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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (2850)	6/29/2003 10:15:49 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793843

And a nice criticism of power hungry Tom DeLay. The Lone Star Power Grab nytimes.com The unslakable thirst of the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, for partisan dominance is of Faulknerian proportions: he keeps coming at the Democrats with a gunslinger's bead that summons images of his early career as a pest exterminator as much as his Capitol nickname of the Hammer. In his tooth-and-claw resolve, the Texas Legislature has been summoned into special session tomorrow by Gov. Rick Perry, a DeLay ally, to once more take up Mr. DeLay's hubristic plan to remap Texas' Democratic Congressional majority out of existence. The brazenness of the initiative — overreaching from Washington to manipulate the state's right to draw Congressional lines — was underlined last month when Democratic legislators literally fled Texas. They denied their opponents a quorum and foiled approval of the customized gerrymandering Mr. DeLay wanted from the G.O.P.-led Legislature. He sent his operatives to work the back rooms in Austin and visited the Statehouse himself in seeking to shape the place to his will. A new sort of political bossism was upon the land. In persisting, Mr. DeLay obviously feels entitled. He is one of the nation's most assiduous fund-raisers, regularly squeezing Washington's K Street lobbyists for campaign tribute. The majority leader helped funnel $1.5 million into the Texas campaign coffers last year when the Republicans swept the Statehouse for the first time in over a century. The party did not have as much success with the Texas Congressional delegation, however, and Mr. DeLay remains determined to try to defeat a half-dozen Democrats by squeezing them into new districts — some of them shaped like a Salvador Dalí nightmare — that include more Republican voters. "I'm the majority leader, and we want more seats," he declares with intimations of l'état c'est Tom. The Texas districts were remapped by court order after the 2000 census, and the national tradition of once-a-decade redistricting is being violated by Mr. DeLay's stratagem. He is gerrymandering out of season and mischievously opening a new arena for D.C. power brokering. He has the blessing of Karl Rove, President Bush's political guru, who lately sounds like Karl von Clausewitz in envisioning fresh ramparts for G.O.P. hegemony. Texas legislators should stay in Austin this time and directly rebuff the majority leader who would be king.