TEXAS DEMOCRATS were unusually hopeful in 2002, dubbing it the Year of the Comeback. But they lost horribly–including the highly publicized races by an African American for the Senate and a Latino for governor–and Republicans now hold all 29 statewide offices. Republicans captured 57 percent of the vote for U.S. House seats and also won the legislature for the first time in 130 years. Worse for Democrats, Republicans control the state senate (19 to 12) and state house (88 to 62) by sizable margins. By almost any definition, Texas has become a Republican state. There is one aberration: Democrats hold 17 of the state’s congressional seats to 15 for Republicans. The gap was even wider before the 2002 election (17 to 13), when a federal court stepped in. The court did little to narrow the gap, except to put the state’s two new House seats in Republican territory. Now the Texas legislature is set to redraw the congressional map to favor Republicans, perhaps to the tune of a four-seat or better pickup in 2004.
There’s a word for what Republicans want to do–gerrymandering. But of course that is quite normal. When Democrats controlled Texas, they regularly gerrymandered the districts to minimize the impact of the surging growth of Republican suburbs and rural areas. In 1991, Democrats pulled off what Michael Barone calls in the “Almanac of American Politics” “the shrewdest gerrymander of the 1990s.” It allowed Democrats to win 70 percent of the House seats in 1992 (21 of 30), while winning just 50 percent to 48 percent in the popular vote for those seats.
What’s not normal was the Democratic reaction to Republican redistricting this year. Democrats in the statehouse fled to Oklahoma in a huff, to prevent a quorum and thus block a vote on redistricting. And they dressed up their raw obstruction and unmitigated partisanship in the self-righteous language of majority rule and high principle. They seemed oblivious to the hypocrisy of barring Republicans from repeating what Democrats had been doing for decades. They denounced Republicans for acting as a “tyranny of the majority,” when they were pursuing, successfully, a tyranny of the minority and cynically protecting their own gerrymandered preponderance of House seats.
The action of Texas Democrats is of a piece with the behavior of Democrats in Washington. For both, extreme measures that break sharply with the routine course of politics and governing are the order of the day. Why do they feel justified in doing this? I think it’s based on the old saw that conservatives think liberals are stupid while liberals believe conservatives are evil. Both are wrong, but since George W. Bush became president in 2001, Democrats appear convinced he and his allies are indeed evil and that almost anything done to impede them is therefore not only acceptable but morally justified. So Democrats conduct filibusters to block conservative judicial nominees and treat Bush’s presidency as illegitimate.
The normal way, tested over 200-plus years, is for majorities to govern–with limitations. When one party wins, it shapes voting districts to its liking. If it does so too egregiously, the other party goes to court. Legislators don’t storm out in high dudgeon. Why? Because gerrymandering is self-correcting. What one party does is later undone by the other party or by the courts.
The same is true with the appointment of federal appeals court judges. Democratic presidents tend to nominate liberal judges. Republicans choose conservative judges. The result is the appeals courts sometimes tilt conservative, sometimes liberal, but rarely are dominated by either side. Things balance out. In any case, Senate Democrats have decided Bush is not entitled to place many conservatives on the bench. Lacking the votes to stop this, they’ve decided to use the filibuster, which allows a minority to defy the majority. They mask their power play as defiance of “court packing.” When filibusters were staged by Southern Democratic segregationists or Republicans, the media covered them disapprovingly. Now that liberals are the filibusterers, the press is more positive.
Democrats are comfortable with such extraordinary and unprecedented action because of their bitter view of Bush. Only a few Democrats in Washington persist in talking of the president as “selected, not elected,” but many still think that. (They’d have been delighted, of course, if the Florida Supreme Court had “selected” Al Gore to be president.) To Democrats, it would be one thing if Bush, acknowledging his dubious election, were to govern jointly with congressional Democrats, despite Republican control of the Senate and House. Instead, the president pushes his conservative agenda and aggressive foreign policy. Democrats in Washington think this is overreaching, and makes their extreme measures the appropriate response.
Likewise for Texas Democrats, who are doing no better than their colleagues in Washington at adjusting to minority status. They are currently basking in the adulation of the political left. Willie Nelson sent them red bandannas. Molly Ivins love-bombed them in a column that called Republicans fascists and Shiites. Democratic Rep. Martin Frost was emboldened to attack the Republican reapportionment as Nixonian and “an unprecedented, partisan power grab.” He must have a short memory. Frost was the architect of the Democratic gerrymander in 1991.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
