It was
his strategy to bypass the DOJ and pre-clearance by going directly to court with the Republican redistricting overgrab. He thought the two GOP judges would be in their corner.
He was wildly wrong, and now
he's bitching about the outcome.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's office on Friday slammed an interim redistricting map proposed by a three-judge panel in San Antonio, saying the federal jurists overstepped their bounds in redrawing House and Senate district lines that could cost Republicans a half-dozen seats next year.
"Contrary to (a) basic principle of federalism, the proposed interim redistricting plan consistently overturns the Legislature's will where no probability of a legal wrong has been identified," Lauren Bean, a spokeswoman for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, said in a statement.
The three-judge panel had to create the interim maps for the 2012 election because a trial in Washington, D.C., on whether the redistricting plans approved by the Texas Legislature this year conform to the U.S. Voting Rights Act will not take place until after candidates have to file for office.
Greg Abbott's view of the law is so warped that it consistently makes him a laughingstock.
Update:
Burka.
Republican sources tell me that there is disgruntlement toward the attorney general among Republican House members. Their gripe is: The attorney general’s office had a “lackadaisical” attitude toward the case; or, alternatively, “Abbott didn’t have his A team on this.”
Abbott’s ballyhooed strategy was an attempt to win the case through forum-shopping. The AG’s legal team thought they had figured out how to wire around the Obama Justice Department, which was to choose the option of taking the case before a three-judge federal court in the District of Columbia and bypass a trial by moving for summary judgment on all the maps in controversy. The problem is, the two Bush appointees on the panel didn’t take a partisan position. [...]
One unexpected problem Abbott encountered at the San Antonio trial is that one of his own expert witness–John Alford, a political science professor at Rice University– went south on him. Alford testified that he would have done things differently from the Legislature’s congressional redistricting map that Abbott was defending...
I didn't realize how fundamentally incompetent and
corrupt the man was until I worked on the campaign of the man who ran against him in 2006. Of all of the profoundly ignorant, nakedly raw partisan schmucks running the state of Texas -- from Rick Perry, John Cornyn, David Dewhurst, Kay Bailey, and David Dewhurst trickling all the way down to Susan Combs, Jerry Patterson, and Todd Staples -- Greg Abbott is
the worst. And the most dangerous.
You can be certain that Abbott will do everything he can to subvert the will of the federal court which slapped away his party's overzealous gambit for permanent super-majority status.
On the other hand, one of the conservative cabal's junior partner in Houston, Paul Bettencourt, gets it. Almost:
"I don't think the Democratic Party could have hoped to have a plan drawn like this if they controlled had been able to participate in any meaningful way at the Legislature," said Paul Bettencourt, a former executive with the state Republican Party and former Harris County tax assessor.
Fixed it for ya, Quitter. That's pretty much what I said
yesterday.
This will be how the statewide Republicans will run their campaigns in 2012: completely against Washington D.C., much like Rick Perry conducted his 2010 re-election. 'EEEvil, evil feds want to tell Texans how to live', blah blah blah.
Dewhurst is already doing it. The "Obama/socialist,DemocRAT" rants will only get louder.
That tea is weak. And stale.
The Republican party declares that 'government doesn't work' and then demonstrates its premise on a daily basis. No jobs bill. No budget deal. No tax increases. No, no, all the time no.
No voting without your photo id, no pensions for anybody unless we can let Wall Street get their hands on it, no money for schools and teachers, no money for Planned Parenthood's
birth preventive education.
And you get even more 'No' if your skin is brown, you are female, homosexual, and/or you're not a Christian.
But there's plenty of tax breaks for oil and gas companies who foul the environment and lots of great deals for crony capitalists. The better friend you are of Rick Perry's, or the more money you can give to Republicans, the better off you will be. It's the classic example of the 1% waging war on the 99%.
And the only reason to keep the focus on abortion and gay rights is to keep the ignorant and the poverty-stricken distracted. Distraction is, in fact, the primary tool in their toolbox. A president misleads America about the costs to get a prescription drug bill passed, paying off Big Pharma cronies to the tune of $1 trillion dollars? Republicans snooze. President exaggerates intelligence to fool Americans into going to war against Iraq, costing 4,800 American soldiers' lives and over $800 billion? GOP snores, snorts, and rolls over.
President accelerates a loan guarantee to Solyndra, loan goes bad costing $500 million?
The tried-and-true faux outrage erupts.
You like this? Want more of it? Keep voting for these vile Republicans.
-- Tune out Black Friday and absolutely avoid its creeping back into Thanksgiving Day. If you must buy anything, buy it from a local merchant and not a corporation. That's an Occupy Wall Street objective even the most dense conservative ought to be able to understand.
