The Texas stalemate: It's all about race

Few are saying it openly, but the DeLay-Rove power grab in Austin is all about keeping white control of an increasingly Hispanic state.

By Michelle Goldberg

Sept. 3, 2003 | ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Exile in Albuquerque is not glamorous. The 11 Democratic Texas state senators who fled to New Mexico more than a month ago to block a Republican power grab spend most of their days and nights at a slightly shabby Marriott hotel in the city's grim, sprawling periphery. Each morning they put on suits and hold a press conference in a windowless room, putting the most cheerful face possible on an impasse that looks ever more unlikely to yield the senators a real victory. By the evening, many of them have changed into shorts and are drinking in the hotel's lobby bar with a group of increasingly enervated Texas journalists. The senators miss their families and their jobs. They're spending thousands of their own dollars -- one of them had an $1,800 cellphone bill last month. And the local press is declaring their fight hopeless. "The Albuquerque Democrats might as well learn the Ballad of the Alamo," R.G. Ratcliffe wrote in the Houston Chronicle on Monday, "because no reinforcements are coming and they're running out of ammunition."

Their situation grew dramatically worse on Tuesday, when one of their number, state Sen. John Whitmire of Houston, enraged his comrades by deciding to return home because he saw no end to the deadlock. Without him, the Democratic group doesn't have enough people to deny Republicans a quorum and thus stop them from passing their redistricting plans. Yet the remaining Texas 10 still say they're not going home. While most press accounts cast them as opponents of a Republican plan to grab power by redrawing legislative districts, the lawmakers-in-exile here see something at once more subtle and more important: the latest chapter in the South's long, ugly war over minority voting rights.

Nine of the 10 senators remaining in Albuquerque are black or Hispanic; the other one represents a district that is mainly minority. And within a few years, experts say, Texas will join California as a state where Latinos, African-Americans and other minorities will outnumber Anglos.

So it is not far-fetched to say that how this drama unfolds will determine whether minority voters in Texas gain power proportionate to their numbers. That's why several Texas Democrats are trying to hold firm even as their audacious gambit gives way to a protracted, depressing slog and their unity begins to crack.

"This is an effort to seriously gut minority voting rights," says Sen. Leticia Van De Putte, head of the Texas Democratic Senate delegation. "We could not protect our constituents without breaking quorum" and fleeing Texas to short-circuit the Republican plot.

Redistricting -- the creation of new electoral districts to ostensibly reflect new population patterns -- is done once every 10 years in every state, based on census figures. It was last done in Texas in 2001. But Texas Republicans, having swept state offices in the last election, are determined to remake the voting landscape there while they have the power to lock in their party's dominance. They have the votes in the state Legislature to prevail, but because the Texas constitution requires that two-thirds of the senators be in the Senate chamber before business can be done, the Texas 11 were able to use their self-imposed exile to thwart their opponents, running out the clock on two special sessions called by Republican Gov. Rick Perry.

They couldn't go home because Perry would have immediately called another session and had them arrested and forcibly brought to the Senate. Whitmire's departure changes that equation, because with him, the Senate Republicans, and the one Democratic senator who stayed behind, the Senate has a quorum and can do business. According to the Houston Chronicle, Whitmire has suggested he might flee again if the governor calls yet another special session, but without him, the Democrats' boycott is largely symbolic. Still, as of Tuesday night, they were pledging to stick with it.

If the senators are stubborn, it's partly because they've come to see their stance against redistricting as a civil rights struggle, not a political quarrel. At first, it's difficult to see that the battle over Texas redistricting is all about race. Spurred by Texas powerhouse Tom DeLay, the majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, and by White House maestro Karl Rove, Texas Republicans are trying to ram through a redistricting proposal that would virtually ensure that Republicans would replace between five and seven white, moderate Democratic incumbents. The GOP proposal would redraw the state's legislative boundaries so that minorities are concentrated into a few districts, likely leading to a net increase in the number of minority members of Congress. But the voting power of blacks and Latinos would likely be diluted in other districts, giving Republicans a net gain of as many as seven seats.

Yet Texas Democrats insist that the Republican redistricting plan is a deviously clever update on the party's old-fashioned divide-and-conquer Southern strategy. The Republican plan, Democrats argue, would redraw the boundaries so that blocs of Hispanic and black voters would shift from districts where they've voted in coalitions with white Democrats and independents into solidly Republican suburban districts, where their influence will be almost meaningless.

It's an attempt, Democrats say, to lock in Republican power ahead of demographic changes that bode ill for conservatives. Republicans, they believe, are trying to both reduce minority voting power and to stigmatize the Democratic Party as the party of blacks and Hispanics (who still vote largely Democratic, despite some Republican inroads). And, by targeting white congressmen elected by coalitions of minorities and white Democrats, the Republicans have found a way to disenfranchise minorities without violating civil rights laws that prohibit states from gerrymandering electoral districts on racial lines.

Among many of the exiled Democrats, there's a strong sense that the most crucial political story in the nation is being overshadowed by the more colorful electoral pageant in California. "Were it not for California, this would be the biggest story in the country," says Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos of Austin.

That analysis of the Texas standoff is shared by the liberal group MoveOn.org, and later this month it will raise the story's profile with an advertising blitz funded by a million dollars raised online through its "Defend Democracy in Texas" campaign. Many of its radio, television and print ads, some of them in Spanish, will target Hispanics in Texas and in key swing states. The plan is to make Texas redistricting into a national issue about Republican hypocrisy on Hispanic issues.

"Republicans are trying to have it both ways," says Zack Exley, MoveOn's organizing director. "They're trying to make this very strong appeal to Latinos to get some voters to switch over and vote for Spanish-speaker George W. Bush, but then at the same time they're blatantly trying to disenfranchise Hispanic voters in Texas to solidify the Republican grip on Congress.

"Republicans from Bush on down to Perry reach out to minorities with their left hand, then knock the hell out of us with their right," says Barrientos, a dapper, eloquent man who spent his childhood as a migrant worker in Galveston.

No Republicans returned calls for this story. But the redistricting standoff comes at a time when blacks and Latinos are on track to become majorities in Texas, leading some Texas Democrats to believe Republicans are using redistricting to limit the effect of demographic changes. One exiled Democrat recalls the candid comment of a Republican colleague: "We have 10 years until Hispanics take over."

Next page: Republicans bill their plan as electoral affirmative action