Why is Everyone Yelling?

You have to wonder how Texas legislators would act if average people were actually paying close attention, or if those voters really, truly, deeply cared about congressional redistricting. The summer battle over new maps has held the state media’s attention. It’s still common to see seven to nine television cameras at press conferences and stakeouts and group gropes at the Capitol. And the public is certainly aware that Democrats left the state over a political fight. But the issue hasn’t even held a dominant spot on talk radio shows, much less in the regular conversations of Texas civilians. The vegetables are right there on the plate, but the diners aren’t biting.

Wear their shoes for a minute.

Cops, firefighters, crime reporters, habitual criminals and the guys who drive the Roach Coaches to sell sandwiches, donuts, coffee and sodas at crime scenes have all seen things like this before. So have the veterans of maximum-security day care centers. Somebody’s holed up in a building making demands. They swear they won’t quit until they get what they want. They have hostages and say they’ll hold the hostages indefinitely in pursuit of their goal. Nothing is changing from day to day.

Texas Democrats are considering a challenge to the redistricting plans put in place for the state House and state Senate two years ago. If they sued, they would be seeking a revision based on this summer’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a Georgia redistricting case. Some Democrats say the logic of that ruling, applied to Texas, could add as many as three Democratic seats to the state Senate and as many as 12 to the state House. Numbers like that, if they proved to be more than fantasy, would move both chambers of the Legislature to near parity between Democrats and Republicans.

Ignore the minutiae for a moment and the congressional redistricting tangle has only two apparent dramatic points. Will 21 senators allow the issue to come up for consideration? And if they do, will the courts approve the plan that then passes through the Legislature?

Gov. Rick Perry officially opened the call of the special session, confining it at the beginning to the subject of congressional redistricting. He can add more at will. Republicans want to redraw the congressional lines because only 15 of the 32 members of the Texas delegation are theirs. It’s the last holdout for Democrats, and the GOP wants to break it down. The current districts could accomplish that. But to win, they’ll have to squeeze out Democratic incumbents the voters continue to support.

The budget approved by the Legislature last month doesn’t balance, and Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn says she won’t certify it. This, ladies and germs, is a first. In all the years that the Texas Constitution has called for a balanced budget, the Legislature has spent less than it had.

The conventional wisdom among legislators and lobbyists is that congressional redistricting will be a “second” issue in a summer special session, since politicians don’t want to look like they’re spending taxpayer money for a purely political purpose. It’s not a baseless theory–some of the smart people have been talking about it right along with the rest of us.