You might have read that on Monday the Supreme Court agreed to hear four law suits brought by various organizations regarding the mid-census redistricting that went on in Texas.
The story is that Tom Delay and his cronies engineered a redistricting of the Texas congressional districts in 2003. They relied on 2000 census data even though Texas' population had been increasing by about 1.5M people per year. They gerrymandered the districts in such a way that the Democrats ended up losing 5 congressional seats.
The controversy was fueled last week when the DOJ leaked a memo written by its bureaucrats unanimously condemning the attempted redistricting. Any time there is an attempted redistricting a team 4 lawyers and 2 statisticians - all DOJ bureaucrats - review the submission. In this case they all said that this was unconstitutional. This is the memo that has been leaked.
What the Republicans are doing is simply bad for democracy in addition to being dishonest.
2 comments:
Wow. That's wild. I've heard of re-districting and gerrymandering, but never really thought about until now. So they just re-arrange the boundaries so that the districts hold a higher proportion of demographic groups more likely to vote for them? How can they do that? Who decides?
They usually redistrict every 10 years after the Census results are available. The idea is to preserve a balance in the congressional districts and if the population has grown to add new congressional seats. It was a reasonable idea when it started 200 years ago but as our politicians have become more dishonest so has the redistricting process.
Now it is just a pitch battle to rig districts so that a republican or a democrat has a better chance to win. I believe that this is the first time that they have redistricted an area between censuses.
It is precisely because of this redistricting that so few Republicans risk losing their congressional seats even though the tide of sentiment is turning against them.
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