Emphasizing partisanship is a gift to racist Texas Republicans.
The vote to adopt the Trump-ordered redrawn congressional map by the Texas State House is a shameful act of cowardice and hostility to Texas voters. No Texan is served by the map, and millions are harmed by it. Greg Abbott and every other Texas Republican leader has lied to Texans from the outset about both the motivation for the map and its effect on Texas voters.
The Trump map is NOT simply a partisan gerrymander designed to give Republicans five more seats. The method used to achieve partisan advantage is to systematically and intentionally pack and crack minority neighborhoods to destroy their voting strength. Early on, Greg Abbott even admitted that they want to give Trump five more seats by eliminating multiracial majority districts because they don’t like the way those citizens vote.
The repeated citing of the Petteway v Galveston County and the Rucho v Common Cause federal court rulings to justify the map is blatant gaslighting by Texas Republicans to the media and the Texas public. Neither of the cases allows partisan gerrymandering when it is accomplished through intentional discrimination.
Texas Republican leaders have engaged in gross intentional racial discrimination with the cynical hope that litigation challenging the maps will drag on for years while illegitimate elections take place and/or the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately strips away the last remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act.
In each region of the state, Republicans attack minority voters:
- In North Texas, even though Dallas and Tarrant Counties are majority minority counties where the Anglo population has gone DOWN by over 90,000 voters, minority opportunity districts were reduced from three to only two. Two districts are tightly packed into Dallas County while Tarrant County, which has the third largest urban minority population in Texas, is left without any district where minority voters have a meaningful voice.
- In the Harris County region, the number of minority opportunity districts is reduced from four to only three. District 9 is converted from an African American opportunity district to a Republican district where Anglo voters will overwhelm Hispanic voters.
- In Austin and San Antonio, minority voters are packed into only two districts while Hispanic opportunity District 35 is converted to a district where Anglo Republicans will overwhelm Hispanic voters.
- On the Border and in West Texas, Hispanic neighborhoods are paired with high turnout suburban and rural based Anglo voters to dilute the voting strength of Hispanic citizens.
So far, the media has done much of the Republican’s work for them by characterizing the Texas map as a partisan power grab and then moving on to how California and other states will act to offset the Republican gain with their own redraws. These reports are incomplete at best and exactly the way Republicans want the Texas story told.
The first, most accurate, and most important point to make about the Texas map is that it achieves partisan gain by engaging in intentional racial discrimination. It is a hostile attack on Black, Hispanic, and other minority citizens. Any characterization of the map that does not make that point directly and prominently is a disservice.
