The time has come for an overhaul of Texas’ redistricting process

Matt Angle, the founder and director of the Lone Star Project, is a veteran of Texas’ long-running redistricting wars.

These conflicts are effectively endless, tortuously complex and oddly dispiriting for voters who were under the impression that we should pick our elected representatives, rather than hoping a competent one picks us.

Angle said he was dragged into the fight in the early 1980s, when he was serving as a staffer to longtime U.S. Rep. Martin Frost, a Democrat who represented the state’s 24th Congressional District in north Texas until 2005.

“I was a very young staffer,” Angle said, “and he knew I grew up in Fort Worth.

“He called me into his office — I had probably talked to Martin Frost personally five times at that point — and he had on the floor a big map of Tarrant County, and said, ‘Where do you live?’ ”

Frost asked Angle to tell him about the voters who lived on his own street, and on another street, and on another one after that.

Even then, redistricting was a tendentious and high-stakes business. But since then, these partisan fights have become only more sophisticated and more fraught.

As the 2020 election cycle heats up, politically minded Texans are arguably more preoccupied with the fight for control of the Texas House than the question of whether to re-elect President Donald Trump.

That’s perhaps because the state, rightly or wrongly, isn’t seen by many as a real battleground yet in the presidential election. But it’s also because both parties grasp the importance of partisan gerrymandering, which is constitutional and tends to have self-perpetuating effects.

Republicans controlled state government when the last redistricting cycle began — and as it continued, for years, in the courts. The results were made manifest during the 2018 mid

term elections. Democrats put up a more energetic performance than usual, fielding candidates in every congressional district. Then-U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke made an electric showing in the top-of-the-ticket Senate race. Nevertheless, they hold only 13 of the state’s 36 congressional districts, thanks in part to the surgically precise gerrymandering by the GOP that previously helped stifle candidate recruitment as well as Democratic voter turnout.

Today, despite the gerrymandering, Democrats have a chance of retaking the Legislature’s lower chamber. If they hold all the seats they won in 2018 and pick up nine more in 2020, they’ll be in the majority as lawmakers embark on the 2021 redistricting process.

After the 2020 census, Texas is likely to gain several new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives due to population growth. State lawmakers are also tasked with redrawing district boundaries for the Texas Legislature and state Board of Education.

In theory, the redistricting process should be straightforward enough. The Legislature can simply draw up new maps in 2021, when it meets for its first regular session after the decennial census, and adopt them via the regular legislative process. Those maps could then take effect immediately. As a result of a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the state’s maps are no longer subject to federal preclearance.

However, no one expects things to go that smoothly. The suggestion that it might is arguably ridiculous.

Regardless of whether Democrats retake the Texas House, legislators in that chamber will probably struggle to come to an agreement with their more conservative Senate colleagues led by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

And any maps that eventually emerge from the Capitol — in a special session, perhaps, or after intervention by the fivemember Legislative Redistricting Board — will almost inevitably be challenged in court.

“The history of the redistricting process during the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s illustrates some of the different courses decennial redistricting can take,” says the state’s redistricting website, putting it mildly.

I suspect the redistricting process of the 2020s will illustrate to many Texans why we should consider a change of course altogether. Texas could put the mapmaking process in the hands of an independent commission, as some states have done. Several Democratic lawmakers put forward proposals to this effect during last year’s regular session, but Republicans — still in power and determined to hold onto it — showed little interest.

For now, then, I keep on my desk printouts of the 2018 election results for several Houston-area districts, partly out of admiration for the mapmakers’ ingenuity and craftsmanship.

The 10th Congressional District, which stretches from Katy to Austin, is like a fat, flightless bird scrambling for freedom. The 2nd District, which begins in Montrose and swoops up and over into Kingwood, evokes Trump’s swoosh of hair. The 22nd District, which covers most of Fort Bend County, looks like Republicans are not prepared to relinquish the suburbs, even if the voters who live there attempt to stage some kind of mutiny.

None of them looks nearly as coherent as the map that Frost laid out on the floor of his office decades ago, when he was trying to educate himself about the Texans in his district.

The notion that voters should pick their representatives was still in effect, at the time — and it’s overdue for a comeback.