The Calculating and the Calculated: Texas Redistricts Its Ghosts By Earl Cotten for The Earl Angle Newsletter In the capitol, under the indifferent gaze of statues commemorating older, perhaps less intricate, betrayals, the machinery grinds. Governor Greg Abbott has summoned the legislature back. Ostensibly, they convene to address the floods, the drowned homes, the ruptured earth. But the true agenda, appended like a codicil to a will nobody wanted to read, is redistricting. Again. Mid-decade. A recalibration of power lines using instruments known to be faulty, guided by a map already fading from relevance. One watches, not with surprise – surprise is for the innocent, and innocence is a luxury long since pawned in Texas politics – but with a certain cold recognition. This is how it happens. Not with a bang, but with a spreadsheet. Not in a wave of passion, but in a calculated, almost elegant, act of self-immolation disguised as strategy. I. The proposition, laid bare, possesses a stark, Texan audacity. Possessing already 25 of the state’s 38 congressional seats – a dominance secured by maps drawn barely three years prior, maps currently under legal siege for precisely the manipulations they now seek to amplify – the Republican apparatus aims for more. Three more. Perhaps five. The national calculus is simple, brutal: the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is tissue-paper thin. Donald Trump, sensing vulnerability, wants a bulwark. Ohio is being similarly wrangled, promising another two or three seats. Texas, vast and booming and ostensibly crimson, is to be the linchpin. The insurance policy against the predictable ebb tide of a midterm election. So, the maps must be redrawn. Now. While the floodwaters offer a distraction, however ghoulish. While the legal challenges to the last gerrymander are still wending their way through the courts. Hakeem Jeffries names it correctly: a mid-decade power grab disguised as legislative necessity. But the naming changes nothing. The machinery is in motion. The method is familiar, a dark art refined over decades: surgical incisions into the body politic. To wrest five seats from territory currently yielding Democratic victories requires a delicate, perilous operation. Conservative voters, clustered safely in districts running 70%, 80% Republican, must be siphoned off. Dripped, like scarce water, into districts currently blue. The aim is to turn those districts pink, then red. But the consequence, the unspoken counterpoint vibrating beneath the confident projections, is the inevitable thinning of the Republican lifeblood elsewhere. Districts once considered impregnable fortresses become mere stockades. Margins shrink from twenty points to ten, to five. Safe seats become competitive. Competitive seats become, overnight, vulnerable. You dilute your own strength to poison the well of the opposition. Julie Johnson, a Democrat possessing the weary clarity of those who have witnessed these cycles before, calls it roulette. It is perhaps more akin to playing Jenga with the foundations of your own house during a tremor. The goal is to add height; the risk is catastrophic collapse. II. Every act requires its justification, its fig leaf of legality. Abbott’s arrives courtesy of the Department of Justice, a letter dated July 7th. Its argument, delivered with bureaucratic crispness, lands like a punchline in a joke nobody finds funny. Four congressional districts – districts around Houston and Dallas where coalitions of Black, Latino, and Asian voters have formed effective majorities and elected candidates of their choice – are declared, suddenly, “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” The DOJ, acting on a controversial and legally shaky ruling from the Fifth Circuit (Petteway v. Galveston County), asserts these coalition districts aren’t protected by the Voting Rights Act. Therefore, Texas must dismantle them. The dissonance is breathtaking. It hangs in the air, thick as the humidity. For years, throughout the ongoing litigation challenging the current maps (LULAC v. Abbott, among others), Texas Republicans and their hired mapmakers have testified under oath, repeatedly, emphatically, that race played no role in drawing these very districts. They were drawn, they insisted, purely on partisan grounds – a distinction they believed immunized them from Voting Rights Act challenges. The maps were colorblind, they swore. Race was irrelevant. Now, with convenient timing, the DOJ hand-delivers a rationale demanding their dismantling because of race. Because, suddenly, race was determinative, and unacceptably so. It is a legal pirouette so blatant it borders on farce. Justin Levitt, who navigated these shoals in the Obama DOJ, dismisses it as a "fig leaf." It is less a leaf than a hastily grabbed napkin, transparent and inadequate. The targets are not accidental: all four districts elected minority Democrats. The effect of "remedying" this alleged constitutional violation will be the further dilution of minority voting strength – the precise harm the pending lawsuits allege the current maps already inflict. The state’s position is not merely contradictory; it is schizophrenic. Yesterday, race didn’t matter. Today, it matters so much these districts are illegal. Tomorrow? Tomorrow depends on who needs which votes carved where. Principle is the first casualty, replaced by a chilling, transactional cynicism. III. History in Texas is not a distant country; it is the very soil, layered and unstable, upon which they build. The ghosts of redistricting past hover over this special session, whispering warnings in the dry, conditioned air. They remember 2003. Tom DeLay, the Hammer, orchestrating a mid-decade redraw with naked aggression. The Democrats, cornered, fled. To Oklahoma, then New Mexico. A quorum break born of desperation. It bought time, generated outrage, but ultimately failed. The GOP gained seats. It also sowed seeds of resentment, fertilizing the ground for future losses. Power, grasped too tightly, can crush the hand that holds it. They remember 2011. Another aggressive gerrymander, stretching Republican voters across the burgeoning Dallas suburbs like butter scraped over too much bread. Safe districts were engineered, margins deemed comfortable. Then came 2018. A wave, yes, fueled by a national recoil, but it found fertile ground in those overextended districts. Demographic shifts – the steady, relentless influx, primarily Latino – met political energy. Twelve state House seats flipped. Two congressional districts turned blue. Michael Li of the Brennan Center named it the "dummymander": the self-inflicted wound born of overreach. The maps, designed for perpetual dominance, cracked under the weight of their own ambition and the changing tide they ignored. The architects, confident in their calculus, had failed to factor in the human variable – the slow drift of population, the spark of political engagement, the unpredictable current of collective will. The parallels now are almost too on the nose. Mid-decade? Check. Targeting minority coalition districts? Check. Driven by national GOP imperatives? Check. Using power gained through previous gerrymanders to entrench it further? Check. John Cornyn’s public admission of uncertainty – “I’m as interested as you are in how that’s going to turn out” – is less reassurance and more an unwitting epitaph for strategies blind to their own potential for backfire. The lesson seems clear: in the restless geography of Texas, carving districts too fine, stretching margins too thin, invites the wave that washes them away. But the lesson, it seems, must be learned anew. The arrogance of the present moment dismisses the ghosts as irrelevant, anomalies. This time, they assure themselves, the calculations are sharper. This time, the margins will hold. History suggests otherwise. History suggests they are building on sand. IV. The focus sharpens southward, towards the Rio Grande Valley. Here, the political earth is shifting, or so the Republican narrative insists. Trump made inroads with certain segments of the Latino electorate; close calls in 2020 and 2022 for Democrats like Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar are interpreted as harbingers of realignment. The Valley, therefore, becomes the primary battlefield for the new gerrymander. Carve Laredo. Split McAllen. Inject rural, conservative voters into these districts like a serum meant to turn the patient red. Dismantle the coalition districts identified by the DOJ – Sylvia Garcia’s in Houston, Marc Veasey’s in Fort Worth – ostensibly to comply with the law, practically to eliminate Democratic strongholds. But South Texas resists easy categorization. It is not a monolith. The notion of a permanent realignment remains fiercely contested; Democrats see 2024’s close shaves as anomalies, the product of unique candidates and national headwinds, not a fundamental rupture. Thomas Saenz of MALDEF sees the DOJ's sudden intervention for what it is: collusion between the state and a partisan Department of Justice to "diminish minority voting strength" under a flimsy legal pretext. And Marc Veasey, whose district is on the chopping block, voices the cold, strategic truth the GOP gamblers seem determined to ignore: “If they redraw to target us, they’ll absolutely put more Republicans at risk.” To weaken a Democratic district anchored in Fort Worth requires pulling voters out of surrounding Republican districts. The math is inexorable. You cannot create new Republican seats ex nihilo; you must cannibalize your own margins to do it. The surgical strike risks bleeding the patient to death. V. Beneath the political maneuvering lies a more fundamental, almost existential, absurdity: the maps will be drawn using the 2020 Census data. This data is not merely old; it is known to be flawed. It was collected during the peak of the COVID pandemic
