State Government

The third special session this year — in fact, the third special session in more than a decade — starts at midmonth, and nobody has a clear idea what will happen. The Democrats are back in Texas, but say they have new tricks in their bag. The Republicans have the legislative quorum they seek, but have no agreement on a congressional redistricting plan. And the courts aren’t done with the wreckage of what was, just a year ago, still a bipartisan government.

Sen. John Whitmire, who’s been in the Senate longer than anyone else and in the Legislature longer than all but four others, returned to Houston after 37 days in the Land of Enchantment, providing relief to Republicans and anguish to Democrats.

Statewide offices are full of ambitious people, and governors of Texas have been historically besieged by people who want their jobs, or their power. Bob Bullock, first as comptroller and then as lieutenant governor, was a special pain in the necks of Gov. Mark White and then Gov. Ann Richards. For Gov. Bill Clements, the bad news regularly arrived from the offices of then-Attorney General Jim Mattox. And for Rick Perry, it would appear that the thorn bush is rooted at the Lyndon B. Johnson State Office Building, headquarters of Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts Carole Keeton Strayhorn.

This special session of the Legislature never officially convened on the East end of the Capitol, and if the Democrats came back this minute, there wouldn’t be time to pass a congressional redistricting plan. The Senate never got a quorum, and could never send bills to committee, much less hear them, amend them, pass them, and all that jazz.

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.