After Bitter Fight, Texas Senate Redraws Congressional Districts
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: October 13, 2003
USTIN, Tex., Oct. 12 — The end came fast — in three minutes to be precise.
After more than five months of bitter party squabbles and two quorum-busting flights into exile by Democratic lawmakers, the Republican-controlled Texas Senate gave final approval Sunday night, without debate, to new Congressional districts that put the Republicans in a far stronger position to dominate the Texas delegation in the 2004 elections and beyond.
The measure now goes to Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, who has said he will sign it. The Republicans, who now trail the Democrats 17 to 15 in Washington, are likely to gain seven seats by some accounts.
Savoring a victory that had seemed repeatedly within Republican grasp, only to be stymied by colorful opposition tactics, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who presides over the Senate, congratulated the Legislature for "historic advances in reorganizing government and aligning the state for the first time with the voters and their philosophies."
The Democrats, acknowledging defeat in the Legislature after months of guerrilla resistance, vowed to challenge the remapping in the courts, charging disenfranchisement of minority voters.
"The redistricting genie has been let out of its box," said Senator Royce West of Dallas, one of the 11 Democrats, later reduced to 10, who fled to New Mexico in July to stall Republican efforts to win a quorum for a redistricting vote. Now he warned, "Democratic governors will consider redistricting plans of their own." In May, the House Democrats absconded to Oklahoma.
"I move adoption of House Bill 3," said the sponsor, Senator Todd Staples, Republican of Palestine, at 6:45 p.m., after a 45-minute delay in the unusual Sunday vote that raised the prospect of yet another unexpected development. But the count proceeded quickly, and when it was over at 6:48 the tally stood at 17 for and 14 against. All 12 Democrats voted nay; two of the body's 19 Republicans joined them in opposition.
"House Bill 3 is finally passed," announced Mr. Dewhurst with a slightly audible sigh. The Republicans immediately went into a caucus to consider withdrawing the status of "probation" they had levied on 11 Democratic colleagues for fleeing to New Mexico this summer to stymie action on redistricting.
But when they emerged half an hour later, the sanction had not been lifted and the Senate adjourned its third special session.
The anticlimactic Senate vote on redistricting followed the House action on the measure by two days. On Sunday, the House also passed a bill on government reorganization, a price that the Republican leaders who run the Senate had demanded in return for their support of the redistricting plan. The last-minute maneuvering showed how much at odds Republican leaders of the two houses had been since the Democrats failed in their blocking efforts.
In the end, the Republican speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, Tom Craddick of Midland, got what he had most coveted — a new Congressional district for his home oil region. "I'm glad it's done — it's a real positive for the people of Texas," Mr. Craddick said in his office Sunday shortly after the House vote and before the Senate took up the measure across the rotunda.
He belittled complaints of partisan politics and said, "I think the map over all was good for across the state." As for whether it will withstand the required Justice Department review for fairness to minority voters and virtually certain court challenges, he said: "The lawyers tell us it will. They scrubbed it."
But one of the two Republicans who voted with the Democrats to oppose the remapping, Bill Ratliff of East Texas, said, "Virtually all my constituents are against it." They complained, Mr. Ratliff said, that it lumped their rural district with suburban Dallas and Fort Worth. He said he was not sure the plan would survive court challenges.
"A novice could look at it and see the extreme level of gerrymandering," he said.
Democrats were also sharply critical. Senator Eliot Shapleigh of El Paso — whose district was left unchanged because the population density of the city and emptiness of the countryside left no alternative — called the Republican remapping drive "unprecedented in American politics."
Mr. Shapleigh and other Democrats contend that after the Legislature failed to devise a satisfactory plan after the 2000 census, a plan imposed by the courts should have stood until after the next census in 2010.
Mr. Shapleigh said he did not regret bolting with his colleagues to New Mexico, where they could not be arrested under Texas law and forced to attend to their legislative duties. "At the very least we would have delayed any map until 2006 or later," he said.
Senator John Whitmire of Houston, who returned from Albuquerque in early September, undercutting his Democratic colleagues' ability to deny the Senate a quorum, said he too had no regrets. Beyond staying out of state indefinitely, the group lacked an exit strategy, Mr. Whitmire contended. Now, he said, the fight would move into the courts.
In lambasting the plan, the Democrats got some unwitting help in recent days with the leakage of a gloating message e-mailed to aides by a legislative counsel to United States Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Ennis. The counsel, Joby Fortson, called the redistricting plan "the most aggressive map I have ever seen."
On the Senate floor before the vote, Republican members huddled with colleagues, torn, some said later, between pressure to follow their party leaders who were for redistricting and constituents who were against it.
Senator Robert L. Duncan of Lubbock, though a Republican, had long resisted the remapping, which roped part of Lubbock into Midland's new district. But Mr. Duncan relented in recent days after some adjustments in the lines and lobbying in Austin by the United States House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Sugar Land, outside Houston.
"We did the best we could," said Mr. Duncan, taking issue with a colleague's characterization that Mr. Duncan had been "dropped in the grease" — abandoned by Republican leaders. "I'm not pleased with it completely," he said of the plan, calling the compromise "a tough political deal." |
