of be alike well Republicans have percent of the seats They don t win percent of the vote and they certainly don t win percent If you accept the arguments from the Tom Delay cycle well gosh you indeed should have more Democratic seats This interview has been edited for length and clarity The post The Texas GOP s Unprecedented Risky Gerrymandering Scheme appeared first on The Texas Observer