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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
As former Houston bug man Tom DeLay and the Texas Republicans use nasty tricks to consolidate their power, the Democrats are fighting fire with fire.
May 15, 2003 | As U.S. Special Forces scour Iraq for Baath Party poohbahs, Lone Star State Republicans are gunning for their own political outlaws. They've even published a card deck illustrated with the portraits of the evildoers.
Their quarry? Fugitive Democratic legislators, without whom the Republicans can't rule Texas. The Dems are on the lam in order to derail a congressional redistricting plan widely credited to U.S. House Majority Leader Tom "The Hammer" DeLay, the former Houston exterminator who's now one of the most powerful and relentless politicians in Washington.
Hogtied for the moment, and still well short of victory, angry Republican legislators have taken to calling their colleagues the "Chicken D's" for leaving Austin. New GOP Gov. Rick Perry unsuccessfully dispatched state troopers to find the wayward pols, arrest them, and drag them back across the border. DeLay, calling the Democrats "cowards," investigated putting federal agents on their tails. If so, FBI agents would stop hunting al-Qaida and instead try to smoke out security threats hailing from San Antonio, Fort Worth and El Paso, instead.
For Texans, the dramatic political fight has become the equivalent of a summer movie blockbuster -- filled with busy troopers, back-stabbing, stalkings and skullduggery. But the fight holds serious national implications.
In the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans currently outnumber Democrats 229 to 205, with one independent. But in the 32-member Texas delegation, Democrats outnumber Republicans 17-15. If the Republican redistricting plan passes, strategists say, Democrats could lose from four to seven congressional seats. In a Congress where the balance of power is so close, seven additional Texas Republicans who owe their jobs to DeLay could make it significantly easier for Republican President George W. Bush to give tax breaks to the rich, slash health programs for the poor, undermine environmental safeguards, and push through other central elements of his legislative agenda.
"The stakes are extremely high," says Gary Keith, a lecturer on Texas politics at the University of Texas at Austin. "If you think about it -- each of the last few national elections has been a battle over five to 10 House seats. Now [with the new redistricting plan], boom! [Republicans] could win with just one state."
To prevent what they called a "relentless" effort by "Washington Republican political leaders" -- read: Tom DeLay -- to ram through the redistricting plan, the Texas House Democrats simply took the best and most effective political option available: They left town. The exiles -- discovered last Monday in a Holiday Inn in Oklahoma -- refuse to budge from their hideout until key legislative deadlines expire on Friday.
The GOP won control of the Texas legislature for the first time in 130 years during the 2002 elections. That all but assured they would have the clout to push through a plan that would redraw congressional district boundaries to the advantage of Republicans, allowing the party to solidify its power in Texas and in the U.S. House.
But the drama accelerated last Sunday night. Facing certain defeat over the redistricting plan inspired by DeLay, more than 50 Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives fled the state capitol in Austin -- sneaking across the state line on two chartered buses to Ardmore, Okla. They vow to remain there -- holed up in the motel off Interstate 35 -- until their GOP colleagues shelve the controversial bill.
With Republicans the majority party in Austin, the bill's outcome was never in doubt. But Texas law mandates that 100, or two-thirds of the house's 150 representatives, be present for a quorum.
The math isn't complicated. The Democrats knew that a well-organized boycott could hamstring the GOP juggernaut, and so they counted heads and decided to make a run for the border. With 51 politicos missing and at large, the Republican redistricting bill will expire on Friday -- effectively derailing the GOP's plan, at least temporarily.
Furious Republicans asked Perry to issue warrants for the Democrats' arrest. They urged him to send "wanted" bulletins to neighboring states. New Mexico state Attorney General Patricia Madrid, a Democrat, replied with a sarcastic promise of cooperation:
"I have put out an all-points-bulletin for law enforcement to be on the lookout for politicians in favor of healthcare for the needy and against tax cuts for the wealthy."
By most accounts, the proposed congressional districts are blatantly political -- designed to ensure the DeLay keeps his job and Dubya's home state is colored red for a generation.
"The districts are drawn by Republicans to the advantage of the Republicans," says Keith, who also points out that Democrats, when they ruled Texas, redrew districts to suit them.
What's new, however, is how blatantly the plan gerrymanders Texas cities and towns.
"This plan takes the white conservative camp in Texas and institutionalizes it," Keith says. "It completely smashes up communities all over [the state]." Keith uses liberal Austin as an example. Currently one congressional district, the city -- under the Republican plan -- would be redrawn and quartered -- chopped up into four pieces. Each portion would be sewn onto a rural, Republican district.
To deflect the partisan nature of the dispute, the Democrats argue their boycott is about local control. There are also other issues caught up in the fight. Now that the Republicans hold the top jobs in Texas government, the Democrats are fighting a conservative assault on the environment and on health and home insurance reform. But the redistricting plan remains the flash point. The Dems insist they will return to Austin only if the GOP kills the bill.
"We will hop on a bus two minutes from now and go home as soon as the Republican leadership agree that other issues are more important than redistricting," says state Rep. Pete Gallego, a Democrat from Alpine who's residing, temporarily, at the Holiday Inn in Ardmore. "We will be back in the capital post haste."
So far the Republicans haven't caved, and the state is gridlocked. "It's a train wreck," Keith says.
It's also thrilling drama -- even if most of the participants resemble actors on the suburban dinner theater circuit and not the buff, nostril-flaring thespians of "Matrix Reloaded."
Depending on one's politics, the spectacle resembles two different movies.
To Democrats, the Republican redistricting effort is a partisan "Frankenstein," with the monster cobbled together by mad Dr. DeLay. House Democrats play the role of the torch-bearing, rake-rattling peasants, united in their efforts to destroy the monster and save the Democratic congressional delegation from destruction.
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