Folks,
Here is a great article on redistricting from the Washington Post.
It was posted to the YDA-Discuss list at Yahoo!Groups (Young Democrats of America) by Keny Michael Apodaca, Executive Vice President of the Texas Young Democrats.
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Justice Dept. Clears Texas Redistricting
Democrats' Lawsuit Is Still Pending
By Edward Walsh
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 20, 2003; Page A04
The Justice Department announced last night that a controversial congressional redistricting plan enacted by the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature does not violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and can be used in next year's congressional elections.
The decision cleared a major hurdle for the plan, under which Republicans could pick up as many as seven House seats next year. But the plan could still be overturned depending on the outcome of a legal challenge to it in federal court by Texas Democrats.
In a letter to Texas Secretary of State Geoffrey S. Connor (R) that was made public last night, Sheldon T. Bradshaw, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the department's Civil Rights Division, said Attorney General John D. Ashcroft "does not interpose any objection to the specified changes" in the state's congressional district lines that were enacted in October. Under the Voting Rights Act, any changes to congressional districts in several states, most of them in the South, must be approved by the Justice Department before they can take effect.
Texas Democrats, who had predicted that the Bush administration would approve the plan, said it would disenfranchise as many as 3.6 million black and Hispanic voters in the state.
"Until today, no Justice Department had ever approved a plan eliminating a majority-minority congressional district," Rep. Martin Frost (D-Tex.) said in a statement. "But the Bush Justice Department has made itself infamous by approving a plan to eliminate two majority-minority districts."
Frost added that the Texas plan "is the single greatest setback for minority voting rights in the 38-year history of the Voting Rights Act. It would have been laughed out of any other Justice Department -- Republican or Democratic."
Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the Justice Department approval "shows that the map is legal and fair, and will be upheld. We look forward to contesting next year's elections under the new map."
The GOP redistricting plan was the source of high political drama in Texas during much of the year. Democratic state lawmakers twice fled the capital of Austin to deprive the legislature of a quorum, blocking passage of the measure. Republican Gov. Rick Perry called three special sessions of the legislature before the plan was finally approved.
States are required to redraw their congressional and legislative district lines every 10 years following the census. In 2001, Texas Democrats and Republicans could not agree on a plan, throwing the issue into federal court, where a three-judge panel crafted the existing congressional districts that were used in the 2002 elections.
Democrats emerged from the 2002 elections with a 17-to-15 advantage in the state's delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives. But the same year Republicans took complete control of the state legislature, allowing them to enact new district lines that favor the GOP.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was the driving force behind the new redistricting plan that, if not overturned in court, would virtually ensure Republicans continued control of the U.S. House through at least this decade.
In their lawsuit, Texas Democrats maintain that it is unconstitutional to redraw congressional district lines more than once in a decade. The Colorado Supreme Court recently overturned a GOP-inspired redistricting plan in that state on those grounds, but its decision was based on the Colorado constitution. The Texas constitution does not explicitly prohibit redistricting more than once in a decade.
Several folks have noted that no one has filed for Precinct 1 Commissioner against Democrat-Turned-Republican Ricky LaPrade.
Rest assured, though, there is interest in the race, and there could be as many as three who file for the post!
Folks,
This was posted to TexasDemocrats. It is an interesting article that deals with Dean, but I liked it because it underscores my post from the other day about not being discouraged because much of the media declares the capture of Saddam Hussein to be the thing that will re-elect Bush.
John Nichols: Dean's right: Getting Saddam no panacea
By John Nichols
December 18, 2003
Howard Dean showed a good measure of insight with regard to international affairs and security issues - and an even greater measure of political courage - when the man who is often portrayed as the front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination declared amid all the hoopla about the detention of Iraq's former dictator that "the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer."
If the debate about the U.S. invasion of Iraq were being conducted along lines of fact or logic, of course, Dean's comment would be a simple statement of reality. Even before the U.S. attack on Iraq, there was no evidence that Saddam posed any immediate threat to the United States. Years of United Nations inspections, strict sanctions and bombings had rendered him a toothless tiger. And his militant secularism meant that it was comic to suggest Saddam had linked up with the religious extremists who lead the al-Qaida terrorist network.
That is why America's allies around the world, experts on the Middle East and U.N. officials - including weapon inspectors - counseled that an invasion of Iraq was unnecessary. But George W. Bush was bent on making war, so the invasion went ahead and quickly forced Saddam from power in a fight so lopsided that it proved Saddam was even less of a threat than serious observers of the region had imagined.
Now, months after he was deposed, Saddam has been found lying face down in a hole in the ground. It is possible - although far from certain - that his capture will make it somewhat easier for U.S. forces to operate on the ground in Iraq. But it is impossible - and ridiculous - to suggest that ordinary American citizens are any safer today than they were last week when Saddam was still in hiding.
That was the point that Dean was making in his foreign policy address to the Pacific Council in Los Angeles on Monday. And Dean made it in a reasoned manner that saw him addressing points that were very much in the mainstream of the discourse about the Iraq imbroglio.
"The difficulties and tragedies which we have faced in Iraq show the administration launched the war in the wrong way, at the wrong time, with inadequate planning, insufficient help, and at extraordinary cost, so far $166 billion," Dean said. "The capture of Saddam Hussein does not end our difficulties from the aftermath of the administration's war to oust him."
Predictably, however, Dean was attacked by the Democratic candidates who have not been able to match his appeal to the party's grass-roots activists. The silliest of the attacks came from the lamentable Joe Lieberman, who is, if anything, a bigger defender of the Bush administration's military adventurism abroad than the president himself.
"If (Dean) truly believes the capture of this evil man has not made America safer, then Howard Dean has put himself in his own spider hole of denial," the Connecticut senator grumbled. "I fear that the American people will wonder if they will be safer with him as president."
John Kerry took a similar shot at Dean, and a shadowy group run by former allies and aides to Kerry and Dick Gephardt began running commercials in the early primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina declaring that "Howard Dean just cannot compete with George Bush on foreign policy."
Actually, Dean's speech on Monday suggests that he is more than ready to compete with Bush. He has drawn the clear distinctions that Lieberman, Gephardt and Kerry - all backers of the invasion of Iraq - have failed to make. Dean says he wants to give the American people a real choice next November. Contrasting Bush's policies with his own views, Dean says that the choice should be "between a national security policy hobbled by fear and a policy strengthened by shared hopes, ... between today's new radical unilateralism and a renewal of respect for the best bipartisan traditions of American foreign policy, ... between brash boastfulness and a considered confidence that speaks to the convictions of people everywhere."
It is predictable that supporters of the Bush administration would attack Dean for drawing those distinctions and suggesting that they ought to be central to the debate in the fall of 2004.
It is shameful that other candidates who want to carry the Democratic brief into that debate would attack Dean for speaking the truth about what is going on in Iraq. Lieberman, in particular, has proven that he is not prepared to mount a credible or realistic challenge to the president. Indeed, his comments suggest that a Lieberman presidency would not depart in any serious manner from the foreign policy agenda of the Bush administration.
To his credit, Howard Dean wants to make that departure. That is why so many more Americans are excited by his candidacy than by Lieberman's.
Published: 6:13 AM 12/18/03
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Here is an article entitled "A Giant Void," from Texas Monthly. Although it is about Republican Bill Ratliff, I thought Democrats on this blog would find it interesting because of the commentary on the new partisan rancor in Austin.
This was posted to the Yahoo! Texas Democrats 2 mailing list, and I have copied the entire post of the article here.
A Giant Void
It's a sad day when Bill Ratliff, the best legislator of his time, decides there's no place for him in the poisonous partisan world of Texas politics.
by Paul Burka
"BUILT FOR GIANTS BUT INHABITED BY PYGMIES." Such was the description of the Capitol invoked in days of yore by a Houston legislator and lobbyist (and later a congressman) named Bob Eckhardt, who all too frequently found himself engaged on the losing side. I thought of that remark on the November afternoon when around two hundred people gathered in the Senate chamber to hear Republican state senator Bill Ratliff, of Mount Pleasant, announce his resignation, effective January 10. A giant is departing, and the Senate he leaves behind looks all too pygmyish.
Anyone who has read this magazine's biennial compilation of the Best and the Worst Legislators is familiar with Ratliff's accomplishments. In his fifteen-year career, he made the Best list a record-tying six times (with Dallas legislator Steve Wolens). He did everything a senator could do: passed landmark legislation that brought equity to school finance, accountability to public education, and reasonableness to tort reform; chaired the Senate's three most important committees (Finance, State Affairs, Education); and served a session as lieutenant governor, elevated by his Senate peers to fill the vacancy left when Rick Perry became governor in 2001 following George W. Bush's ascension to the presidency. But even this unparalleled list of achievements falls short of explaining why Ratliff was the best senator of his generation. He was the conscience of, and the role model for, the Senate-an exemplar of the idea that the public interest knows neither party nor ideology. So infallible was his character that his colleagues famously referred to him as Obi-Wan Kenobi, after the Star Wars Jedi knight who was a fair, wise, and just guardian of the galaxy.
And yet there is more to say about the resignation of Bill Ratliff than valedictories. He did not want to leave the Senate. Rather, the Senate left him. In the fractious climate brought on by redistricting, it no longer wanted a conscience, or his kind of role model, or even to listen to what he had to say. Rumors began to fly as early as last summer that Ratliff would not serve out his term, and they had the ring of truth. He knew his time had come. It was no coincidence that he began his resignation speech with a reference to Ecclesiastes: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven." If there was many a wet eye in the audience, the tears were as much for the passing of bipartisanship and goodwill in Texas politics as for the man who'd practiced them.
The erosion of Ratliff's influence began with the end of the 2001 legislative session. He would serve as lieutenant governor until January 2003, but he had to decide whether to seek election to a full four-year term. He wanted to run, but the powers that be in the Republican party, including Governor Perry, didn't want him on the ticket. They worried that he couldn't beat Democrat John Sharp and that he was too independent to do their bidding. They may have been wrong about Sharp, but they were certainly right about his independence: Ratliff liked to describe himself as "51 percent Republican," and they wanted 100 percent. Rather than make the kind of promises that are necessary to win Republican primaries and statewide elections, he decided against the race.
Instead of ending his career on a high note, however, Ratliff opted to run for reelection to his Senate seat in 2002, which he did not have to give up upon becoming lieutenant governor. In retrospect, this was a mistake-not for Texas, not for the Senate, but for himself. You can't go backward and end up where you once were. The Senate he returned to was different from the one he had presided over: more Republican, more partisan, less experienced, less able. David Dewhurst, the new lieutenant governor, named Ratliff chairman of State Affairs, giving him jurisdiction over tort reform, a highly divisive issue, and for a time it was like the old days: Ratliff in effect wrote the legislation by himself, producing a bill that was widely praised, in contrast to the House version. But when he tried to raise the House's grinchy $250,000 ceiling on noneconomic damages for patients suing for medical malpractice-the most controversial facet of the bill-the compromise he had forged with the doctors was sabotaged by the governor's office and other health care lobbyists. He was able to lift the ceiling a little, but in the end he was not able to achieve the fairness he had sought.
Still, Ratliff's reputation emerged from the regular session largely intact. He had proven once again that he could handle complex legislation better than anyone at the Capitol. His relationship with Dewhurst, tenuous at first, had improved to the point that on the last day of the session, Ratliff offered a toast at Dewhurst's lunch for the committee chairs, praising the lieutenant governor for his handling of the Senate. But the good feeling was not destined to survive the summer.
The break came over congressional redistricting, the most poisonous and partisan of issues. Dewhurst originally wanted to avoid it altogether, knowing that it could blow up the Senate (which it did), but once Perry called the Legislature into special session, he felt that he had no choice but to pass it; in his view, his own political future was on the line. And to pass the bill, he needed every Republican vote, including Ratliff's, to reach the two-thirds majority necessary to suspend the Senate rules so that the new redistricting plan could be brought up for a vote. Dewhurst feels that Ratliff made a commitment and betrayed him, and Ratliff is certain that he did neither. By now, their misunderstanding is familiar ground to anyone who follows Texas politics. Ratliff joined ten Democrats in vowing to block the redistricting bill from coming to the floor. But Dewhurst held the trump card; he maneuvered around the two-thirds rule, outlasted a Democratic exodus to New Mexico, and eventually passed the bill. It remains to be seen whether his victory was worth the price in hard feelings and the damage to his own reputation for fairness.
It is clear now that the confrontation between Dewhurst and Ratliff was a titanic clash between the former lieutenant governor and the present one, not just over redistricting but over how the Senate should operate-and who would decide. Its role in the legislative process has been to temper the majoritarian passions and excesses of the House with the two-thirds rule, which ensures that the minority's concerns will be addressed. Ratliff's challenge was about preserving the Senate as a body that works by consensus, not partisanship. Dewhurst was willing to change the rules for redistricting; Ratliff was not. As he had done so many times before, he tried to save the Senate from a meltdown, but this time the Senate did not want to be saved. His influence in the Republican caucus plummeted as soon as he sided with the Democrats. As the battle over redistricting reached its climax, he argued against imposing sanctions on the absent Democrats, but, he told me, "It was like speaking into a hollow tube."
The immediate effect of Ratliff's departure is that his expertise will be absent during the all-important issue of school finance, which is scheduled to be addressed in a special session this spring. His training as an engineer allowed him to understand how the individual provisions of legislation fit into the whole; he knew what kept the structure standing and what could make it fall. Nowhere is this understanding more essential than in school finance, where a tweak of a formula can bring chaos to school district budgeting and upset equity between rich and poor districts. A couple of days after Ratliff's announcement, one of his former staffers sent me an e-mail recalling how Ratliff had rewritten the entire body of law for public education: "I had the great privilege of working [with him] on both education and tort reform. He is the finest public servant I have ever known. Fair, ethical, logical, hardworking. For example: In 1993 I gave him the Education Code on computer disk. A few months later, he plopped a foot-high stack of paper"-the code, rewritten-"on my desk. 'I've been doing some work,' he said, in his typical, understated way." Eventually, Ratliff's draft would become the foundation for the new education code, which is still in force.
Above all, Ratliff will be missed as a role model. It is not only the two-thirds rule that distinguishes the Senate from the House; it is the capacity of the Senate to produce leaders who rise above the gritty side of politics-raising money, running for reelection, settling scores, currying favor, feathering nests, ingratiating oneself with the rich and powerful; in other words, acting like House members on the make-to ask themselves the question "Why am I here?" and then come up with an answer that is something other than "For me" or "For my party." The list of senators who have achieved this status over the years is short and largely unknown outside the Capitol-Aikin, Gonzalez, Schwartz, Jordan, Sherman, Farabee, Caperton, Montford, Sibley, Ratliff. For the first time that I can remember, there is no one to take up the mantle. The Democrats are too small in number to produce such a leader, and the Republicans are too beholden to the financial and ideological base of their party. It is significant that my e-mail correspondent, a Republican, failed to include "independence," Ratliff's most outstanding quality, among his virtues. New to power, Republicans outside the Capitol want to dictate to those inside, and those inside, from Rick Perry to lowly freshmen, seem all too eager to be dictated to.
The Senate membership is not short of talent. It is short of independence, short of vision, short of principled leadership, short of role models, and, without Bill Ratliff, bereft of giants. We know what that leaves.
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