Texas's flying lawmakers pretty well know they've reached a dead end in their idiot-minded protest of congressional redistricting in their state.
Their bid to prevent that by fleeing the state to deny it a quorum will end exactly the way the one they tried earlier ended: They'll be back to their home state with their tails between their legs and life will return to normal.
So now they're trying to save face, according to the Texas Tribune:
ST. CHARLES, Illinois — If Gov. Greg Abbott is determined to pass a gerrymandered congressional map, Texas Democrats know he has the votes and the power to eventually get his way.
But for the dozens of Democrats who left the state this week in protest of the map, ...
...
... it will all be worth it, they say, if they can lay the groundwork for a national fight over redistricting and ensure enough voters across the country understand what they frame as an attempt by President Donald Trump to stack the deck in the midterm election next year.
Which is pretty ridiculous.
Democrats have been playing the gerrymandering game for a lot longer than Republicans have, and now they're getting a taste of their own medicine.
They want "a conversation" about gerrymandering?
How ironic that they made that call in Illinois, the pioneer of that practice with districts cut up in manners so bizarre nobody could defend them as legitimate representations of the voters, just representative of the wished outcomes of the Democrats. Would they really like a conversation about gerrymandering? They've been doing it for decades.
Seems they like gerrymandering, but only when they get to do the gerrymandering. They don't like gerrymandering when Republicans do it. That's the depth of their debate.
No, there won't be a debate, not when Democrat practices are sure to be brought up.
The Tribune piece goes into how this gerrymandering is triggering threats of political retaliation from states such as New York and California.
The walkout, meant to deny Republicans the quorum needed to conduct legislative business and bring the House to a standstill, has also set off a possible national redistricting war. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has promised to draw more blue seats in his state if Texas approves its plan, and national Democratic leaders are looking to reshape maps in Illinois, New York and Maryland.
But even on that front, they are firing blanks.
They shot that wad years ago when they did their gerrymandering as Republicans stayed silent.
How can you gerrymander an already-gerrymandered district and expect to squeeze out more leftist results when you have already got what you wanted from the previous gerrymanderings?
Sorry, boys, you can only go to that well once.
Their yellings ring hollow for a third reason: Texas has already been cheated of a congressional seat based on the last Census.
According to Katie Pavlich, writing at Townhall:
Not only did the 2020 census count illegal aliens (like previous counts) - but it was wildly inaccurate - conveniently benefiting Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In a shocking report that has not received the attention it deserves, the U.S. Census Bureau recently admitted that its 2020 Census count of the American population was incorrect in at least 14 states.
And those mistakes were costly to certain states in terms of congressional representation, number of electors, and money those states are likely to receive from the federal government during the next decade. To put the scope of these mistakes into perspective, contrast the errors in the Census Bureau’s latest recount (the 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey, or PES) with the recount from a decade ago (the 2010 Post-Enumeration Survey)—in which there was a net overcount of a mere 0.01 percent (36,000 people), a statistically insignificant error.
As explained below, as a result of these errors, Florida did not receive two additional congressional seats and Texas did not receive one more congressional seat. Meanwhile, two other states, Minnesota and Rhode Island, each retained a congressional seat that they should have lost, and Colorado gained a new seat to which it was rightfully not entitled.
Texas's redistricting corrects a lot of longstanding injustices of underrepresentation in Congress and prepares the groundwork for that extra seat Texas is entitled to and Rhode Island, Minnesota and Colorado are not.
The overall argument is that Republicans are doing this to serve themselves, but it ignores the picture that existed before corrective action was taken to redistrict. Far from Donald Trump seeking more power, as they and their media allies frame it, the conservative Texans are trying to even the playing field through tit-for-tat warfare, which unfortunately, is the only power game Democrats understand. They don't play by Marquess of Queensberry rules, they understand force and Texas Republicans are delivering it.
Thank goodness the Texans recognized the Democrat game and showed Democrats they can give as good as they can get. The old era is over.
Now time to get back to the legislature and drop the stupid flying stunts. Bet they won't try that again.
