Is Texas Re-Districting Anti-Semitic?

24 December 2003

According to an article in the Washington Times, Texas Democrats are taking their “last stand” against the long-awaited and hard fought redistricting bill that, if it is approved, will in all likelihood lead to the involuntary retirement of some senior Democratic representatives.

Redistricting is almost always a partisan mess. It has always been so, and unless the courts suddenly discover a constitutional right that bars “taking party into account” it will always remain so. But, perhaps because most things in Texas are bigger, the Texas redistricting mess (including the frequently fleeing Democrats high-tailing it out of state) is bigger as well.

I believe there are reasonable arguments that mid-decade redistricting — even when, as in Texas, it would be the first redistricting by the legislature — is bad policy, just as I believe that pressing partisan advantage to extreme limits is not good; the long-term rancor that it generates may well undermine the short-run gains. Those, however, are not arguments that it is barred by constitution or statute.

The absence of any strong argument that mid-decade partisan redistricting is per se illegal, in fact, has led the Texas Democrats to trot out their tried and true (well,maybe not true) one-argument-fits-all-cases argument that making the Texas congressional delegation more closely resemble the partisan voting pattern of Texas would be “unfair to minorities.”

Listen to Rep. Martin Frost, a leader of the “livid” Democrats:

Mr. Frost, whose district has been carved to pieces, was equally livid last week. He is the senior member of the Texas congressional delegation.

“President Bush should hope the courts rescue him from going down in history as the president whose Justice Department gutted the Voting Rights Act,” Mr. Frost said.

Rep. Frost is an honorable and intelligent man, but for him to claim that the survival of the Voting Rights Act requires his having a safe district seems a bit much.

Frost is Jewish. Maybe he and the Democrats will argue next that redistricting is anti-Semitic.

[The following added 12/25/03 10:45AM]

There are over 100,000 Jews in Texas, after all, and Frost may well be the only Jewish representative. (Look at them here; no immediately probable Jewish names leap off the list.) On the other hand, if Frost is not the only Jew, then Jews are vastly overrepresented in the Texas congressional delegation, and something should no doubt be done about it.

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Say What? (2)

  1. CGHill December 25, 2003 at 7:03 pm | | Reply

    Ruben Navarrette, at the group blog at The Dallas Morning News, said this (18 December, 4:59 pm):

    “On redistricting, few members of Congress acted more shamefully than did Democrat Martin Frost, whose entire strategy was to get just enough minorities in his district so he could [be] re-elected but not so many that some minority lawmaker might dare run against him.”

    I would suggest that people with a hidden agenda are vastly overrepresented in the Texas Congressional delegation. :)

  2. John Rosenberg December 25, 2003 at 8:29 pm | | Reply

    Hmm. Maybe I’ll have to reconsider that comment about Frost being “honorable and intelligent.” But he was doing no more than mouthing the new party line.

    If I might quote a deservedly unknown non-authority on the subject of redistricting and “majority-minority” districts, me, here’s what I said first here:

    The necessity for “majority-minority” districts was based on the assumption of “bloc voting,” that whites wouldn’t vote for blacks, but it did not take long for that assumption to be proven false. Once it became clear that super-majorities of blacks were not necessary to elect at least a significant number of blacks, the Democrats slowly emerged from the woodwork and began to argue (remember, they’ve never been addicted to consistency) that herding too many of blacks into “majority-minority” districts was racist, smacking of apartheid. At the same time, however, they argued that placing too few blacks in a district was also racist. To the Democrats, “too many” means more than enough to assure the election of a Democrat, and “too few” means not enough. By some cosmic co-incidence, the Democrats implicitly argue, that precise balance is what the law requires. This behavior thus has earned the Democrats the much-deserved Discriminations Award for Brazenness.

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