As Texas Republicans try to muscle a rare mid-decade redistricting bill through the Legislature to help Republicans gain seats in Congress – at President Donald Trump’s request – residents in Austin, the state capital, could find themselves sharing a district with rural Texans more than 300 miles away.
The proposed map chops up Central Texas’ 37th Congressional District, which is currently represented by Democrat Rep. Lloyd Doggett, will be consumed by four neighboring districts, three of which Republicans now hold.
One of those portions of the Austin-area district was drawn to be part of the 11th District that Republican Rep. August Pfluger represents, which stretches into rural Ector County, about 20 miles away from the New Mexico border.
If you think that the Democrats are the only ones to gerrymander until now you’re not intelligent enough to be weighing in
They both do it. Democrats are just the ones who invented it, then like everything they do, they cry victim when the Republicans also do it and try to act like they’re filled with righteous indignation knowing that they also jerrymander.
The American system adopted it from across the pond. Rotten and pocket burroughs were frequent in the 18th century and actually started getting outlawed in the 19th century right when the Jeffersonian republicans went hard with it.
The Jeffersonian republican/democratic republican is the father of both major parties, it split into the northern republicans (anti- slavery) and southern democrats (mostly pro-slavery).
Neither of those parties resemble the modern parties, which flipped ideologies during the Civil Rights Movement, among their most recent changes.
So, it would be safer to say that American gerrymandering was created by the precursor to both modern parties.
I thought they flipped sides after lbj passed the civil rights act…
It wasn’t a single event that flipped the parties, it was a long evolution over time.
And now the Republican Party has made another major evolution, and turned into the MAGA Party. They no longer follow any of the tenets of the Republican Party - smaller government, lower taxes, economic responsibility, family values, etc. - and only follow the MAGA tenets of hatred, bigotry, cruelty, treason, fiscal mismanagement, incompetence, weaponisatuon, and pedophilia.
The Republican Party is as dead as the Whigs, and should only be referred to in a historic, scholarly setting, as the precursor to the MAGA Party. All Democratic politicians should stop saying Republican Party in all media appearances, and only refer to them as the MAGA Party.
Democratic leadership should even hold an official press conference making the announcement that they are unilaterally declaring the Republican Party dead, replaced by the MAGA Party, and then never refer to the Republicans again. Making this fundamental declaration about the Republican Party without consulting them, will likely make them go even crazier. I can already hear them howling like the baboons they are.
Most of those people grew up in the Republican Party, and it is their identity. To kill it, and replace it with a preschool fingerprinting like the MAGA Party will grind up many of them. Many are only MAGAs Of Convenience, and they won’t like it at all. I want to see them howl that they are officially sidelined from history, and scream that they are NOT MAGA, they are REPUBLICANS!
There is stress between MAGA and the traditional GOP that they try to hide, and pretend doesn’t exist, and this would put tremendous strain on that partnership.