Time for another roundup of this and that:
Posts Tagged ‘Redistricting’
LinkSwarm For February 15, 2012
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012Texas Republican Party on Redistricting Lawsuits State of Play
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012A long but informative breakdown of where things stand. The bottom line: The cases are still up in the air, Texas GOP is not directly involved in talks, and February 6 is the last day the case can be resolved and still have an April 3 primary.
Supreme Court to District Court: No, You Can’t Overturn the Democratic Process to Help Democrats. Not Yours.
Friday, January 20th, 2012OK, they didn’t use quite that language (and I must prepend the usual I Am Not a Lawyer disclaimer). But in issuing the decision (they had previously blocked the District Courts’ maps), the Supremes did say the San Antonio District Court had exceeded its authority in drawing new redistricting maps for Texas for no clear reason, and ordered the District Court to go back to the drawing board and create maps closer to what the legislation passed in the first place:
Because it is unclear whether the District Court for the Western District of Texas followed the appropriate standards in drawing interim maps for the 2012 Texas elections, the orders implementing those maps are vacated,and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Time and time again in this decision, the Supreme Court criticizes the District Court for their approach:
Time in time again, the Supreme Court said to the District Court: “You screwed up. The State government has the responsibility to perform redistricting, and you shouldn’t overturn their work without explicit Voting Rights Acts reason, and you went and did it anyway.”
Justice Clarence Thomas concurred with the opinion, but went even further, declaring that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (the section requiring judicial preclearance of voting districts) was unconstitutional:
In my view, Texas’ failure to timely obtain §5 preclearance of its new plans is no obstacle to their implementation, because, as I have previously explained, §5 is unconstitutional…Although Texas’ new plans are being challenged on the grounds that they violate the Federal Constitution and §2 of the Voting Rights Act, they have not yet been found to violate any law. Accordingly, Texas’ duly enacted redistricting plans should govern the upcoming elections. I would therefore vacate the interim orders and remand for the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas to consider appellees’ constitutional and §2 challenges in the ordinary course.
Presumably, a more chastised District Court will come back in short order with a map that more closely resembles what the legislature passed, and not one designed to give Democrats in the court room what they couldn’t achieve at the ballot box.
Supreme Court to District Court on Texas Redistricting Plan: REJECTED!
Saturday, December 10th, 2011The Supreme Court Friday night “blocked a redistricting plan for Texas drawn by a panel of federal judges.”
I’ve got to run off, and the issue is far from settled, but this is good news for the rule of law, and bad news for liberals wanting to abuse the court system to get what they want despite voters rejecting them again and again.
[Edited to add: Crappy, hastily written headline now rewritten to make it clear this was a U.S. Supreme Court stay, not the Texas Supreme Court, which is obviously holds no sway over a U.S. District Court. – LP]
The Washington Post Discovers Ted Cruz
Friday, June 17th, 2011Washington Post writer Aaron Blake pays serious attention to Ted Cruz, and his role as Tea Party favorite. It’s a decent write-up for an out-of-state MSM outlet playing catch-up, but there are several statements about which I have at least some minor quibbles.
For example, take this sentence
That’s because he’s emerging as a potential top-tier candidate in the Lone Star state race, posing a real tea party threat to better-funded candidates in what should be one of the most expensive primary races in the country.
There’s two things wrong with that sentence:
- Cruz isn’t “a potential top-tier candidate,” he’s arguably already the frontrunner.
- Saying that he’s “posing a real tea party threat to better-funded candidates” suggests that there are, in fact, better-funded candidates. Leppert only has more money on hand thanks to a $1.6 million loan (discounting loans, in Q1 Leppert pulled in slightly over $1 million, and Cruz pulled in slightly under $1 million), and even then the rest of Leppert’s fundraising relied heavily on max contributions from a limited number of Dallas-area donors. So Cruz is about as well-funded as anyone in the race right now. (Would Lt. Governor David Dewhurst change that if he jumped into the race? If he really wanted to commit a substantial portion of his personal fortune (consistently rumored, without verifiable attribution, to be around $200 million), yes it would.)
Likewise his suggestion that Leppert is one of the “big boys” (outside of Dallas, his profile is no bigger than Cruz’s) seems misguided.
Then there’s this:
Dewhurst is the prohibitive favorite if he gets in, and Leppert has made a big splash early with his fundraising. But many conservatives aren’t waiting for Dewhurst—choosing instead to rally around Cruz.
I think “prohibitive favorite” overstates the case a bit (I would use “formidable”), but the idea that conservatives have ever “waited” on Dewhurst is off-base.
As so many other Republican politicians do, Dewhurst occupies that vast gray area between a RINO (think Arlen Specter before he went The Full Benedict) and a real movement conservative. The phrase “a self-described ‘George Bush Republican'” appears, unsourced, in his Wikipedia entry (and thus is automatically suspect), and sums up the feelings of many conservatives towards Dewhurst. He ran as a conservative, and mostly governed as a conservative, but every now and then he would go off on Big Government tangents that would infuriate proponents of limited government. Despite this, outside the state, Dewhurst is regarded as something of an “arch-conservative” for shepherding through the (constitutionally-required) 2003 redistricting.
I wouldn’t go so far as to compare him to Charlie Crist (as some have), but there’s been real dissatisfaction with Dewhurst among movement conservatives, and it came to the fore with this year’s legislative sessions, where, despite having controlling majorities in both House and Senate, conservative Republicans found their agenda being thwarted in many ways great and small by Dewhurst in the Senate and Speaker Joe Straus in the House. Hence state senator (and possible U.S. Senate candidate) Dan Patrick’s lashing out at Dewhurst for thwarting his anti-TSA goping bill. Dewhurst managed to get the big things done (i.e., getting a budget passed without a tax hike), but there’s a sense among conservatives that he could have gotten a lot more conservative bills passed if he really wanted to, and that he “left money on the table” in the game of legislative poker by compromising when he didn’t have to
So it’s not at all surprising that Dewhurst is viewed as a stanch conservative when viewed from inside the Beltway; by Washington, D.C. standards he is. But there’s a widespread sense among Texas conservatives that they should be able to elect a full-bore movement conservative to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison, and that David Dewhurst isn’t that guy. There was a good deal of debate over whether Ted Cruz or Michael Williams was the preferred choice; with Williams getting out of the race to run for a House seat, the issue has been resolved in Cruz’s favor, as indicated by his impressive array of endorsements.
Still, those quibbles aside, the WaPo piece is a pretty solid look at Cruz, and is well worth reading for those following the Texas Senate Race.
(In the future, Brooks might want to run this sort of piece by Jennifer Rubin, who has a lot better grasp of the nuances of conservative politics than most MSM observers.)
In Which I Come Perilously Close to Defending Lloyd Doggett
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011Paul Burka has a post up in which he basically makes two arguments:
- Republicans are trying to Gerrymander white Democrats out of Congress; and
- “Almost no one has done as much damage to the Democratic cause” in Texas as Lloyd Doggett.
He is mistaken, to differing degrees, in both beliefs.
As for the first, Republicans are trying to Gerrymander as many Democrats as possible out of their congressional seats, white, black, Hispanic or purple, just as Democrats ruthlessly Gerrymandered Republicans out of congressional seats when they had control of redistricting. (Remember, Texas never had as many as three Republicans serving in the U.S. House of Representatives at the same time until James M. Collins joined George H. W. Bush and Bob Price in 1969, despite Texas voters preferring Republican Presidential candidates in 1928, 1952, and 1956.) It’s just that the Voting Rights Act makes it so much easier to do it against white Democrats than minority Democrats.
As for the second, anyone who has been reading this blog for any appreciable length of time should realize that I have no particular fondness for Rep. Doggett. However, laying the lion’s share of the Democratic Party’s precipitous decline in Texas at the feet of Doggett’s unsuccessful Senate campaign is both misguided and deeply ahistorical.
First of all, it was a lot less obvious in 1984 that Doggett was too liberal to win (though he was) than the fact that nobody was going to beat Phil Gramm. After Democrats threw him off the House Budget Committee for supporting the Kemp-Roth tax cuts and co-sponsoring the Gramm-Latta budget reconciliation bill, Gramm resigned from his House seat and ran for it again as a Republican, winning overwhelmingly and turning himself into a folk hero for doing so. In the Republican primary he creamed Robert Mosbacher, Jr. and Ron Paul, and then thumped Doggett by 900,000 votes. Nobody was going to beat Gramm that year, even if Kent Hance had managed to defeat Doggett. And remember that after losing to Doggett in the Democratic Primary, Hance switched to the Republican Party the very next year. Even back then, it was apparent that conservatives had no future in the Democratic Party.
Further, fingering Doggett as the cause of the Texas Democratic Party’s decline ignores the pronounced decline in the fortunes of the Democratic Party in every state south of the Mason-Dixon line over the last 32 years, as the so-called “Reagan Democrats” have fled the party in droves in both the South and Midwest thanks to its unwavering drive for bigger government and higher taxes. That can be laid at Doggett’s feet only insofar as he was one of several hundred Democratic elites pushing their party relentlessly left, no matter the electoral cost.
And as for Burka’s starting that “How could [Doggett] have had so little self-awareness as to not know that he had was too liberal to win a statewide race?”, two points:
There are numerous reasons why the Texas Democratic Party has gone from the overwhelming majority party in Texas to a rump minority party, the biggest one being that their misguided policies of big government liberalism are objectively wrong, financially ruinous and extremely unpopular. But Doggett is only an outstanding exemplar of the problem, not the cause of it.
(PS: Also remember that in 1992, Burka was blaming the Texas Democratic Party’s decline on Bill Clinton’s unwillingness to seriously contest the state against Bush41.)
LinkSwarm for Thursday, April 14, 2011
Thursday, April 14th, 2011Texas to Gain Four House Seats in Redistricting
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010The census data has finally been released, and Texas will gain four seats in the U.S. House. (Here’s a map breaking down which districts have gained or lost population, and by how much.) Keep in mind that at least one or two of those seats will have to be “majority minority” Hispanic seats to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
The only other state to gain more than one House seat was Florida, which gained two. Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington state each gained one.
Ohio and New York will each lose two seats, while Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania will each lose one.
The total U.S. population is now 308,745,538, a 9.7% increase from 2000.
The states gaining seats are predominately Republican, while the states losing seats are predominately Democratic, a trend that’s been going on since at least the 1980s. This, along with newly Republican majorities in many of the statehouses that will control redistricting, is the reason some analysts believe that Republicans will control the House at least through 2012, and possibly beyond.
Analyst: Republicans Will Control House After 2012
Friday, December 3rd, 2010This is an interesting piece by Glen Bolger on why Republicans will enjoy a house majority for at least the next four years. There are several statistical reasons:
- Presidents who win re-election have small coattails, at best.
- Republicans picked up 9 House seats the year Bush 43 won reelection, but Democrats lost 35 seats when Carter got creamed by Reagan.
- State legislative gains have given Republicans extensive control over redistricting. In 1981, Republicans only controlled redistricting for 55 House seats, while Democrats controlled it for 225 seats. By contrast, next year Republicans will control redistricting for 193 House seats, while Democrats will only control it for 44 seats.
Read the whole thing (it’s short).
(Hat Tip: Jim Geraghty at NRO’s Campaign Spot.)
LinkSwarm for Saturday, November 20, 2010
Saturday, November 20th, 2010Time for another LinkSwarm, with a good dollop of Texas political news:
- Waiting for word on the Solomon Ortiz-Blake Farenthold recount? You’ll have to wait until Monday, since they stopped recounting for the weekend. Farenthold still leads by just under 800 votes.
- Things are getting a bit hairy down on the border.
- A look at congressional redistricting, with a good bit about Texas:
This state gains four districts. The Republicans used their mid-decade redistricting to create extremely Republican districts, forcing longtime Democratic incumbents out. They will probably relax these districts a bit now. With population trends, two districts will have to be in Houston, one in Dallas, and one in Austin; the growth is in heavily-Republican areas. The only real questions are how much they can shore up Blake Farenthold in the 80 percent Hispanic 28th, and whether they try to go after Democrat Lloyd Doggett in Austin, who had a surprisingly close 2010 race.
- On the other hand, the Washington Post notes that Republicans already dominate the Texas congressional delegation so extensively that gaining more than one or two additional seats will be very difficult to do.
- Not only are Democrats poised to lose Senate seats in 2012, but some of the seats they are most likely to lose are those of their least liberal Senators.
- The difference between how Ireland and Iceland handled their respective bank problems.