(this is the district the Texas GOP "gave" to Democrats in "exchange" for making a bunch of others strongly Republican) Also a reminder that Texas will gain 2-3 districts after the 2020 Census is finished. David Vance, a national media strategist for Common Cause, a D.C.-based watchdog group that fights for representative government, said Texas doesn’t have the best record of creating a fair vote. . An analysis by AP showed that the plan helped Texas Republicans win more U.S. House seats through redistricting than any other state. There was some precedent for this kind of action in Texas. Or Texas. Demographic and population shifts show that the Houston metropolitan area is becoming increasingly more Democratic. The current map of Texas' congressional districts is the product of two decades of gerrymandering. He asserted that the number of Hispanic representatives could grow from six to eight, and the number of African-Americans from two to three. Congressional district compactness, 113th Congress. The district then passes through Memorial Park before turning south and capturing the strongly Democratic Montrose, Rice University, and parts of Braeswood.[7]. It invalidated three congressional districts in south and west Texas and in the Austin area. Texas's 2nd congressional district of the United States House of Representatives is in the southeastern portion of the state of Texas. Published: February 25, 2020, 8:48 pm Updated: … I'd like to submit Texas's 35th district for the worst gerrymandering in Texas competition. The district was formed December 29, 1845, after Texas joined the Union. You saw Democrats also gerrymander in Texas for decades before that.”. Texas' Big, Bad Week for Voter Suppression and Gerrymandering Within two days, courts reject second election map, voter ID bill By Richard Whittaker, 1:05PM, Fri. Aug. 25, 2017 Editor's Note: This story is the first of a two-part series on gerrymandering. Insbesondere in den Vereinigten Staaten ist diese Praxis bis heute verbreitet. The Supreme Court ruled Monday that one congressional district in Texas was drawn in a way that limited the vote for Hispanic and African-American residents. See how seven different ways of drawing districts in Texas could change the partisan and racial makeup of its congressional map. The district now includes Kingwood, Humble, and Atascocita in northeastern Harris County, then loops around northern and western Houston before moving toward the center of the city roughly following Interstate 10. District 35, stretching from San Antonio to Austin, has ranked among the most gerrymandered in Texas.. GovTrack.us. See also: Texas' 2nd Congressional District elections, 2012. In a 5-4 decision along traditional conservative-liberal ideological lines, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan redistricting is a political question — not reviewable by federal courts — and that those courts can't judge if extreme gerrymandering violates the Constitution. This is the heart of Texas’s long history of intentional discrimination against voters of color: Analysts say that because voters of color were packed into single districts or broken up across several districts, their voting power is diluted to the point that their votes are rendered ineffective in choosing their political representation. Texas has been found in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because of intentional racial discrimination every decade since its enactment. He led the unprecedented step of redrawing the state’s congressional districts in the middle of the decade, five years before the census. States use that snapshot to update their legislative maps for population shifts. Texas law required that two-thirds of the 150-member body be present to conduct legislative business. All districts will be redrawn in 2021 (in all states with more than one district). When Texas Republicans returned to the legislature in 2013, they adopted the court’s interim maps as the permanent maps, with only a few alterations. Our new Spectrum News app is the most convenient way to get the stories that matter to you. The most recent gerrymandering battle in Texas stems from a legal challenge by a group of Black and Hispanic groups who alleged the 2011 version of the district maps bolstered white Texans' voting power. Each Texas district has an estimated population of 698,488 people. (These predictions were, for the most part, accurate.). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas's_2nd_congressional_district Ana Gonzalez. Get the best experience and stay connected to your community with our Spectrum News app. The map passed, but not without a phalanx of legal battles. From 2002 to 2012 it stretched from Houston's northern suburbs through eastern Harris County, and across Southeast Texas to the Louisiana border. When the districts are redrawn to benefit a particular party, it’s called gerrymandering. “I think you've seen in the voting process all sorts of efforts to minimize the power of voters of color, and that that's either through some of the sort of racial gerrymandering, discriminatory voter ID laws, and, most recently, limiting ballot drop off points. Texas’s 2nd Congressional District: What you need to know about this important race. If the district were less oddly shaped and contorted it would actually be quite difficult for a Republican to win in this area. “Republicans have been very gross in their gerrymandering and their racial gerrymandering,” Veasey said. In effect, Republicans had laundered a racially gerrymandered map through the judicial system, Vance said. The 2nd Congressional District of Texas held an election for the U.S. House of Representatives on November 6, 2012, in which incumbent Ted Poe (R) won re-election. The day after the preclearance safeguard was removed, a modified redistricting plan was signed into law. As of the 2000 census, the 2nd district represented 651,619 people. “When Republicans took over the state legislature, they sort of smelled blood in the water,” Vance said. Texas’ 2nd Congressional District is currently being held by one-term Congressman, Dan Crenshaw. With the 2012 election imminent, a federal court made minor alterations to the 2011 map for use in that year’s races. In May, the Supreme Court ruled Texas Republicans did not draw district lines to discriminate against minorities, In June, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering should not be a matter for federal courts, Texas has been found in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act every decade since its enactment, The current gerrymandered districts stem from a Tom DeLay-led redrawing in 2003, after Republicans captured the House, Senate, and governor's office, California Consumer Do Not Sell My Personal Information. “The Republican majority, egged on by Tom DeLay, decided to take their legislative majority for a spin and redraw the districts mid-decade. In the United States, redistricting takes place in each state about every ten years, after the decennial census. The district's configuration dates from the 2003 Texas redistricting, when most of the old 9th district was split among three neighboring districts. Like clockwork, the United States conducts a census every 10 years to provide a snapshot of where the nation’s residents live. 5. By Aaron Bycoffe, Ella Koeze, David Wasserman and Julia Wolfe. How Texas became 'ground zero' for gerrymandering, voter suppression When legislative districts are drawn to maximize partisan advantage, political parties tend to … From 2000 to 2010, Texas grew by 4 million people, and 90 percent of them were minorities. PUBLISHED Jan. 25, 2018 at 6:00 AM. In a forceful dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority had manipulated prior rulings and the evidentiary record to reach its desired outcome. And gerrymandering isn’t something new that’s popped up in this hyperpartisan environment. After the courts later ruled that the 2011 maps had been drawn with discriminatory intent, the state argued that the 2013 maps weren’t affected because they had been largely drawn by the courts themselves. Gerrymandering of state legislative districts can effectively guarantee an incumbent's victory by 'shoring up' a district with higher levels of partisan support, without disproportionately benefiting a particular political party. Fort Worth Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey represents what the Washington Post recently called "one of the most gerrymandered districts in the country. Each map has a different goal: One is designed to encourage competitive elections, for example, and another to maximize the number of majority-minority districts. Gerrymandering, he said, is just one tactic used to silence voters in Texas. We went back to the drawing board and drew a set of alternative congressional maps for the entire country. The phrase partisan gerrymandering refers to the practice of drawing electoral district maps with the intention of favoring one political party over another. The compactness of a district — a measure of how irregular its shape is, as determined by the ratio of the area of the district to the area of a circle with the same perimeter –can serve as a useful proxy for how gerrymandered the district is. Fierman: The 2nd District, held since the start of the year by Dan Crenshaw, is the result of extreme Republican gerrymandering in Texas. In Texas, where national experts conceded the congressional districts look more like Rorschach inkblots than representative swaths of real estate, the state’s legislative makeup has been impacted by gerrymandering more than any other state, according to a study by the Associated Press. The four-term Democratic incumbent in the 9th district, Nick Lampson, was unseated by Republican Ted Poe, a longtime felony court judge in Harris County. A panel of federal judges in Texas is ordering the state to redraw its congressional district map because it discriminates against Hispanic voters. Beaumont, which had been part of the 2nd and its predecessors for over a century, was removed along with all of Jefferson County. At times, Sotomayor wrote in her 46-page dissent, the majority selectively quotes evidence that exonerates Texas lawmakers of discriminatory intent. Share: District ID: 2nd District: Representative: Dan Crenshaw https://spectrumlocalnews.com/.../a-brief-history-of-texas-gerrymandering- The recent iteration of the gerrymandering saga in Texas dates back to 2003 when Rep. Tom DeLay was avenging years of Democratic gerrymandering. Map of Texas 2nd Congressional District Border. The first installment can be read here.. DALLAS — In 2013, the Supreme Court effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote along ideological lines. “This disregard of both precedent and fact comes at serious costs to our democracy.”. “Minority rights have been protected,” he said at a press conference after the plan was ratified. FiveThirtyEight. American politicians have been gerrymandering districts for more than 200 years. In den Vereinigten Staaten sind dagegen für Kongresswahlbezirke häufig Legislative oder Exekutive der Bundesstaaten und damit Organe, die parteipolitische Ziele verfolg… What is most evident in the rearticulation of the Texas district map is the ease with which legislative mapmakers can engage in political gerrymandering as a permissible practice to subvert the VRA’s provisions for allowing the creation of more balanced districts. The Democrats, who numbered 62, could stop the legislation simply by not showing up. This process occurs every 10 years after collecting new census data. His district disappeared.” As for another Democratic incumbent, Nick Lampson, Fortson says, he and a GOP incumbent “are drawn together in a Republican district.” (Lampson lost, too.) Gerrymandering refers to the practice of redrawing voting district boundaries with the intent to favor one party over the other, discriminate against minorities, or, in some cases, maintain the status quo. He defeated Jim Dougherty (D), Kenneth Duncan (L) … The standout in that state is the 3rd Congressional district, which is the nation's second-most gerrymandered and home to Democratic congressman John Sarbanes. In vielen Demokratien weltweit wurde der Neuzuschnitt von Wahlkreisen zur Vermeidung von Verzerrungen unabhängigen Kommissionen übertragen, die beispielsweise von Verfassungsrichtern besetzt sind, etwa die Delimitation Commission of India. The root of these violations is redistricting, the process of redrawing the boundaries of every congressional and state legislative district to maintain roughly equal populations. All of Liberty County was removed as well, putting the district entirely within Harris County. Here’s another map with the 10 least compact districts identified in the report, based on scores for all four metrics: NC-12, FL-5, MD-3, OH-9, TX-35, NC-4, LA-2, FL-22, MD-6 and NY-10. Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, in 1965, most legal fights about redistricting have concerned the rights of racial minorities. In November 2017, Poe announced that he would retire from Congress at the end of his current term, and did not seek re-election in 2018. The memo, which was disclosed in the course of subsequent litigation, offers a “quick rundown” on each of the seats in the delegation. In other instances, she asserted, the court’s conservatives ignore a broad swath of the factual record that suggests the state’s Republicans sought to preserve the 2011 maps’ flaws as much as possible when drawing the 2013 maps. There’s a lot of complaining about gerrymandering, but what should districts look like? . It’s definitely an unfortunate pattern.”. DeLay expected such a challenge to the 2003 Texas map, and he was ready with a preemptive defense. Download it here. On Thursday, part II of this series will focus on specific laws that have been impacted by gerrymandering and why the practice is so difficult to overturn in the courts. [5][6] Dan Crenshaw was elected on November 6, 2018 and is currently serving as congressman. Sen. John Whitmire, of Houston, decided that the effort had become futile, and returned to Texas for the Labor Day weekend. A month before that ruling, the Supreme Court asserted that partisan gerrymandering should be left to states. “This has a real national impact that should assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood.”. At the time, DeLay said that with 57 percent of Texas voters backing Republicans for Congress, it was only fair that the GOP control more than 15 of the 32 seats in the U.S. House. Learn More. Voters have already cast ballots in three federal elections based on controversial and contested maps drawn after the 2010 census. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the conservative majority that excessive partisanship in the drawing of districts does lead to results that "reasonably seem unjust," but he said that does not mean it is the court's responsibility to find a solution. Aside the fact that Crenshaw is a staunch Trump supporter and votes with Trump positions 95% of the time; overall he has been a terrible representative for his constituents. Determine whether your congressional district is gerrymandered using this website. Veasey said the Supreme Court's decisions to allow gerrymandering and Texas have created a system in which the elected officials are choosing their constituents, not the other way around. The Atlas Of Redistricting. Texas begins redistricting in two years. A select group within the Texas Legislature is the architect and cartographer of this endeavor. The historic decision freed nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval. Soon after the original 2010 redistricting plan was redrawn in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the preclearance law in Shelby v. Holder in 2013, giving Texas a new unchecked power in creating voting laws and passing redistricting plans. In the spring of 2003, Texas Republicans, who were now dominant in both the State House and Senate, proposed a new congressional map that promised to add between five and seven new Republicans to the Texas delegation. In 1979, a group of liberal state senators, known as the Killer Bees, fled the state to deprive the majority of a quorum in a dispute over the date of the Texas Presidential primary. The process will slice up Texas into political districts. Racial gerrymandering and majority-minority districts are discussed in greater detail in this article. Their defense was it was sort of a tit for tat. It encompasses parts of northern and western Houston. “I think that the Supreme Court has definitely erred. “This is the most aggressive map I have ever seen,” Fortson concludes. TEXAS — A seven-year legal battle over Texas’s legislative maps largely ended in May when the Supreme Court rejected almost all claims that Republican lawmakers in the state had drawn electoral districts to intentionally dilute minority voters’ influence — otherwise known as racial gerrymandering. Coordinates: .mw-parser-output .geo-default,.mw-parser-output .geo-dms,.mw-parser-output .geo-dec{display:inline}.mw-parser-output .geo-nondefault,.mw-parser-output .geo-multi-punct{display:none}.mw-parser-output .longitude,.mw-parser-output .latitude{white-space:nowrap}30°02′51″N 95°10′42″W / 30.04750°N 95.17833°W / 30.04750; -95.17833, district representing parts of Houston, TX in the U.S. House of Representatives, Recent election results from statewide races, List of members representing the district, 2020 United States House of Representatives elections, List of United States congressional districts, "Congressional Districts Relationship Files (state-based)", "Partisan Voting Index – Districts of the 115th Congress", "Texas GOP lawmaker won't seek reelection", "DistrictViewer – Texas Legislative Council", Congressional Biographical Directory of the United States 1774–present, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Texas%27s_2nd_congressional_district&oldid=1000217766, Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Short description with empty Wikidata description, All articles with lists with data missing, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 14 January 2021, at 04:19. The 2-to-1 decision — years in the making — was issued Friday night. The decision in Abbott v. Perez rounds out a string of defeats at the high court this term for voting-rights advocates. I really hope that with the blatant attempts right now that tries to undermine African American and Hispanic voters – the things that Trump is saying about voting, about voter fraud, the things that governor Abbott is doing with these drop-off mail ballot boxes – I hope that it wakes them up.". Dan Crenshaw has shown himself to be a liar, a racist, a misogynist, and an asshole. Series The Gerrymandering Project . So most of them took off for Oklahoma. Shortly after the redistricting plan passed, Joby Fortson, an aide to Republican Rep. Joe Barton, sent a candid email to a group of colleagues that makes this point more clearly than any public statement issued by the participants. Editor's Note: This story is the second of a two-part series on gerrymandering. This time, in 2003, the House Democrats were dubbed the Killer D’s. Gerrymandering, in other words, is the practice of setting boundaries of electoral districts to favor specific political interests within legislative bodies, often resulting in districts with convoluted, winding boundaries rather than compact areas.. Not a single minority group received an additional seat in Congress as a result of that growth. The 2012 redistricting process radically changed the district. Districts that follow a generally regular shape tend to be compact, while those that have a lot of squiggles and offshoots and tentacle-looking protuberances tend to be the most doctored. The practice of partisan gerrymandering was … Maryland’s 3rd congressional district, the most gerrymandered in the nation, is a Rorschach test in the most literal sense. A majority-minority district is one in which a racial group or groups comprise a majority of the district's populations. If a mid-census redistricting was necessary to align the seats with the popular vote, Republicans argued, so be it. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (AP), COVID-19/Coronavirus News & Announcements. From the beginning, it was evident that the agenda of the Republican mapmakers in Texas was more political than racial. Fortson begins his description of the district where Martin Frost, the senior Democrat in the state, would have to run with the words “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. He noted that the committee was probably going to have to extend some rural districts into urban areas to keep the population at roughly 850,000 per district. . “As a result of these errors, Texas is guaranteed continued use of much of its discriminatory maps,” she wrote, joined by justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan. A panel of federal judges in Texas is ordering the state to redraw its congressional district map because it discriminates against Hispanic voters. The compactness of a district, measured using the ratio of the district area to the area of a … The 2nd and 22nd congressional districts are considered examples of partisan gerrymandering in Texas. The U.S. holds federal elections every two years, so those maps are used at least five times before another decennial census starts the process anew.

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