Don't Mess With Texas

As in don't mess with the districts

This will probably come off as one of those more personal ramblings so if you hate those, stop reading now.

I am currently just angry, frustrated, sad, etc.

My life was dominated by sports, and one thing I hated was sitting on the sidelines of any sport I played. Football, basketball, soccer, track… let me do all the things I refused to sit.

To do that it took conditioning. Can’t be tired and asking to play. So stay in shape, stay ready.

If my team lost and I didn’t give it my all, I harbor that blame and responsibility. This NOT to say I am always the best or the sole determining factor, it is about effort and doing all you can to the best of your abilities.

I Should Have Been Better For Us

I am mad at myself for not being better. For not being in a position to do something. For not achieving like I thought I would by now. How I prepped and planned for. How I put everything into trying to grow my abilities so I could do SOMETHING.

I mentioned this before in my piece following the state sponsored murder of Marcellus Williams—

That was almost a year ago and I still feel the same frustration if not more. Both in myself and in this cesspool we call a country.

And now Texas is reminding me of how frustrating it is to watch a game you prepped for be played without you.

Tragedy = Opportunity

Recently, Texas was struck by catastrophic flooding that took the lives of many including a summer camp for little girls.

Texas was swift to respond with legislative action. Just not in the interest of saving future lives.

Instead, the Texas legislature used this tragedy to bring in a special legislative session to…get rid of the non-white congressional majority area seats in Congress.

A quick guide to special sessions— In Texas, as in many states, they are called by the Governor. They are not like a regular legislative session they are limited in scope to WHATEVER triggered it and is included in the proclamation issued by the Governor.

It would seem that right after a horrific flood, we would try to address those issues..but nah..lets take that time to take even more away from people we don’t like.

But Why…But How?

The why is obvious. They know the commander in orange is terrible, and they also know midterm elections will see a shift towards dems. This is not just an indictment on Mango Mussolini but historically common.

The DOJ and His Royal Orangeness sent word to Texas via the DOJ that they want to pick up 5 seats in Texas.

Maybe, just maybe, narrow the gap in the future. The goal being to make the current dems in the urban areas run against EACH OTHER instead of how the actual population looks.

This map is outrageous. If implemented, driving around the outer highway belt in Dallas would have you go through 7 congressional districts. Possibly 8. If you go south to Houston you are looking at 5. That is NOT what democracy looks like.

They want to pick their voters instead of voters picking them.

Eff Gerry

This process is called gerrymandering, which is when you manipulate the maps to be to the advantage of a group and a disadvantage to others. Texas is growing rapidly and most of those people are not white. They don’t like the direction Texas and this country is going, so the only option—besides ya know doing things for the people— is to try to dilute their votes as much as possible.

This has been done for years and historically was done once Black people got the right to vote.

Wonder why…

Oh yeah…that.

Then the courts helped. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed and created what was called pre-clearance. This process involved federal review of voting modifications in historically racist areas before they were allowed to be final.

This helped. More of us were able to vote. Fewer of us were kept out. Well at least in this way—there was still rampant disenfranchisement but at least in this area we were trending up.

We even voted for a Black guy.

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

But as anything like that works…they had to take it back.

The court so eloquently said in Shelby County v. Holder that we didn’t have to do that anymore because the formula used to determine who used to be racist was out of date and we aren’t racist anymore —more on that later— so they began to gut it.

Three days later, states like North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Alabama (insert other southern state here) all pushed for new voting regulations that began to do what the voting rights act had stopped for years.

Racist maps were back baby!!!

But Wait… Am I Complicit

When I said I prepared for a fight and now am watching I am not kidding. This is my wheelhouse. I drew the maps for Kentucky. LITERALLY. My job out of law school was working on the Elections Committee for the KY legislature and they got me a big computer that I used to draw maps to their specifications on a program called Maptitude.

Legislators told me what they wanted and I had to draw it all with a handy guide on election laws on my other screen for reference. But this was pre-Holder.

Now states, like Texas, are literally looking on these maps and seeing where they can get rid of minorities and boost the white rural votes.

Oh..and the districts they are going after in Texas…some of them they were FORCED to draw due to racist Voting Rights Act violations.

But…and back to the stupid rationale in Holder, they are saying we don’t need it anymore.

BUT IT GETS WORSE.

Remember the Harvard affirmative action case? Where the unSupreme Court said we no longer can do that because, and I quote, “the only way to stop being racist is to stop being racist” the DOJ used the Harvard case as legal justification for doing this. Because racism is dead, and the only way to prove it is to not let non-white people vote anymore.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

These people are seriously trying to play in our faces right now.

Not The Last

This will not be the last of this. And this is where my personal frustration goes. I DO KNOW a bit about this. I have actual knowledge of the mechanisms. I know what they are trying to do and I also am fluent in republican. I wish I were somewhere in the fight, able to help do something and get off the stupid bench.

Last week I was at a conference with wonderful people from NAACP, LDF, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and the National Urban League. Many of them were going to Texas from the conference. Ready to fight. I am so thankful for them and wish I could be there fighting along side them. Literally like…PUT ME IN COACH!

But what worries me is not just Texas. This is the start. Other states are doing the same thing. They just didn’t have a flood triggering the thought of a special session. But when they come back in session, its on. “Blue” states are threatening to fight back with their own dem heavy gerrymandering but…dems being the perennial hall monitors instead of fighters have mostly set up independent commissions to draw their maps in order to be fair.

So here we are… we are stuck waiting to see what happens and me, personally, I’m just dying to get out there too. I trained for this.