I was going to put this as the last item in the earlier post, but I didn’t want to change that post’s title and I also didn’t want to gloss over that this happened. We knew it was going to happen, and despite a clever amendment from Rep. Gene Wu that “would only allow the congressional maps to be implemented once the Jeffrey Epstein files were released by the Trump administration”, opposition and delay were swatted aside, as one would expect. It is what it is.
The Senate will pass this soon enough, and then the Lege will move on to other matters. The Senate did have a hearing about flood matters, which of course came after they passed the map bill out of committee, because priorities, but you know they’ll be on this like JD Vance on a nice couch. From there we wait to see what happens in California, where Republicans have sued to stop that process from going forward, and with the federal court in El Paso. But redistricting and placating Donald Trump are why we are here, everything else is an afterthought. The Trib has more.
Care to speculate on what will be the outcome of voting in Houston’s revised districts? I am hoping for a coalition of educated suburbanites who can’t stand Trump and inner-city minorities who have turned against him for his purge of black history and thuggish ICE activity.
It’s really a function of how much the gains Republicans made with mostly Latino voters persist. CD09 could be a very tight race if we’re back in a 2020 or 2018 context. Too soon to tell for now.
Can we hope that all this xenophobia has the same effect here that Prop 187 did in California?