Remember, it's never the crime...
May. 24th, 2003 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaIt's the cover-up.
The current incarnation of this is the Disappearing Texas Democrats fiasco. For those who came in late, early this month, the entire Democratic membership of the Texas legislature hightailed it from Texas and holed up in a Holiday Inn in Oklahoma for most of a week to prevent the legislature from having a quorum, because the Republican leaders of the legislature, under orders from US House of Representatives Tom "The Hammer" DeLay (R-Malebolgia), were about to redistrict Texas to eliminate as many as five likely Democratic congressional seats.
Leave aside the fact that Texas just redistricted last year in response to the 2000 Census and that redistricting again is a blatant partisan move in violation of a century of US political practice. Leave aside that what the Democrats did was strictly illegal, since it's not actually a crime. (No, really. That's how it's defined in Texas law.)
What the Republicans did in response to this not-criminal activity was order the Texas Department of Public Safety to find the Democrats by any means necessary. This included a DPS officer filing a false report of a missing plane with the FAA to try to get the Department of Homeland Security on the case; it also, accoding to DeLay, involved DeLay asking the FBI to get involved. Then, once it was pointed out that lying to the Dept. of Homeland Security and the FBI was probably criminal behavior, all parties involved started stonewalling, and the DPS ordered all records destroyed.
Joshua Micah Marshall is doing his damnest to keep this story from dying on the back burner of the corporate-owned media. Help him out. Write to your congresspeople about this. Make phone calls. This is a crime, and it needs to be treated as one.
The current incarnation of this is the Disappearing Texas Democrats fiasco. For those who came in late, early this month, the entire Democratic membership of the Texas legislature hightailed it from Texas and holed up in a Holiday Inn in Oklahoma for most of a week to prevent the legislature from having a quorum, because the Republican leaders of the legislature, under orders from US House of Representatives Tom "The Hammer" DeLay (R-Malebolgia), were about to redistrict Texas to eliminate as many as five likely Democratic congressional seats.
Leave aside the fact that Texas just redistricted last year in response to the 2000 Census and that redistricting again is a blatant partisan move in violation of a century of US political practice. Leave aside that what the Democrats did was strictly illegal, since it's not actually a crime. (No, really. That's how it's defined in Texas law.)
What the Republicans did in response to this not-criminal activity was order the Texas Department of Public Safety to find the Democrats by any means necessary. This included a DPS officer filing a false report of a missing plane with the FAA to try to get the Department of Homeland Security on the case; it also, accoding to DeLay, involved DeLay asking the FBI to get involved. Then, once it was pointed out that lying to the Dept. of Homeland Security and the FBI was probably criminal behavior, all parties involved started stonewalling, and the DPS ordered all records destroyed.
Joshua Micah Marshall is doing his damnest to keep this story from dying on the back burner of the corporate-owned media. Help him out. Write to your congresspeople about this. Make phone calls. This is a crime, and it needs to be treated as one.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
question on redistricting
Date: 2003-05-24 07:48 pm (UTC)redistricting again is a blatant partisan move in violation of a century of US political practice
i have the -- possibly false -- impression that it is in fact a time-honoured (if not an honourable) pursuit to try and redistrict whenever one is the ruling party, no matter whether D or R. no? am i totally off my rocker and it's really only the R's who're trying to do that?
Re: question on redistricting
Date: 2003-05-24 10:46 pm (UTC)MKK
Re: question on redistricting
Date: 2003-05-25 06:35 am (UTC)Also, redistricting has gotten more and more egregious over the last fifteen years. Mark Monomier, expert on maps, has written an entire (nonpartisan) book entitled Bushmanders and Bullwinkles about how redistricting has gotten more detailed and more partisan since the 1990 Census redistricting. It didn't used to be the case that legislative districts had jagged-tooth boundaries where alternating blocks in a neighborhood were in different districts; now it's commonplace.