How Republicans Destroy Democracy in Texas (and Everywhere Else in America)

Politics has always been a dirty game, but it used to be that most of the dirt was kept in smoke-filled back rooms. These days, no purely political act, no matter how outrageous or anti-democratic, is beyond the limits for Republicans. They simply have no shame; for them (ever since our favorite Texan pest-eradicator, Tom DeLay), politics has become war, with the aim not simply to get elected but to destroy the other party and every initiative it has ever implemented.

A recent excerpt from "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" offered an eye-opening view of an abuse of power by Texas Republicans that illustrates their party's local and national efforts to disenfranchise as many voters as possible, create districts designed entirely not to represent the voters of a particular city or region, and simultaneously weaken the opposite party's ability to respond to their outlandish policies and programs. Thus, Texas is becoming a state where only a Tea Party, fundamentalist Christian would want to live, and the courts have been powerless to stop a level of electoral abuse that can only be described as "banana (R)epublican" in nature.

You may recall the infamous Texas redistricting episode in 2002, when a Republican-controlled state legislature hijacked the process, ignoring the redistricting plan established by a federal court in 2000 and causing the entire Democratic representation in the legislature to flee to Oklahoma. But for Texas Republicans, that wasn't enough -- they've been busy ever since trying to implement every conceivable law they could think of that would discourage or otherwise make it difficult for Democratic-leaning groups (students, minorities, etc.) to vote. Democracy, that bastion of American exceptionalism, the Holy Grail of Republican belief so revered that we spent trillions of dollars and thousands of young people's lives to ram down the throats of Iranians -- in Texas, it's only democracy if it leans bright Red.

So all that seems anti-American and anti-democratic enough, so much so that I long ago took a vow never again to visit the state of Texas, not even to book a flight through it (same for OK, NE, KY, LA, MS, and, of course, AZ). But I had no true appreciation of Texas Republicans' blatant disregard for democracy -- and the concept of "representation of the people" until I saw this map of their redistricting of Austin, the only liberal-leaning city in the state:

The city of Austin is in the center -- draw a small circle to represent it. In this ingeniously deceptive plan, small bits of the city have been carved off, Hannibal-Lechter-like, from the city center and married with huge swaths of suburban and rural Texas, running in some instances for dozens of miles outside the city, in order to "divide and conquer" Austin's Democratic-leaning citizens. By mating those urban segments with enough Red, rural voters over a wide enough area, those Blue voices are effectively negated. Only one district, District 9, is more or less contained within the city proper. (To see this even more clearly, watch this "Daily Show" excerpt at around the 2:50 mark for a map that makes the outrage much clearer.)

The result? Not surprisingly, a Blue city has six Congressional representatives, and five of them are Republican. And not moderate, Rockefeller-type Republicans, either. Rabid, foam-frothing, Bible-belting, science-denying, Tea Party types. A bit of gerrymandering and: Voila! Huge chunks of Democratic-leaning voters in Austin, not disenfranchised but also clearly not represented.

Thanks, Texas, for proving once again that you really do belong in Mexico, where this sort of political power abuse is considered normal.