Wednesday, November 19, 2025

🎶Texas Wants You Anyway 🎶

The story of Texas' redistricting is legit Keystone Cops level hilarious. Here's the 160 page court order distilled into a short vignette:

Trump: Ya’ll should redistrict Texas.*
Texas Leg: No. Thanks. We’re good.
Trump: No really. I want you to redistrict.
Trump DOJ: Your districts are illegal [they weren’t]. You need to racially gerrymander them [which is illegal].
Texas Gov: I’m calling a special session of the leg because of the DOJ letter.
Texas AG: This DOJ letter is hogwash. We need to ignore it (seriously, hint hint).
Texas Leg: We’re redistricting because of the DOJ letter, not because of partisanship.
Jake Tapper: Are you redistricting because of Trump?
Texas Gov: No, we’re redistricting to give Hispanics districts and because of the DOJ letter.
Texas leg redraws districts based on race.
Court: What's up?
Plaintiffs: You can’t racially gerrymander districts.
Texas AG: The DOJ letter was hogwash. We made partisan maps. Race didn't matter.
Texas Leg: Oh yeah, we did what the DOJ told us to do. It was racial!
Texas AG: No, I swear!
Court: This DOJ letter is garbage but it sure looks like it’s telling you to gerrymander based on race.
Court: Racial gerrymandering is illegal.
Court: If you guys had just drawn the same districts based on partisanship, this would all be legal.
Court: But at every turn, you said you were racially gerrymandering based on the DOJ letter.
Court: Since racial gerrymandering is illegal, your new maps are illegal.

How did this happen? Either someone at the DOJ deliberately sabotaged this DOJ letter or, perhaps more likely, Harmeet Dhillon was way in over her head and didn't bother to run this letter through the 'ol AI.
I don’t know what the Supremes will do with this. Under the statute creating the opportunity for this claim, appeals go directly there.  Probably they issue a stay, probably the maps remain as gerrymandered (certainly after “Kavanaugh stops” the Sinister Six aren’t ashamed of being associated with blatant racial bias). But given the state of play among Hispanics amidst Trump’s “Get ‘Em Out By Friday” deportation policy, their support for the GOP is no longer assured. Especially in midterms, with Trump no longer on the ballot (for evermore). 

I was always skeptical redistricting would ever work. It was commonplace in the 19th century, but that political culture has faded. It’s not Epstein files toxic, but I’m not sure voters are going to be real happy waking up next November to a political world of brand new districts drawn to restrict their vote. That data is like polls anyway; always expecting the outcome of the last election. Things have changed quite a bit since then. And politicians are always the last to find that out.

*Clearly a Yankee. Doesn’t know how to spell “y’all.” That’s all right. As Lyle Lovett said: “Texas wants you anyway.”
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2 comments:

  1. jim, some guy in iowa12:42 PM

    There is so much bad lawyering going on it almost seems like malicious compliance- that these people are just going through the motions for Trump. The hole in that line of thinking is, it could be done without torching their own reputations. So back to the simplest answer: they really are that dumb. Amazing this is who is running the country.

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  2. The Thought Criminal1:23 PM

    I'm ever more curious about the status of Amy Coney Barretts two Haitian children and what they might think about their mom's association with blatant racism. I'd love to grill the administration from Notre Dame, especially that jackass who got Covid at her coming out party.

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