Where will vote be fairer, Sugar Land or Nineveh?
You don’t need to know much about the representational models, however imperfect, in the Iraqi elections this week to understand that they certainly are no more egregious than U.S. House districts in Texas. What hypocrites Republicans can be: All this breast-beating about representative government in Iraq while they continually try to jigger the vote at home.
- Cragg Hines
It strikes me as fascinating- and more than a little disturbing- that while Republicans are championing the development of representative democracy in Iraq, they are actively working to suppress the same thing here in Texas. The story of Congressional redistricting here in Texas is about to find itself on the radar screen again, now that the US Supreme Court has agreed to here arguments filed by Democratic and minority groups. That Tom DeLay’s tactics will finally be put under a microscope…well, let’s just say it’s better late than never. And the role of the Justice Department’s political hacks should also, if there is any justice, come in for some serious scrutiny.
DeLay got what he wanted, to be able to reconfigure the Texas Congressional map in a manner that ensure he would get his Republican majority in the Texas House delegation. That some of the redrawn Congressional districts look like something from a Timothy Leary flashback merely speaks to the purely and crassly political nature of DeLay’s machinations.
Is it more than a touch ironic that as ballots began to be cast in the first post-Saddam parliamentary elections in Iraq, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision to hear multiple challenges to the mid-decade, politically inspired redrawing of the 32 U.S. House districts in Texas as demanded in 2003 by then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land?
And that it became clear that, against all precedent, nonpartisan staff attorneys at the Justice Department, having urged disapproval of Republican redistricting in Texas and having been overruled by their political masters, were then effectively cut out of the federal preclearance process altogether?
And that President Bush’s latest Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito, has opposed the line of one-person, one-vote decisions at the heart of the fair-representation debate?
And that a state court judge in Texas allowed to stand criminal money-laundering charges against DeLay and associates for political fund-raising that was central to his being able to browbeat the Legislature?
Quelle confluence, non?
I’m not naive enough to not be able to recognize the reality that a party in power will attempt to remake the world in it’s own image. Democrats do it when they are Kings of the Mountain. What separates Republicans, though, is their willingness to leap any hurdle, ignore any moral stricture, even break a few laws, in an effort to achieve their goals. When power is the ultimate goal and you belong to a party devoid of morals or even a simple sense of common decency, this is pretty much what you can expect to get…and Republicans certainly haven’t disappointed.
At this point, it’s not a stretch to say that there is a very good chance the the election in Iraq will be a much fairer and more equitable affair than the last Congressional election in Texas. And that is precisely what Tom DeLay and his fellow Republicans were after.
Vote Republican…it’s easier than thinking, eh?
