The Republican isn't wrong. "A lot of people think that what's going to happen in Texas is going to be what happened in California," says Michael Lind, the author of "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics." "It went from being a right-wing state based on lower-middle-class whites to being one of the most liberal states because of a coalition of blacks, Latinos and white liberals."

In the same way, "Texas is going to go from being one of the most reactionary states in the union to being one of the most progressive," Lind predicts. "At this point, the white Texans who vote for the Democratic Party tend to be very affluent, well-educated people who are very liberal, similar to California. The old white Texas populists, once the mainstay of Lyndon Johnson's Democratic Party, are mostly Republican now."

Thus, breaking up members of this coalition into different districts is key to preserving Republican power in Texas.

"Demographic changes mean that a majority of Texans will be people of color," says Garnet Coleman, a state representative from Houston. With the growing Hispanic population, "for the first time Anglos would become the minority. It doesn't bode well for them [Republicans] in terms of electoral demographics, but as long as they stack the deck by gerrymandering districts that favor them beyond the time that they naturally would be able to keep those districts, that's to their advantage."

Republicans don't have much time. Hispanics currently account for a third of Texas' population; according to a 2002 Washington Post story, the continued growth of the Latino population will leave Anglos as less than 50 percent of the population in Texas by 2005. Hispanics will exceed 50 percent of the state population by 2026, the Post reported.

Redistricting may blunt their political power, though. Once established, electoral districts are very difficult to change, says Rob Richie, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Voting and Democracy. As proof, he offers the case of Democratic dominance in Texas.

Texas Republicans have a point that the current congressional map doesn't reflect Texas' voting patterns, Richie says. More than 50 percent of Texans voted for Republican congressional representatives in the last election, but Republicans won just 15 seats, while Democrats took 17. (Of course, given the last presidential election, there's something audacious about Republicans arguing that the system is invalid because its party won the popular vote in Texas but lost the electoral vote.) The Democrats dominate, says Richie, because of the electoral maps that state Democrats drew in 1991.

A panel of Texas judges redrew those maps in 2001, after statehouse Republicans blocked passage of a new map drawn by Democrats, who were then a majority. Republicans defended those court-drawn maps, which gave their party two extra seats, from a challenge in U.S. Supreme Court brought by civil rights groups, who said the map was unfair to minorities. Nevertheless, that round of redistricting didn't reverse all the advantages Democrats had built into the system in 1991.

Indeed, Richie calls the Texas Democrats' 1991 maps the most effective gerrymandering of that decade in the nation. But Democrats were hardly alone in trying to draw maps to their advantage. During the same decade, Republicans successfully gerrymandered Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Right now, Richie notes, Pennsylvania Democrats could win a clear majority of the statewide vote and still not have a chance at taking the majority of House seats.

The point, he says, is that electoral maps drawn now will determine who can get elected a decade from now. That's why the Texas Democrats have such a sense of mission, even as their costs multiply and they grow weary of being away from home.

"Our Senate colleagues, they think we did this for show. They're very uncomfortable every time we bring up the black or Hispanic issue," says Van De Putte. "But this is about the consolidation of power and trying to direct control of the U.S. House for the next 20 years."

One great irony of this whole imbroglio is that the Republican plan would create more minority seats in the U.S. Congress than currently exist. On the Texas Republican Party Web site, party chair Susan Weddington boasts that redistricting will "provide new leadership opportunities for minority Texans." She's right -- while redistricting would dilute minority influence in many districts, it would pack a couple of districts with minority voters, who would be likely to elect minority candidates.

Democrats find it maddening when their opponents tout their plan as a kind of electoral affirmative action. "If anyone believes that Tom DeLay and Susan Weddington are really interested in what's good for black and brown people, then they believe that the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan is interested in what's good for black and brown people," says Coleman, who is black.

In exchange for two new minority members of Congress, Democrats say, blacks and Hispanics would lose a handful of white members whose voting records are relatively well-ranked by civil rights groups.

The argument that a handful of sympathetic white congressmen beats two minority representatives would sound grossly self-serving if put forth by the white congressmen themselves. But the main proponents of that argument are the Texas 11. "If you look at their voting records, you will see a stark difference in how [white] representatives from the two parties vote" on black and Latino issues, says Sen. Judy Zaffirini of Laredo. "Redistricting is a weapon of mass discrimination."

If it is, though, it's a subtle kind of discrimination. One might think the senators were being oversensitive, even paranoid, if a key Republican operative hadn't confirmed their suspicions that Republicans, led by Rove and DeLay, are playing a devious race card.

In May, the Denver Post reported on GOP attack dog Grover Norquist's strategy, saying, "The GOP can live with urban liberals, such as [California Rep. Maxine] Waters; it's moderates such as [Texas Democratic Rep. Charlie] Stenholm who are its main target." If the Texas redistricting plan is adopted, Norquist was quoted saying, "it is exactly the Stenholms of the world who will disappear, the moderate Democrats. They will go so that no Texan need grow up thinking that being a Democrat is acceptable behavior."

For those attuned to the signals, Norquist's message was clear -- redistricting would drive Southern whites out of the Democratic Party. In July, he went further, telling the New York Times that Sheila Jackson-Lee, a African-American congresswoman from Texas, "will be the spokesman for the Democratic Party."

"Basically you'll be labeled a nigger-lover if you're a Democrat," Coleman says of the Republican plan. "We've already been through those times. It's all part of the Southern strategy."

Whitmire's departure makes it unlikely that the Democrats can block that strategy, even if some of them hold out until Christmas, as they've threatened to do. If they remain in New Mexico, they'll probably prove the Houston Chronicle right -- it will be a Democratic Alamo, brave and doomed.

Recent Stories