Once again, Texas is at the center of fugitive legislature drama. For the last quarter century, Democrats of the state have been treated badly by political fortune. They’ve descended deep into the minority of the state houses and have utterly failed to take a major hide such as Ted Cruz, even when it seemed everything was going their way and enormous sums had been raised. And now, they face further insult as their Republican opponents have taken the opportunity of a major court decision to attempt to redraw the congressional districts so as to gain additional seats and perhaps protect the slim D.C. majority by so doing.
Having zero ability to change out a terrible political hand and to find some way to draw an ace, the Texas’s legislative Democrats have resorted to the most desperate of stratagems. Several of them have fled the state, thereby depriving the Republican majority of a quorum of members present to do business. The name for the maneuver is quorum busting. It’s been done before in Texas and elsewhere, but it typically results in delay rather than denial of the majority’s will. Although big donors are funding fugitive Democrats and promise to pay the fines they incur, it is likely that eventually enough Democrats will drift back into their state having made their point, but not winning the war.
The Republicans may well manage to redraw the lines and to improve their party’s chance of holding Congress in the 2026 elections. In the United States, one of the few civic lessons that seems to stick in the minds of students is that the aggressive and opportunistic methods legislators use to draw advantageous districts is not fair and should probably be reformed out of our political lives. But the other lesson is that it remains a common practice in red states and blue ones. The state of Massachusetts, despite having had Republican governors and having elected a Republican senator in recent memory, does not have a single Republican congressional district.
At the same time redistricting has become an issue in Texas, there is additional conflict over a federal court ruling in favor of the state’s efforts to strengthen voter identification requirements and to tighten up the conditions under which voters can use mail ballots. While an effort to redraw lines in the middle of a decade before the census can be taken may raise eyebrows, there is likely to be substantial support for the state’s attempt to shore up confidence in voting procedures.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine )
Hunter (J.D., Ph.D.) is the provost and dean of faculty at North Greenville University in South Carolina. He is the author of The End of Secularism, Political Thought: A Student’s Guide and The System Has a Soul. His work has appeared in a wide variety of other books and journals. He is formally affiliated with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Touchstone, the Journal of Markets and Morality; the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy; and the Land Center at Southwestern Seminary.