Texas Is the Dry Run for the GOP’s Dismantling of Electoral Democracy
They know what they’re doing. In his opening remarks, King outlined his reasons for sponsoring the bill: “My first objective is to create a plan that will elect five more Republicans to the U.S. Congress.” If this sounds scandalous to you, it’s because you are correctly drawing the connection between GOP seats and decreasing representation of people of color, which is exactly what they can’t say. They can be honest about their ends but not their means, though the two are practically the same.
These fuckers can’t be shamed. Maybe that’s the only thing they have in common with their forebears in the Texas legislature, an elected body with the shortest calendar in the country and thus the most scandals per hour served. It used to be that shamelessness was a little more flamboyant. Old-school Texas politics had a sweaty, theatrical quality—men in bolo ties and cowboy boots saying the quiet part with a wink. But today’s GOP operates with a different kind of shamelessness: dull, mechanical, and at the beck and call of a tyrant. While we have the odd sex scandal still (and some of them are very odd), the immorality here is bloodless, cold. They are executing a plan. They’re not worried about losing power. They’re building a system where they’ll never have to ask for it again.
I’d been at the Capitol for six hours before the thing with Pastor Dan happened. I had pages of notes, hours of voice memos. Witness after witness took the mic to explain how this map would hurt them and hurt Texas. It would make aid harder to access, representation more diluted, and invert democracy: It would “allow representatives to select their districts and not districts to select their representatives.” Over the past three weeks, there have been thousands of public comments on this map. Last week, Texas House Democrats lit off to other parts as a last-ditch effort to forestall a vote, and are now being “chased like runaway slaves,” in Miles’s colorful formulation.
