As Texas Republicans try to muscle a rare mid-decade redistricting bill through the Legislature to help Republicans gain seats in Congress – at President Donald Trump’s request – residents in Austin, the state capital, could find themselves sharing a district with rural Texans more than 300 miles away.
The proposed map chops up Central Texas’ 37th Congressional District, which is currently represented by Democrat Rep. Lloyd Doggett, will be consumed by four neighboring districts, three of which Republicans now hold.
One of those portions of the Austin-area district was drawn to be part of the 11th District that Republican Rep. August Pfluger represents, which stretches into rural Ector County, about 20 miles away from the New Mexico border.
I will never understand how this obvious manipulation has been legal for decades.
The pretense is gone now though, which is fascinating. And scary.
It’s literally just partisan warfare with legal exploitation, and voter bases apparently think it’s justified. I mean, what are they gonna do, side with the other party over it?
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when lawmakers break the law and nobody enforces the law, it stops being the law.
And so many things were just ‘common sense,’ and not enshrined in laws because the thought was that anyone breaking them would be held accountable by the populace. We now have a critical mass of stupid, self absorbed, or malicious people that laws don’t matter, much less norms.
centuries*
Federal government won’t do anything about it. States control their own elections and therein lies the conundrum. Texas is proving very willingly that it doesn’t care about the rules as long as they win.
GOP, not all of Texas.
Won’t matter unless the progressives of the state get organized.
And you pretend that the Democrats haven’t been doing this since they were the Democratic Republican Party.
The Democrats proposed a bill last congress to ban gerrymandering and every single Republican voted against it.
Over a century. It all started with the Democratic Republican Party that eventually became the Democratic Party.
If you think that the Democrats are the only ones to gerrymander until now you’re not intelligent enough to be weighing in