Hard to believe Republicans are flying blind on this.
While the Republican redistricting effort is underway in Texas, the fight is on nationally. So, too, is the wait, as political observers – and anxious politicians – hold on for the new map.
State Rep. Chris Turner (D-Arlington) is a member of the Texas House Select Committee on Congressional Redistricting.
The Arlington Democrat accuses Republicans of hiding the ball because no map has been released after the first week of the special session.
“I believe there is a map out there somewhere. I think it’s been drawn in the White House or by DC political operatives. And it’s probably been sent to the Governor,” Rep. Turner told us on Inside Texas Politics. “But we haven’t seen it. So, they’re hiding the ball from not only the Legislature, but from the public, from Texans. And that’s wrong.”
President Donald Trump says he wants five new Republican-held Congressional seats in Texas, and it can be done by simply redrawing the state’s political map, part of an overall effort by Republicans to maintain their slim majority in the U.S. House. Republican strategists we’ve talked to say three or four are more realistic.
Rep. Turner told Inside Texas Politics he doesn’t know what to expect. But he suspects Republicans have delayed releasing the map because they don’t want the public to see it before all scheduled public hearings conclude. The final hearing [was] held Monday, July 28 inside Turner’s district in Arlington.
There’s video embedded of the conversation, if you want to hear more. I’ve talked about this before, that it’s not credible to me that the Republicans don’t have at least one map that they’re considering and have done all the number-crunching on. And yet, that’s what they’re saying.
With just 22 days remaining in the Texas Legislature’s special session, Democrats and Republicans alike say they’ve yet to see a proposed redistricting map that President Donald Trump said he wants to shore up the GOP’s grip on Congress.
And certainly the public hasn’t seen the map that could move millions of Texans into new districts, even as the Texas Legislature holds hearings to get input from them on how to reconfigure the state’s 38 congressional districts before next year’s elections.
The chair of the Texas Senate committee charged with redrawing the state’s congressional districts said he hasn’t seen any maps either and couldn’t even tell the public or his colleagues when one might be released.
“I certainly do expect one will pop up before too long,” state Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford, said on Monday during a hearing.
That is adding to the frustration of Houston’s Black and Hispanic leaders, who say the redistricting is being rammed through so fast that it gives their communities little chance to have influence on what the Legislature ultimately does. Even Monday’s Texas Senate hearing on how to draw the congressional maps in Houston was done in Austin, and people could only testify via a computer teleconferencing program.
“It’s an absolute farce,” state Sen. Borris Miles, D-Houston, said about the whole attempt to redraw the maps. “And it’s disrespectful to every Black and Brown citizen in this state.”
[…]
While Miles and other Democrats have been blasting the redistricting process in the Legislature, outside, Democratic groups have been holding rallies around the state to mobilize voters to help fight the proposed changes. On Friday, an estimated 5,000 people attended a rally in a school gym in Austin to hear former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke and current U.S. Reps. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas; Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio; and Greg Casar, D-Austin, speak against the redistricting effort.
In Houston on Saturday, O’Rourke and Crockett were part of another rally at a community park urging people to testify against redrawing the congressional maps.
And yet here we are. It may be that they have a couple of competing maps and they want to pick one to unify behind, and it may be that they do have a map in mind but haven’t convinced enough of their own doubters to put it out there. It’s also possible that the Trump administration sold the Texas GOP a bill of goods and they’re all scrambling to come up with something credible. Maybe that hypothetical map could reasonably flip three seats, but only a map that flips at least five is acceptable to Trump and no one quite knows how to placate him without risking major losses in a bad year. The “Trump’s Razor” hypothesis that Josh Marshall coined in 2016, that the dumbest explanation for anything Trump is doing is usually the correct one, is still in play. But until we see a map, we’re all just guessing. That’s almost certainly a feature and not a bug.
UPDATE: On a related note:
Law enforcement dropped charges against a Houston congressional candidate who was jailed in Austin after being arrested at a public hearing on Thursday for protesting the GOP push to redraw congressional districts.
Isaiah Martin — one of more than two dozen candidates vying for the congressional seat left vacant when U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner died in March — was charged with disrupting a meeting, resisting arrest and criminal trespass, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Martin, 27, was held in the Travis County jail until Friday night, more than 24 hours after he was forcibly removed from a state House redistricting committee hearing where he shouted “Shame!” at lawmakers and ignored the chairman’s instructions to quiet down. Several security officers tackled him as he resisted effort to have him removed. He was then taken out of the Capitol.
A Texas Department of Public Safety spokeswoman said Martin was arrested around 7 p.m. after he “refused to obey requests from committee members and subsequent orders from DPS to leave a committee hearing at the Texas State Capitol.” The charges were dropped on Friday, according to the Travis County Attorney’s Office. It’s not clear why.
Martin said in a video posted on X after he was released that Republicans “threw me in jail because I refused to sit idly by as they seek to redistrict our state.”
“They did this because I had the audacity to speak up — and you know what, I’m going to continue to have that audacity,” Martin said. He appeared at a redistricting hearing in Houston over the weekend, where he received applause from the crowd.
That Martin was ever arrested was extremely dumb, but this is the world we live in.
UPDATE: Here’s a report from the third and so far final hearing.
Epic Beatdown in Arlington
Only one guy, a MAGA preacher, spoke in favor of redistricting. Several other self-identified Republicans spoke against it. All of the other witnesses, speaker after powerful speaker, hour after hour, delivered punishment to the Republican committee members. I again watched the whole thing, I again don’t know how the online comments went, but I am still amazed that Team R could not get their people in front of the microphone for this. Team No Redistricting absolutely crushed it in all three hearings.
A highlight late in the session was an election law professor that spoke about the DOJ letter and the case law it cited. He took it apart case by case, explaining how the cases cited were misinterpreted or not applicable. It was stated that the DOJ letter was an embarrassment and that whoever wrote it had likely not passed the Bar.
The Democrats on the committee, in particular the Vice Chair Rep. Rosenthal, tried to pin down the Chairman and get him to admit that it was clear no one wanted this. The Chair tried to weasel out of any statement but then grudging admitted that an “overwhelming majority” of speakers rejected redistricting. The Vice Chair pointed out that for the three hearings the majority was approximately 1000 to 1.
I don’t know how the Republican committee members felt after getting all of this pounding. They were called cowards over and over, told repeatedly that they were not representing the people of Texas, and even told they were shameless power hungry boot lickers for Trump. I am betting some serious booze got chugged afterwards.
I stopped by the UH event last Saturday. I didn’t have time to wait all day for the slim possibility of getting an opportunity to speak. I did fill out one of the blue forms, despite the vexing technicality that “neutral” was prechecked. The lack of any proposed maps or a bill meant that you couldn’t register approval or disapproval on the form. Very annoying.
While I would share J’s hope that this was unpleasant for the GOPers, I think that they are beyond shame. I see no redemption arc for them.
Just a footnote on the Isaiah Martin thing, because that is all it deserves. He was inarticulate at the microphone, did not seem to have a statement ready, and wasted his allotted two minutes. He then ignored the repeated requests of the chair to yield the podium. He knew he was going to get tossed out and got what he wanted. In my opinion this was a very amateurish stunt by a CD 18 candidate trying to stand out in a very crowded field.
He spoke at the Arlington hearing, trying to play the unbowed victim. I call BS.
One possible interpretation of the lack of any proposed plan(s) is that the stated objective is unobtainable and that has been verified by the team(s) working on it. Obviously, there are other plausible scenarios. We’ll know soon enough.
J: “In my opinion this was a very amateurish stunt by a CD 18 candidate trying to stand out in a very crowded field.”
Me: It seems to have worked.
Joel, I am giving Mr. Martin points for thinking on his feet. After he flubbed his big moment, it was time for him to leave the podium along with the sorry remains of his campaign. He grabbed the only life line he could, making a big scene to distract from his failure at the mike.
I imagine that the same anxiety about the midterms that caused Cheeto the Cheat to order more seats is also affecting Texas Republicans. Filling that order means endangering their own seats by adding pissed off Democrats to their districts. The infernal free for all within the Texas GOP right now has got to be insane. I don’t see any map being agreed by them for a while.