Texas Redistricting Quorum Flight Time Warp!
With the Democrats of Texas fleeing the State to prevent the Republicans of the state quorum to ultra-have their state, I am surprised that there is no more mention on the way the same thing happened 22 years ago when the legislators of Texas did exactly the same thing. All this occurred in early 2003. More of you, some of which, will remember that. But it’s more than a few interesting anecdotes. Because the circumstances of this previous example are a key, although semi-vergogue, to understand how we arrived where we are today.
Twenty-two years ago, the redistribution in mid-December was unknown. There was, as we say now, a very strong standard against it. The American census is released every decades, then the seats in the congress are redistacted for the next elections. This has created regularity and prevented chaos and the game of the legislatures of the states rushing to the redistribution at every moment of the partisan advantage.
In 2002, the Republicans had obtained total control of the Texas State legislature for the first time since 1873. Texas was already a fairly conservative state. And he was increasingly republican. But the inertia and the holder had allowed the Democrats to hang on to the House. It ended in 2002. Too bad for the Texas Republicans that it did not happen two years earlier! Then, they could have used these new majorities to redistize the State in favor of the Republicans. Too bad!
But that did not explain Tom Delay, the head of the majority of the room and largely the power behind the throne of the speaker of the Denny Hastert Chamber. Delay, which also faced a growing whirlwind of legal problems, saw an opportunity to fill in the republican majority of the house, and he took it.
Again, it all seems rather picturesque today. There was no law prohibiting redistribution in mid-December. And there was a decent argument that the state was more republican than its state delegation suggested. But it was simply not done. And for a good reason. It was a significant brake on the intrinsically undeveloped potential of redistribution power, where politicians chose voters as opposed to the opposite. Tom Delay did not care about this shit. You have your power and you use it. Period. End of history.
It is a philosophy that appeals or seems necessary for many of us today. But again, this is a key step in the way we got here. Standards are nothing. Power is everything. The delay was a creature of the Gingrich revolution in the congress and the GOP. But it was more concentrated and disciplined than impulsive and emotionally in need that Gingrich. He survived after being swallowed up by Lewinsky’s scandal that he had so much for Stoke at the end of 1998. He was the whip of the house in the Gingrich team, Dick Armey and Delay. After Gingrich was replaced by Hastert, he remained in place. He went up to the majority leader on the mutilated political corpse of Armey in January 2003. It was the apogee of Delay. (They finally won the redistribution.) The 108th Congress was the summit of the corruption of the GOP house at the time of Abramoff. And the law caught up the delay. After the 2004 elections, his first priority was to ensure that the Caucus of the GOP Chamber canceled the rule which provided that no member of the party leadership could be under the indictment. (Picturesque, right?) He was as the majority leader at the end of 2005. He completely left the congress in June 2006. Dancing with the stars was not too far away.
The delay did not survive politically. But the delay -ism did it. Delay hardball tactics are a linear genetic ancestor of Trumpism. The redistribution finally crossed because some of the Democrats who fled the state did not have the heart to continue and return home. Meanwhile, the whole fight sparked a series of secondary scandals. Like this: the delay intervened with the Ministry of Internal Security, the demanding federal police is deployed to arrest the DEM in runaway and bring them by force to Austin. (It seems to be a precedent that is worth monitored today.)
We have already been here. And it did not end well the last time.
