TEXAS - A Banana Republic within the USA
08/24/2003 - People?s representatives are forced to exile because they tried to stop one of the deadliest
attacks to Democracy in America: a redistricting plan that would create partisan congressional districts.
State troops are sent after the lawmakers; an FBI investigation is requested against them; fines of $5,000
per day of absence are ruled by the Republican-controlled state; their lives are threatened. The story
doesn?t take place in Africa or South-America, but instead in Texas, the home state of the U.S. president.
And most surprisingly and outraging, the American mainstream media have decided to censor the event in
order to perpetuate the American ?mock democracy?.
By Ndzana Seme
51 Democrat Representatives of the Texas House were forced to exile from the state on May 11 in an
effort to prevent a state constitutional quorum. The quorum-blocking move killed a Republican redistricting
plan in the regular session. The power of constituencies to designate representatives, including the
president of the U.S., is the gaping scourge of the failing American democracy; with a crisis point having
been reached during the 2000 election in which the candidate with less number of votes was enthroned by
the U.S. supreme court as the leader of the first world superpower.
The U.S. Constitution requires that a census be conducted every 10 years. Based on the census, seats in
the U.S. House of Representatives are reapportioned to each state. Further, the Constitution grants to
each state the responsibility to organize the state into congressional districts. Each congressional district is
an electoral constituency with the power to designate a representative to local or federal congress.
The U.S. population, according to the 2000 census, was 281,421,906. Texas population was
20,851,820. Since Texas has 7.4 percent of the U.S. population, it is entitled to send 32 U.S. lawmakers
over the total of 435 members to the U.S. House, up 2 seats from previous reapportionment.
In 2001, the Texas Legislature decided to redistrict. On May 26, 2001 the House Committee on
Redistricting submitted a redistricting plan. Unfortunately, the plan never came up for a vote. The state
Senate had not been able to get a bill out of the committee. Therefore, its members never voted on a plan.
Since the Texas Legislature adjourned without passing a redistricting plan, the Texas court system inherited
the issue and imposed its redistricting plan.
The Republican-controlled State appealed the 2001 district court ruling. But one should remember that no
state has ever successfully overturned a court-imposed redistricting; especially one where the state
appeared in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and lost.
Democrat Rodney Ellis, Texas State Senator (Houston), sent a letter to MoveOn.org requesting the
non-profit organization?s support to cope with the hardship of their exile in New Mexico. The letter
reports that the 2002 Congressional elections, the first held under the new 2001 redistricting plan, resulted
in a Congressional delegation from Texas consisting of 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans. However, five
of the 17 Democrats prevailed only because they were able to win Republicans? and independent voters?
hearts.
Republicans are in the majority of the Texas House of Representatives and believe they can manipulate the
districts to elect as many as 22 Republicans out of the 32 member Texas Congressional delegation. They
achieve this by packing minority voters - especially Democrat-leaned Blacks - into as few districts as
possible and breaking apart rural districts so that the impact of independent voters will be reduced and
suburban Republican voters will dominate.
However, the state constitution requires that at least 2/3 of the House be present for the House to pass a
bill. The only choice left for the Democrat minority representatives was to block the quorum with the
absence of their members.
Cornered in their total inability to secure more Texan Republican seats to the U.S. Congress, which would
confirm Republicans in the Congress and the White House for the next several years, the Republican
Speaker of the Texas House and the Governor called on state law enforcement officials to physically
compel the Democrats to return. They failed since the Democrat lawmakers removed themselves to a
Holiday Inn in Ardmore, Oklahoma ? outside the reach of state troops.
?I know, it sounds more like a banana republic than the dignified democracy on which we have long
prided ourselves,? Rodney Ellis writes. ?We are effectively exiled from the state due to our unalterable
opposition to a Republican effort -- pushed by (U.S. Senator) Tom Delay and Karl Rove, and led by
Texas Governor Rick Perry -- that would rewrite the map of Texas Congressional districts in order to
elect at least 5 more Republicans to Congress,? he continued.
"The only way you can guarantee the election of more Republicans is to pack and crack minority
communities around the state," Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price said.
?The Republican redistricting effort shatters the tradition of performing redistricting only once a decade
immediately after the Census -- making redistricting a perpetual partisan process,? Rodney Ellis adds. ?It
elevates partisan politics above minority voting rights, in contravention of the federal Voting Rights Act. It
intends to decimate the Democratic Party in Texas, and lock in a Republican majority in the U.S. House of
Representatives.?
While Tom Delay resorted to the new Home Land Security department, the department of Transportation,
and the department of Justice to force the exiled Democrat congressmen to sit in the Texas redistricting
plan session, Karl Rove and Rick Perry twice unsuccessfully tried to get the bill passed despite lack of
quorum, using the state constitution that gives the Governor the power to call a 30-day special legislative
session at any time between regular sessions.
The central issue is that the plan presented by the Texas House incorporates extreme gerrymandering.
However it would be difficult for the Republican political armies to defeat the following 2001 District
court's opinion, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court one year ago:
"? (W)e see gerrymandering as other than what it is: an abuse of power that, at its core, evinces a
fundamental distrust of voters, serving the self-interest of the political parties at the expense of the public
good."
But who knows what ever can happen in a banana republic? But yet Texas is president G W Bush?s home
state, a state he was the governor of before he becomes the U.S. president following a much debated
election in which the concept of congressional district was identified as the central gangrene of the
American democracy. Texas politics are handled exactly the way G W Bush handles the American and
world affairs: with violence, boorishness, cynicism and iconoclasm vis-à-vis democratic principles, civil and
human rights, and civilization.
The most outraging is absence of interest from the American mainstream media about the Texas
redistricting plan event dragging on since three months. While all spotlights are pointed on the ?Californian
Recall? that would unconstitutionally overthrow a Democrat governor before his term of office, the most
scandalous exile of Texan Democrat lawmakers is simply ignored.
The American media's rule of showing the people ?what we want the people to know?, instead of showing
them ?what they want to know? prevails. With the mainstream media having taken side with the
?organized money? instead of staying the Peole's watchdog as Democracy requires them to be, the USA
is more and more known as a ?mock democracy? that the world discovers day after day.
At stake is whether the fate of the United States should be left in the hands of individuals and a party
overtly devoted to serve, not only the good cause of some of the wealthy and firms that (legally) corrupt
them through campaign soft money contributions, but most of all the fundamentalists and short-sighted
among their owners actually leading America towards economic, social and security chaos. The most
dangerous evil for the people is inside the U.S.
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©2003 The African Independent, Inc. All rights to republication are reserved