2003 Texas redistricting

Based on Wikipedia: 2003 Texas redistricting

The Great Texas Escape

In May 2003, fifty-two Democratic lawmakers fled Texas.

They didn't resign. They didn't protest on the statehouse steps. They physically left the state, crossing into Oklahoma to hide out in a Holiday Inn in Ardmore. Their mission was simple: if they weren't present, the Texas House of Representatives couldn't muster enough members to conduct business. No quorum, no vote. No vote, no redistricting plan that would reshape American politics for a decade.

The lawmakers called themselves the "Killer Ds." The press called them fugitives. Republicans called the state troopers. What everyone understood was that something extraordinary was happening—a last-ditch attempt to stop a political steamroller that would fundamentally alter the balance of power in the United States Congress.

Why Drawing Lines on Maps Matters

Every ten years, after the census counts how many people live where, states redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts. This process, called redistricting, sounds like dry administrative work. It is anything but.

The party that controls redistricting controls the game itself. By carefully drawing district lines, mapmakers can cluster opposition voters into a few districts (called "packing") or spread them thinly across many districts (called "cracking"). Either way, the result is the same: more seats for your side with fewer votes.

This practice is called gerrymandering, named after Elbridge Gerry, a Massachusetts governor whose 1812 redistricting plan created a district so contorted it resembled a salamander. A newspaper editor combined the names: Gerry-mander. The term stuck, and so did the practice.

But here's what made Texas different in 2003: the redistricting had already happened. A federal court had drawn new maps in 2001. Elections had been held. Representatives were serving. What Texas Republicans proposed was unprecedented—redrawing the lines again, mid-decade, purely because they now had the power to do so.

The Setup: How Republicans Gained Control

To understand the 2003 drama, you need to understand what happened in 2001.

After the 2000 census, Texas needed new district maps. But the state was divided: Republicans controlled the governorship under George W. Bush and later Rick Perry, plus the state Senate. Democrats held the state House of Representatives. Neither side could agree on maps, so the task fell to federal judges, as Texas law required.

The judges, wary of appearing partisan, essentially kept the existing districts from 1991 intact. This preserved the Democratic advantage: after the 2002 elections, Democrats held 17 of Texas's 32 congressional seats to Republicans' 15.

But here was the Republicans' argument: those numbers didn't reflect how Texans actually voted. In 2002, Republican congressional candidates collectively won 53.3 percent of the statewide vote to Democrats' 43.8 percent. Yet Democrats held 53 percent of the seats. The maps, Republicans claimed, were unfair.

Democrats had a different view. The maps were drawn by nonpartisan judges. The process had already happened. Revisiting it mid-decade—something essentially no state had ever done—would open a Pandora's box of perpetual redistricting, where every time power changed hands, maps would change too.

Tom DeLay's Vision

The driving force behind the Texas redistricting wasn't a Texan state legislator. It was Tom DeLay, the US House Majority Leader from Sugar Land, Texas, who served the 22nd Congressional District in the Houston suburbs.

DeLay was known in Washington as "The Hammer" for his ability to enforce party discipline. He had risen to power by mastering the mechanics of political organization—fundraising, vote-counting, arm-twisting. Now he turned those skills toward his home state.

In 2001, DeLay had created Texans for a Republican Majority, a political action committee designed to funnel money to Republican state legislative candidates. The goal was specific: win control of the Texas House of Representatives, then use that control to redraw congressional districts. If successful, Republicans could pick up five, six, maybe seven additional congressional seats—shifting the balance of power in Washington itself.

The plan worked. In 2002, Republicans won a majority in the Texas House for the first time in 130 years. They now controlled all levers of state government. The redistricting could begin.

According to The New Yorker, Texas Senator John Cornyn later explained DeLay's motivation simply: "Everybody who knows Tom knows that he's a fighter and a competitor, and he saw an opportunity to help the Republicans stay in power in Washington."

The First Walkout

When the redistricting bill came up in May 2003, Democrats faced a math problem. They didn't have the votes to stop it. In the Texas House, Republicans held the majority. The bill would pass.

Unless there was no vote at all.

The Texas Constitution requires two-thirds of House members to be present for the chamber to conduct business. This quorum requirement exists to prevent a small faction from ramming through legislation when opponents happen to be absent. Democrats realized they could flip this protection into a weapon: if enough of them left, there wouldn't be enough members present to vote on anything.

Fifty-two Democrats—more than one-third of the House—left Austin and headed for Oklahoma. They chose Oklahoma deliberately: Texas state troopers had no authority there. Governor Perry couldn't send anyone to drag them back.

The "Killer Ds" holed up in a Holiday Inn, giving interviews, playing cards, and waiting. Back in Austin, furious Republicans ordered the absent members arrested. The Texas Department of Public Safety contacted the Federal Aviation Administration, Homeland Security, and even federal air marshals to help track down the missing legislators. It was a political crisis playing out as a kind of absurdist farce.

After four days, time ran out. Under legislative rules, the redistricting bill could only be considered during the regular session, and that session was ending. The Killer Ds returned home, victorious. The bill was dead.

Or so they thought.

The Special Sessions

Governor Rick Perry had other ideas. Under the Texas Constitution, the governor can call special legislative sessions at any time, for any purpose. Perry called one specifically to pass redistricting.

This time, the fight moved to the state Senate. Texas Senate rules traditionally required two-thirds support to bring a bill to the floor for debate. Democrats held more than one-third of Senate seats. They could use this rule to block the bill even without a walkout.

And they did. The redistricting bill stalled in the first special session.

Half an hour after ending that session, Perry called another one. But this time, Republicans had maneuvered around the two-thirds rule through procedural changes. Democrats faced the same problem House members had faced in May: they didn't have the votes, and the rules wouldn't save them.

So eleven of twelve Democratic state senators left Texas.

This time they went farther—to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The "Texas Eleven," as they became known, set up shop and prepared for a long siege. They stayed for a month, giving press conferences from exile, becoming minor celebrities and objects of national fascination.

The standoff ended when one senator, John Whitmire of Houston, broke ranks and returned to Texas. His departure meant the remaining Democrats could no longer prevent a quorum. The game was over.

In a third special session, the redistricting plan passed. Governor Perry signed it into law.

The Map's Design

The new district map was a masterpiece of surgical precision. It targeted ten districts held by white Democratic incumbents while carefully avoiding the seven districts held by minority Democrats. This wasn't coincidental—attacking minority-held districts would invite challenges under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal legislation that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.

The plan worked through a combination of packing and cracking. Some Democratic incumbents found their districts redrawn to include heavily Republican territory. Others found themselves "double-bunked"—placed in the same district as another Democratic incumbent, forcing them to run against each other.

Consider what happened to Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Austin. His district, the 10th, was eliminated entirely. In its place, mapmakers created the 25th district—a bizarre strip running from Austin south to the Mexican border, snaking along to gather Hispanic communities. Critics called it the "fajita strip." Doggett, a white liberal, would now have to win a primary against opponents with deeper roots in these communities.

Or consider Charlie Stenholm of Abilene. His 17th district was merged into the 19th district, which was already represented by a Republican incumbent. Stenholm would have to challenge that incumbent on Republican-friendly turf. He ran and lost.

Martin Frost of Dallas saw his district simply disappear, carved up among several new districts designed to elect Republicans. He tried running in a neighboring district but lost to the Republican incumbent.

One by one, the targets fell.

The Results

The 2004 elections validated DeLay's strategy completely. Texas Republicans won 21 congressional seats to Democrats' 11. This wasn't just a shift; it was a transformation. Before redistricting, Democrats held a 17-15 edge. After, Republicans held a 21-11 advantage.

The numbers tell an interesting story about the gap between votes and seats. In the 2004 presidential race, Texas voted for George W. Bush over John Kerry by about 61 to 38 percent—a comfortable but not overwhelming Republican margin. In congressional races, Republican candidates collectively won about 56 percent of votes cast to Democrats' 40 percent.

Yet Republicans won 66 percent of the seats.

This is the essence of gerrymandering: translating a moderate advantage in votes into a commanding advantage in representation. Democrats didn't stop existing in Texas. They just stopped being able to win most districts.

The Legal Challenge

Opponents sued, arguing the redistricting was unconstitutional on multiple grounds. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court as League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, decided in June 2006.

The core question was whether mid-decade redistricting, undertaken purely for partisan advantage, violated the Constitution. The challengers argued it did—that using redistricting as a weapon to entrench one party's power undermined democratic principles.

The Supreme Court disagreed. In a fractured ruling, the justices held that states are free to redistrict whenever they want. There is no constitutional requirement that redistricting happen only after a census. The partisan motivation, however blatant, wasn't enough to invalidate the plan.

But the Court did find one problem. Texas's 23rd district, held by Henry Bonilla, a Hispanic Republican, had been redrawn in a way that violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The district had originally been majority-Hispanic, and Bonilla had faced an increasingly strong challenge from Hispanic Democratic voters. To protect him, mapmakers had shifted 100,000 Hispanic residents out of the district, replacing them with Republican-leaning Anglo voters from elsewhere.

This, the Court ruled, was racial gerrymandering—using race as the predominant factor in drawing district lines. The 23rd district had to be redrawn.

The Ironic Aftermath

The remedy for the 23rd district created a delicious irony.

Federal judges ordered a new map for the 23rd and four surrounding districts. A special election was held in November 2006. In the redrawn 23rd district, Henry Bonilla—the very incumbent the original gerrymandering was designed to protect—faced a "jungle primary" in which all candidates from all parties competed together.

Bonilla came in first but didn't win a majority. He faced a December runoff against Ciro Rodriguez, a Democratic former congressman who had been squeezed out by the original redistricting. Rodriguez had lost his seat when mapmakers put him in the same district as another Democrat.

In the runoff, Rodriguez won.

The elaborate scheme to protect Bonilla had, in the end, cost him his seat.

The Justice Department Controversy

A footnote to the story emerged in December 2005, when The Washington Post obtained an internal Justice Department memo. Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Texas had been required to get federal approval—called "preclearance"—before implementing any changes to voting procedures. The Justice Department had approved the 2003 redistricting.

But the memo revealed that career lawyers in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division had concluded the plan violated the Voting Rights Act. Six attorneys had signed a document stating that "the redistricting plan illegally diluted black and Hispanic voting power" and that Texas had "not met its burden" of proving the plan wasn't discriminatory.

They also found that Republican lawmakers had been "aware it posed a high risk of being ruled discriminatory compared with other options" but proceeded anyway "because it would maximize the number of Republican federal lawmakers."

Senior political appointees overruled the career staff and approved the plan anyway.

The Larger Meaning

The Texas redistricting of 2003 matters beyond Texas because it demonstrated what was possible. A sufficiently determined party, controlling state government, could redraw congressional districts at will, targeting specific incumbents for elimination. The only constraint was the Voting Rights Act's prohibition on racial discrimination—and even that could be worked around with careful map-drawing.

The Supreme Court's ruling that partisan gerrymandering is essentially unreviewable removed the final theoretical barrier. States could gerrymander as aggressively as they wanted, as often as they wanted, for purely partisan purposes. The only consequences would be political, not legal.

Tom DeLay didn't survive to enjoy his victory. In 2005, he was indicted on charges of conspiracy and money laundering related to his campaign finance activities, including the political action committee that had helped Republicans win the Texas House in 2002. He resigned from Congress in 2006. Though his conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, his political career was over.

But the redistricting plan lived on. For a decade, Texas's congressional delegation remained heavily Republican, regardless of how individual elections swung nationally. The lines DeLay drew held.

The Democrats who fled to Oklahoma and New Mexico failed to stop the plan. But they succeeded in making visible what redistricting usually hides. Normally, map-drawing happens in back rooms, noticed only by political professionals. The walkouts turned an obscure procedural fight into national drama, forcing Americans to confront an uncomfortable truth: in a democracy, sometimes the most important elections are the ones where voters don't choose their representatives.

Sometimes, representatives choose their voters.