The Texas House — overcoming a weeks-long stalling effort by Democrats who fled the state to twart a vote — passed a congressional redistricting map that likely gives Republicans five more seats.
The Texas Tribune reports:
The Republican-led Texas House on Wednesday approved a new congressional map crafted to hand five additional U.S. House seats to the GOP over fierce opposition from Democrats, who cast the plan as a racially discriminatory attempt by President Donald Trump to stack the deck in next year’s midterm election.
The House adopted the map, 88 to 52, along party lines. A Senate panel advanced a similar map Sunday, and the full chamber was expected to send the new lines to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk later this week….
Democrats in the Texas House staged a two-week walkout over the plan in a bid to stall the map’s passage and rally a national response among blue states, where lawmakers could launch their own retaliatory redistricting efforts. The roughly two dozen Texas Democrats who returned to Austin on Monday said they were starting the next phase of their fight: putting the screws on their Republican colleagues and establishing a record that could be used in a legal challenge to the map….To create up to five Republican pickup opportunities, the map dismantles Democratic strongholds around Austin, Dallas and Houston and makes Democrat-held seats in South Texas redder — all without seriously jeopardizing any of the 25 districts Republicans already control. The proposed map also would push a handful of Democratic members of Congress into seats already represented by other Democrats, setting up possible primary battles between long-serving members of the Texas delegation and younger newcomers.
NY Gov. Kathy Hochul has called what Texas was doing a “Legal Insurrection” (even though there is no such thing as a legal insurrection):
Hochul is threatening retaliatory redistricting in New York, but the NY Constitution prohibits gerrymandering.
California Governor Gavin Newsom also is threatening to redistrict California, but he would need legislative approval (a certainty) plus a statewide referendum in a special election on November 4 (the polling currently looks bad for Democrats on this issue).
This also could kick off a nationwide redistricting war that Democrats would lose because Democrats previously have gerrymandered their states almost to the max.
The national gerrymandering battle map is favorable to red states if war breaks out:
Who’s up for a gerrymandering war?
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY