Naked City

By Doug Potter

Okay, we're an alternative weekly, so we can say this: There are some people in the world who are just a bit repulsive, and Tom DeLay is one of them. The exterminator from Sugar Land, de facto leader of the House Republicans, brought his Democrats-Must-Die act to the genteel corridors of the state Capitol on April 5, when he headlined at the Lege's joint committee hearing on congressional redistricting.

See, the good people of the Texas House and Senate, often treated like lower life forms by our representatives in Washington, every 10 years get the upper hand when they get to draw congressional districts. The committees from both houses -- chaired respectively by Rep. Delwin Jones, R-Lubbock, and Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio -- expected to get an earful from a host of citizens and activist groups.

But it was surprising to see DeLay and his GOP colleague Rep. Joe Barton sitting in the well themselves, instead of twisting arms in private like congresspeople usually do. And it was downright startling to hear the House majority whip toss off the observation that "Democrats are trying to destroy the Voting Rights Act."

Friendly, folksy Barton, whether by design or default, played good cop, praising both the Ds (who number 17) and Rs (13) in the 30-member Texas delegation, which is about to grow with two new seats. Meanwhile, DeLay reiterated that under a truly fair redistricting plan, Republicans would control the delegation by several votes. But DeLay and Barton managed to bob and weave when asked by legislators -- notably Rep. Jim Dunnam, D-Waco -- if they wanted to take out incumbent Democrats. (Dunnam made reference to national gossip that, since the GOP is hemorrhaging seats in California, it wants to take up the slack on the Texas map.)

In the congressmen's defense, all hands agree that the 1991 congressional plan -- which landed the state in court and was altered by judicial action in 1996 -- was an affront to decency and common sense, perpetrated by the Democrats who at the time had an iron grip on the state capitol and the Governor's Mansion. Nowhere was this more true than in Barton's own district, the 6th, which aimed to pack all the elephants in the Metroplex into a bizarre horseshoe stretching from Burleson to Hurst and back south to Ennis, where Barton actually lives. (His neighbors three blocks away reside in another district.)

Even state Rep. Paul Sadler, D-Henderson, no drama queen, termed the 6th "the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen." Barton himself noted that his seat has been called "the most politically gerrymandered district in the history of the republic" and pointed out that in two places it's connected by lakes "where I represent the fish but not the people on the shoreline. We don't need this kind of help." Of course, it wasn't Barton whom the plan was trying to help; it was the Democrats in adjoining districts, notably Martin Frost in the 24th.

As it turned out, the 1991 plan -- attributed by DeLay directly to Frost, the top Texan in the House Democratic leadership -- didn't work, in that Republican Kay Granger, former mayor of Fort Worth, took the supposedly safely Democratic 12th. This was on DeLay's mind as he pointed out that Republicans hold 29 of 29 statewide offices and would, if allowed to, control most of the delegation. Now, the brave face of the GOP is that gerrymandering only helps Democrats, and that if districts were drawn using logical boundaries the Republicans would show their true strength. But DeLay also made clear that a plan that didn't result in a Republican takeover would be considered unfriendly and potentially illegal.

"Preserving the status quo is not fair," he thundered, noting that if the new districts honestly reflected "the full nature of the changes in Texas," they'd account for the state's explosive suburban growth and Republican ascendancy. As for the Voting Rights Act, DeLay says that Anglo Democrats, a declining breed everywhere and almost extinct in Texas, overpacked minority districts nationally to keep Democrats of color from challenging them. But, he tried to assure the panel, that hasn't happened in Texas -- yet.

It would take highly creative cartography, of which the Lege is clearly capable, to not put the new 31st and 32nd districts in the state's suburbs. But DeLay's party-based argument is leaky at best. Even though Lege Democrats gave DeLay various portions of what-for, none really drove this point home. It fell instead to the congressional Democrats' expert-for-hire, American University professor Alan Lickman, to point out that most of the state's districts should already vote Republican, and do so in most elections, but that they keep electing people like Abilene's Charlie Stenholm, Rockwall's Ralph Hall, and Waco's Chet Edwards, regardless of what DeLay views as the natural order of things.

Professor Lickman, who played Arrogant Yankee Windbag in tangling with the Lege's GOP enforcer, Arlington Rep. Kent Grusendorf, waved a lot of numbers around, but political junkies already know that Stenholm and Hall in particular vote so often with the GOP that the Texas delegation is, for all practical purposes, evenly split. (Changing parties, though, would guarantee them GOP primary opposition, which is how party-switcher Greg Laughlin got kicked out of the 14th by current GOP incumbent Ron Paul.) And the combined houses of the Lege, at 52% Democrat, are likewise split, as were the voters in most of the 2000 statewide races. Remember, Rick Perry won the lieutenant governor's race, and thus now holds the Mansion, by well under one percentage point.

Despite House GOP fantasies of a world without Democrats, several witnesses testified to the advantages of power sharing and bipartisanship. Notable among them were civic leaders from Mid-Cities like Arlington and Grand Prairie, which are currently split between Barton and Frost, both of whom have a lot of stroke and have pitched in for the folks at home. And Sadler, living up to his reputation as a cold and fearless SOB, all but ordered DeLay and his posse to sit down with the Dems and work out a consensus plan, instead of waging party war in the back hallways of the Capitol. "We have to do it, and there's no reason you can't," he said. "This isn't 1991. This is now. And we're all grownups."