In effect, incumbents choose their own voters.
Gene Green. It resembles a partially eaten doughnut, forming an undulating shape from north to east to south.
Like virtually all 36 congressional districts in Texas — Republican Will Hurd’s West Texas district being the only exception — neither Poe nor Green’s district is particularly competitive in general elections.
The political art of drawing boundaries to protect incumbents is called gerrymandering — a word derived from salamanders, lizard-like creatures known for their slender bodies and short limbs. The whole idea behind the practice is to carve up the political map for partisan advantage.
It happens everywhere and has been the subject of legal challenges for years.
And now the U.S. Supreme Court has signaled it may take a fresh look in a Wisconsin redistricting case that has the potential to fundamentally alter the political landscape from Texas to Washington, D.C.
In Austin, where a generation of Republican dominance has helped give the party a 25-11 advantage over Democrats in the state’s U.S. House delegation, the implications could be profound — however distant in the future.
In the past week since the high court announced that it will consider the constitutionality of overtly partisan gerrymandering, Texas Democrats have cheered the review, hoping the Wisconsin case might set a precedent that evens the playing field in the state.
“Clearly the Texas congressional map, and the state House map and state Senate map, are partisanly gerrymandered, and they are way out of balance with the political performance of the state,” said Matt Angle, head of the Lone Star Project, which seeks to make Democratic gains in Texas. ‘Packing’ and ‘cracking’
Some Republicans downplay the significance of the Wisconsin case, saying that they believe Texas’ political boundaries are already fair and, most importantly, legal.
“Unless the court does some serious overreach, we shouldn’t be facing needing to redraw those lines at all,” said James Dickey, the newly elected chairman of the Texas Republican Party.
The problem for Texas Republicans is that the state’s congressional district boundaries already are under legal challenge over alleged racial discrimination for the way minorities were packed into a limited number of urban districts.
Some of the boundaries drawn in 2011 already have been ruled intentionally discriminatory, and a federal court is set to hear a challenge next month on a new map drawn in 2013.
Unlike the Texas challenge, which focuses in the racial makeup of political districts, the legal fight in Wisconsin is over the partisan makeup of the state’s boundaries, which also favor Republicans.
But the two criteria are closely related.
“If you correct for the racial discrimination in Texas, you go a long way toward balancing the partisan makeup of these districts,” Angle said.
Others predict that the high court will have a hard time finding a coherent legal standard for deciding whether a state’s mapdrawing process — most are created by state lawmakers — shows undue partisanship.
“It is inherently a political process,” said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, who chaired Texas’ legislative redistricting board in 2000. “Which is not to say it’s a bad process. It’s just hard to know what alternative might be available.”
Nobody knows how the Supreme Court might rule. The
court recently threw out North Carolina’s GOP-drawn congressional map on racial grounds. But challenges based on party affiliation alone could be a different matter.
A pending challenge in Maryland — the only case in which Democrats drew the map — could be telling. Until now, redistricting cases based purely on politics have produced a kaleidoscope of opinions from different justices.
Some reformers advocate for handing the redistricting process — normally done once each decade after the national census — to independent boards or commissions. But legislative veterans say it’s hard to keep the politics out.
“They end up being very partisan commissions, no matter who selects them,” said Green, who has served in both the state Legislature and Congress.
Green has been on the receiving end of political gamesmanship in redistricting, having been drawn out of his district by Texas Republicans in the controversial mid-decade redistricting plan of 2003, spearheaded by then U.S. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Sugar Land.
Finding himself suddenly placed in Poe’s looping district, Green decided to sell his house and move. He recalls telling DeLay, “I want to thank you for the new mortgage.”
Green has persevered in Congress, despite moving into a district that’s more than 70 percent Hispanic. He’s the only non-Hispanic white Democrat representing a part of Houston.
“Clearly the Texas congressional map, and the state House map and state Senate map, are partisanly gerrymandered, and they are way out of balance with the political performance of the state.” Matt Angle, head of the Lone Star Project
Partisan gerrymandering has been around since the beginning of the Republic. The term was coined in 1812. But the practice, critics say, has grown out of hand, with corrosive effects on elections, which are conducted in districts largely drawn by incumbent politicians for their own benefit. In effect, they choose their own voters, rather than the other way around.
Some analysts link the pervasiveness of safe partisan districts to a growing brand of political polarization that rewards extremism on both sides, effectively turning party primaries into general elections and largely ignoring centrist and independent voters.
The tools of the trade are called “packing” and “cracking.” Packing refers to the practice of concentrating voters of one party into a limited number of districts to blunt their influence; cracking entails dispersing them into different districts to dilute their strength.
The bottom line: Some voters just don’t count as much as others, leaving them effectively disenfranchised. An ‘efficiency gap’
In Texas, Angle argues, “There’s no question what’s happened is you’ve got safe districts created, Democrats packed into as few districts as possible, and the rest of them cracked into as many safe Republican districts as possible, and what that’s done is it’s made the primaries matter the most, and primaries are driven by the most ideological people within their party.”
In the Wisconsin case, Gill v. Whitford, the court will be asked to look at the allegedly skewed results of the state’s recent elections. In 2012, Republicans won 60 of 99 legislative seats despite winning only 48.6 percent of the state’s two-party statewide vote. In 2014, Republicans won 63 seats with only 52 percent of the statewide vote.
Texas Democrats say they could make the same case. While Democratic presidential candidates won more than 40 percent of the statewide vote in the past three elections, Democratic voters were distributed in such a way that their party controls only about a third of the state’s legislative and congressional seats.
Critics call that an “efficiency gap,” which can only be explained by partisan gerrymandering. Now before the high court, they hope to find a way to close the gap.
“This is a historic opportunity to address one of the biggest problems in our electoral system,” said Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning law and public policy institute at the New York University School of Law. “Gerrymandering has become so aggressive, extreme and effective that there is an urgent need for the Supreme Court to step in and set boundaries.”
Conservative groups argue that there is no way to estimate what each party “should” win in a fair election. The redistricting tests that have been proposed to close the “efficiency gap” in Wisconsin, they say, are arbitrary.
“Leftists want the courts to overturn district lines if not enough Democrats win,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that has filed briefs defending Wisconsin’s electoral map. “We’re happy that the Supreme Court will now have a chance to rule that Democrats — or any political party — will not have a constitutional right to win elections.”
Political analysts say that even if the Supreme Court were to somehow chip away at partisan gerrymandering, the impact would be far more dramatic in battleground states like Wisconsin than in states where one party is as dominant as Republicans are in Texas.
“Democrats aren’t winning statewide elections in Texas,” said Craig Goodman, a political scientist at the University of Houston in Victoria.
The Supreme Court’s move also could reshape political power in Harris County, where a Republican establishment already faces pressures from an increasingly left-leaning populace.
Republicans have dominated Harris County’s governing board with a 4-1 advantage over Democrats on the commissioners court since 2010.
But fueled by growth and demographic change, the county is shifting increasingly leftward: According to the 2016 Kinder Institute Survey by Rice University, a majority of Harris County’s four-plus-million population leans Democrat. In the November 2016 election, Democrats won every countywide position on the ballot as Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by more than 12 points — a larger margin of victory than George W. Bush had. Impact on Harris County
A decision in the Wisconsin case also could help further tilt the scale in Democrats’ favor after the 2020 Census by disallowing precincts to be drawn based on partisanship, said Rice University political scientist Robert Stein.
“What will happen here, is there will be litigation, and there will be litigation based on the court’s decision,” Stein said.
Efforts to challenge the county’s redistricting efforts are not without precedent. After the 2010 U.S. Census, two Houston city councilmen and others sued the county over a redistricting scheme they said violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting Latino voting power — a suit that was quashed by the federal courts.
But during that case, testimony indicated the lines were not drawn to disenfranchise Hispanic voters, but to create a stronger Republican district, said Douglas Ray, managing attorney for the public law practice group in the Harris County attorney’s office.
“It was about partisan considerations,” Ray said.
He said he does not believe the Supreme Court would eliminate the ability for the county to consider partisanship in redrawing precincts.
One other impact of more politically-balanced electoral districts could be to boost voter turnout. Texas has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the nation.
Lopsided congressional races, like those all across Texas, provide little incentive to vote.
“It’s certainly not healthy for democracy,” said Goodman at UH-Victoria. “It’s hard to encourage people to go out and vote when you don’t really have any chance of winning.”
“It is inherently a political process. Which is not to say it’s a bad process. It’s just hard to know what alternative might be available.” Sen. John Cornyn