Redsitricting statehouse districts at first blush

Those of you that have been following Greg and Charles won't find much of anything new in this post. (Go to Kuffner's link and follow the instructions in that post if you want to walk into the weeds with us.) Here I will react and elaborate on some of the things that Ross Ramsey and Matt Stiles have posted at the TexTrib, Harvey K has put up at Quorum Report, along with some thoughts from other back-channel discussions.

Representatives whose districts have been combined/paired include ...

East Texas: Dan Flynn/Erwin Cain and Allen Ritter/Tuffy Hamilton

Cain, a Republican Tea Party freshman who voted against Joe Straus for speaker, goes under the bus ... probably as much for that as for this. Update: On the other hand, Flynn also voted against Straus, so this might simply be a grudge match scheduled by the speaker himself.

Ritter recently flipped from D to R and has been in the Lege for many years, representing southern Jefferson County; Hamilton has long represented Orange and part of Sabine County. As legislative veterans neither is presumably ready to cash out and become an Austin lobbyist. But Hamilton had triple-bypass surgery late last year so there is certainly the possibility that he's disinclined for a grueling Republican primary.

West Texas: Jim Landtroop/ Charles Perry and Warren Chisum/ Rick Hardcastle.

Landtroop and Perry, both Republican freshmen, will have to face off in a GOP primary, likely for the right to contest former Democratic state representative Joe Heflin in November 2012. Chisum has already announced his intention to run for the Texas Railroad Commission, so Hardcastle can breathe easy.

Dallas County: Joe Driver/Cindy Burkett and Linda Harper-Brown/ Rodney Anderson

Burkett and Anderson are GOP rookies who are again sacrificed in order to preserve the incumbency of two of the most ethically challenged Republican incumbents in the Texas Legislature. Click on the links in their names to refresh yourself with their corruption.

Harris County: Hubert Vo/Scott Hochberg

Vo's district 149 was erased completely and reincarnated as a suburban/rural Republican district in Williamson County (and Burnet and Milam). It wins the Gerrymander of the Decade award:

Vo could wind up challenging HD-133's Jim Murphy, which would be a fascinating contest. Hochberg's 137th added a chunk of Harris west of where his district currently lies, but appears to remain safely Democratic.

Nueces County: Raul Torres/Connie Scott

Continuing the trend, Scott and Torres are both Republican freshmen who were swept in on 2010's Red Tide. They either face a rough primary against each other, or one must stand down so that the other can do battle against an emboldened Democratic challenger with Barack Obama on the ballot in 2012.

These are the eight open seats as mapped:

District 3—Montgomery (part) and Waller

District 12—McLennan (part), Brazos (part), Falls, Limestone, Robertson

District 33—Collin (part) and Rockwall

District 85—Fort Bend (part), Wharton and Jackson

District 88—Wise, Cook, Jack, Young, Throckmorton, Haskell, Stonewall, Kent, Garza, Lynn, Terry, Borden

District 101-Tarrant (part)

District 106---Denton (part)

And the afore-mentioned District 149—Williamson (part), Burnet, Milam

Those all appear to be safe for whatever Republican runs there.

Burt Solomons, the author of these maps, also did an excellent job of attempting to preserve a Republican super-majority for the next decade. Ninety-two statehouse districts are R 55% or greater, up from 82.

Update: Eye on Williamson has more on the new District 149.

The legacy of Boyd Richie (and by extension, the Texas Democratic Party)

In another discussion forum on the topic regarding the announcement this past weekend, someone noted that Texas needs a strong corporate-influence-free Democratic party so that when the Republicans completely frack things up, Democrats can fix the damage with meaningful reforms.

Yes. And I'd like to be able to shit glazed doughnuts.

A short history lesson is in order. Did you know that the reason for John F. Kennedy's trip to Texas in the fall of 1963 was to mend fences between rival factions in the Texas Democratic Party? In fact, the conservative wing of the TDP has been in charge since Lloyd Bentsen defeated Ralph Yarborough for Senate in 1970. Don't believe me? Would you believe Wikipedia?

The campaign came in the wake of Yarborough's politically hazardous votes in favor of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and his opposition to the Vietnam War. Bentsen made Yarborough's opposition to the war a major issue. His television advertising featured video images of rioting in the streets at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, implying that Yarborough was associated with the rioters. While this strategy was successful in defeating Yarborough, it caused long-term damage to Bentsen's relationship with liberals in his party.

Bentsen's campaign and his reputation as a conservative Democrat served to alienate him not only from supporters of Ralph Yarborough, but from prominent national liberals, as well. Indeed, during the 1970 Senate race, the Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith endorsed George Bush, arguing that if Bentsen were elected to the Senate, he would invariably become the face of a new, more conservative Texas Democratic Party and that the long-term interests of Texas liberalism demanded Bentsen's defeat.

In the forty-plus years since that election, Texas Democratic voters became Reagan Democrats, then Republicans, and now TeaBaggers. (Really though, I'm just describing my dad, a union man who voted D all his life, until 1980).

We've had well over a decade of 100% GOP rule at the state level, including all nine seats on the state Supreme Court. As a result of last November's Red Tea Tide, Republicans hold a super-majority in the statehouse, and are one vote shy of holding one in the state Senate. Since 1994: Ann Richards to W to Rick Perry. Dems held the Texas House in the '90's but it slipped to the R's in 2003 (Tom Craddick was the first Republican speaker since Reconstruction). In 2006 and 2008 we slowed their roll in the legislative chambers, but that was all undone in 2010.

Pete Laney was the last Democratic speaker; Bob Bullock was the last statewide Democratic office-holder. You may recall he endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2000.

Now of course that's just elected officials. Most Texans couldn't care less about internal party politics, Democratic or Republick. They don't know the players; they don't even know the game(s). So once again, a little history.

Opinions on Boyd Richie's greatest claim to success during his tenure will certainly differ. Mine: he got those wiretappers at AT&T to sponsor a couple of TDP conventions. I have a nice canvas totebag to prove it. Do you know who occupied the chair before him? Charles Soechting. Before that? Molly Beth Malcolm. Before that? Bill White.

That's fifteen years' worth. See anything slightly progressive there? Now keep in mind, just in the past few years delegates did have progressive options. They -- we -- could have chosen Glen Maxey. Or David Van Os.

You may be one of the people who knew all this history. You may even recall that Soechting resigned a few months before the end of his term specifically to keep Maxey from getting elected. Me, I had forgotten that.

One other thing: the absolute irrelevance of the party chairmanship -- more broadly the serious and severe internal squabbling that seems to dominate party politics -- has not prevented one political party in Texas from dominating state politics. The Dems did so for decades before the Republicans. The RPT, of course, is rife with its own dissension (see: TeaBaggers), which again isn't hurting their franchise at all.

There's a painfully obvious point of which even the most casual observer is aware, and it is that this intensifying Texas conservatism is a generational trend and it just ain't a-changin' in my lifetime, and maybe not in your children's lifetime either. Maybe a more progressive option on the ballot -- specifically,  the Texas Green Party -- can begin to influence the Texas Dems to pull back from their starboard veer, but I'm not holding my breath on that.

So, as with Obama and his re-election campaign, I wish the gentlemen well who are running for the state chair of the TDP in 2012. But it's not like any one of them will be able to make a noticeable difference in the status quo.

This is a convenient and workable excuse for Boyd Richie's incompetence, in case you were wondering.

Why, if we hadn't elected Obama ...

... we might have had a president who refused to roll back taxes on the wealthy, who refused to establish a windfall profits tax on oil companies, who refused to investigate activities carried out by telecom companies who illegally helped the government tap our phones, and who continued to tap phones without a warrant, who would have turned his back on Miranda, who would refuse to investigate any of the Bush Administration lies, incompetence, corruption or torture, who would support anti-democratic, murderous coup regimes in Central America, who might refuse to restore habeas corpus, who would have left Guantanamo open indefinitely and maintain that its inmates had no rights at all, who might have continued extraordinary rendition and torture, who might have fought to keep Dick Cheney's remarks to Plame investigators secret, who would have done nothing of substance to rein in Wall Street, who would have continued to issue signing statements, who might have continued to delay investigations of CIA torture and even investigate those who protest that torture, who would have traded away the public option even while saying he was in favor of it, who would have expanded the war in Afghanistan, who would have opened "vast expanses" of Atlantic seaboard, the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, who would have 'put politics before science' and at first minimized the BP oil spill and then might have claimed that there was practically no oil left and that "the microbes ate it!", who might have continually filed briefs in favor of large corporate polluters, who might have even been in favor of whale hunting, who might have used cluster bombs on civilians in Yemen, who might have refused to investigate Bush's political firings of US attorneys, why we might even have a president who would appoint a bunch of right wing psychopaths to the Commission of Fiscal Responsibility and try to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and middle class while allowing Wall Street banks, the filthy rich and military corporations to continue plundering our economy, or who might try to institute policies which would effectively shut down the internet.

But wait…no. That's what Obama actually did do.

You in? Or out?

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance wants to know if you remember that time Planned Parenthood crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks and took TARP money? Yeah, us neither. We would also like to remind you that we never shut down -- never even threaten to shut down -- as we once again bring you this week's blog roundup.

Off the Kuff discusses the bet the Republicans have made about how the voters will react to deep cuts to public education.

At TexasKaos, Lightseeker warns Don't Buy Into the Lie - Help Spread the Truth About the Fiscal Mess! Updated with video! Check it out - be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

From Bay Area Houston: Unlike the GOP, which believes the solution to teen pregnancy is duct tape and a $50,000 speaking engagement by Bristol Palin, Planned Parenthood actually provides education services, family planning services, and low cost birth control.

Barack Obama asked the question "Are You In?" last week, and PDiddie at Brains and Eggs decided he wasn't.

Texas has a revenue problem that's so bad even the GOP is starting to realize it. WCNews at Eye On Williamson posted about that: Texas GOP tax talk getting louder.

The Texas Cloverleaf looks at the potential, and potentially wacky, new districts in which Denton County might end up.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes that Republicans want to stop you from voting, kill public education and control women's uteri. Did you see anything about creating jobs, except for the special uterus police?

More bad news for fracking from Public Citizen's Texas Vox blog, as they report that the House Appropriation will discuss on Thursday the tax exemption for "high cost" wells, valued at several billion dollars that should be going to schools and health care. As fate would have it, they had already planned to join a press conference that morning led by TPA's own TXSharon on the health impacts of fracking -- click for details!

Neil at Texas Liberal noted that while it is great for Houston Mayor Annise Parker that she raised $1 million for her re-election campaign in a single night, this fact is much less relevant to a public that finds little to care about in a municipal political atmosphere nearly devoid of grassroots enthusiasm.

Sunday Funnies: In or Out edition

Today's SDEC meeting in Austin *update: Richie won't run again

Breaking, 1:00 p.m.: Boyd Richie has announced that he will not run for re-election to the post of chair of the Texas Democratic Party in 2012. Burnt Orange Report is live-blogging the conclave.

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Occurring as this is posted. The following was submitted by my Senate District Executive Committee representative, J.R. Behrman.

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The April 9 meeting will pit the SDEC against the staff employed by the Texas Trust from the staff of Congressman Martin Frost -- the “Little Office” in Austin. That staff is desperately seeking to defeat motions to be made by Don Bankston of  Fort Bend County to support a bizarre theory of “singular authority” vested in the Texas Democratic Party chairman, and to re-elect Boyd Richie for State Chair despite his manifest unfitness and failure.

He had not planned to run in 2012. But, he and his entourage of “Senate Pages” have nobody but each other to turn to. We really cannot afford either half of that vain and unproductive symbiosis.

The staff and the “Palace Guard” -- together comprising the “Speaker’s Claque” -- are already “whipping” the SDEC, defaming Don Bankston, and threatening personal retaliation against each and every one of you. That is the way they operate. Since I am already on the hit list, I don’t care about the smear campaign so much as by what it reveals about a profoundly dysfunctional and failed state party.

The Obama campaign will bypass state parties altogether. They will use the new DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, passed over for the DCCC, to raise money in Texas and spend it elsewhere. We desperately need a new business model at the state and county level, but there is not a hint of such a thing from the Little Office in Austin.

In any case the state party establishment, which bet on John Edwards this time four years ago and Martin Frost to become DNC chair in recent weeks as well as de facto state chair through his protege, Matt Angle, will fare even worse in fratricidal fund-raising from “large donors” in the future.

That leaves the state and county party fighting over the last rich, bored trial-lawyer standing – a horrible business model, but the only one we have today.

Our party does not have personnel problems unless we create them, which we now have by not disclosing material conflicts of interest. Still, that just aggravates the profound financial problems that will not be solved by “keeping on, keeping on” with old or new staff.

Given the size of this state, our lack and ignorance of the scalable technologies that the Obama campaign will use nationwide, and the profound dysfunction of the state and several urban county parties, it is hard to blame the boys in Chicago. They have little regard for cornpone Southern Democratic parties run by “doctors, lawyers, and preachers” for their own benefit, what I call “The Grisham Novel”.

Democrats in Northern states, with real unions and well-funded public schools and services, are fighting against a neo-Confederate GOP. They do not have much use for a state party that nurtures “Blue Dog” collaborators and defectors. So ... we are on our own here.

The Democratic Party establishment in Texas and Harris County are artifacts of a bi-partisan concession-tending regime that lasted statewide from 1824 to 1994 and persists on City Council to this day. This establishment lacks proficiency and purpose – now that tort reform is a done deal and they have no alternative to debt-driven fiscal austerity at every echelon of government.

So the prospects for winning statewide, countywide, and even citywide elections in 2011-12 are not good. There have been essentially no lessons learned from victories in 2008 or losses in 2010. “Wave Election!” is an excuse, not an analysis or a plan. The same consultants will be doing the same thing with the same tools but without the benefit of an Obama primary campaign here in Texas next year.

Apart from dismay at the effects of national, state, county, and city austerity, there will be little motivation and no money trickling down from national politics unless and until we turn things around here on the ground ... dramatically. The patronage-oriented base vote will be no  better than 2010 and the (2008-vintage) “new base vote” will be hard to motivate, locate, or mobilize. It is true that on the margin there is still some 'bloc voting' by various interest groups. But that is not the way the politics of age, ethnicity, class, and gender work in “majority-minority” counties like Harris, for one. So we are going to have to adopt Obama-type political methods and messages if we expect results like 2008.

And if we should overcome our perverse heritage and technical deficiencies, as well as the dead hand of the TDP, DNC, and DCCC, we could join California -- even Illinois -- in re-electing Barack Obama, in re-electing those elected county-wide in 2008, and in electing future national and statewide office-holders.

Which brings me back to today.

The State Chair and the party staff will try to waste time and suppress debate on virtually everything using parliamentary tactics or just jargon and making utterly bogus legal-sounding arguments. My district includes parts of Fort Bend County, and you can bet I will support Don Bankston, less for what he has done -- avoiding Bexar County-type problems, for one -- than for what he and others in the county are doing.

The Speaker’s Claque and our Local Chapter of the DCCC use the term “conversation” to indicate that they will engage grass-roots Democrats as adversaries, not as the source of their own legitimacy and Blazing Saddles jobs. A one-sided “conversation” is what President Obama has with the truculent and juvenile GOP in Congress. It is not the way to handle internal party communications.

I hope SDEC members meeting in plenary session today can be relied upon to discharge their responsibilities to those who put them on the executive committee as their representatives, not as sycophants or suck-ups. We need wholesome and fair deliberation of a slew of important questions.

There are certainly two sides to the questions raised by Don Bankston. But there should be only one side to the question of their right and responsibility to fairly deliberate any important matter. SDEC members should vote to include serious matters -- not just long-winded harangues and busy-work reports-- in the order of business. I hope my colleagues will join me in voting, in particular, against attempts to suppress debate with parliamentary jargon.

But if the Chairman insists on turning a motion to appeal the ruling of the chair into a vote of no confidence backed by his threat to resign ... well, I can live with Lenora Sorola-Pohlman for the balance of this term.

It is hard to imagine a course of action less delusional and impractical than what the Little Office in Austin is doing today. They will whine about the “circular firing-squad”. But then they will volley-fire into the backsides of an SDEC which breaks and runs at the least prospect of serious debate.

Texas Democratic voters are looking for responsibility and leadership, not cowardice or sycophancy.

Unplanned, unwarranted, unbelievable

I don't agree with everything this toon portrays; I just don't think Boehner is all that bothered by being manipulated in this fashion. Nor does most of the rest of the Republican party, for that matter.

Oh sure, there are exceptions -- even in Texas, like Bob Deuell and Jane Nelson -- but generally the GOP is more like Mike Pence and Jon Kyl: they want to force women to bear children and then starve both mother and child to death. They don't want to pay for their medicine and they damn sure don't want to pay for their education. And they will tell any lie they can think of to advance their cause.

But hey, elections have consequences. When we elect weak-ass conservative Democrats to negotiate with terrorists (declaring the resolution of the budget stalemate last night  a victory, for example), we can't be too shocked about the outcome.