During the early hours of Aug. 23, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick rose from his upholstered leather chair to stand before a hushed and tense Texas State Senate chamber. Not only did his grave demeanor echo the image of a judge, but so too was his mission — he, after all, stood before this assembly in order to bang a gavel against his desk and put forth a binding ruling. However, Patrick did not lay down judgement and punishment upon a single lawbreaker. No, he instead sentenced the American democratic ideal of one-person, one-vote to a death march, declaring that Texas House Bill 4 (HB-4) had passed and was to be sent to Texas Governor Greg Abbott in order to be signed into law.
Of course, on its own, the content of HB-4 is egregious and undemocratic enough. After all, it establishes a new, highly-gerrymandered congressional map whose sole purpose is to ensure that Republicans gain an electoral edge in almost nearly every one of Texas’ 38 congressional districts — this being accomplished via a process of “cracking” and “packing” liberal communities across and into conservative strongholds.
However, HB-4’s blatant and systematic gerrymandering becomes all the more abhorrent when one considers the context in which this new congressional map was passed, as Texas Republicans continued to champion the bill despite their knowledge that its passage would trigger a political arms race. In other words, HB-4 was pushed through despite many Democratic Governors’ fervent threats that its enactment would force them to explore the possibility of retaliatory redistricting efforts in their own states so as to counter HB-4’s increase in Republican representation. In fact, California has already passed a measure that calls for a special election to consider new congressional maps that would create more blue-voting districts, while figures like New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker have declared that they will ensure their states would follow suit with similar measures.
Yet, at the end of the day, after all these efforts to grab onto more and more political power have either been made law or have been left by the wayside, what else has occurred but a gross and pathetic degradation of the idea and practical realities of a participatory democracy? What else has happened other than a silencing of the people’s voice — a stunting of their role and their importance democratic process?
Sure, we can sit here and act like children/our politicians by arguing about who did what first… Democrats have, after all, blamed this wave of gerrymandering on President Donald Trump’s declaration that he was “entitled” to a larger Republican presence in Congress through redistricting, while Republicans have pushed the moderately misleading narrative that their actions in Texas were a necessary retaliation to Democrats’ longtime sole weaponization of gerrymandering (in reality, both sides have historically engaged in gerrymandering, with Republicans having actually benefitted from such a practice more often).
Regardless of this blame game, the bottomline is that our political leaders seem unsettingly comfortable with actively disenfranchising certain groups of people in the name of scoring points in this political arms race. Namely, Texas Republicans raucously celebrated the disenfranchisement of the 4.8 million Democrats as a major win for America and the Trump agenda; California Governor Gavin Newsom certainly beamed his movie-star smile as he began the process of leaving 6 million Californian Republicans wholly without representation; Florida Governor Ron Desantis took it upon himself to boisterously claim that he feels it is perfectly “appropriate to do a redistricting in the mid-decade,” something Florida has never done, if it means breaking up Democratic strongholds; and Hochul delivered the following dystopian line with with great seriousness and passion when talking about the necessity of fighting in this gerrymandering arms race: “The reason we are able to draw the lines is because we’re Democrats, because the majority of people in the state elected us to be leaders, and when we say that we can’t use that power to the fullest, then we’re abdicating the responsibility that we all have.” At the end of the day, the reality is — to use an old cliche — that two wrongs do not make a right. Playing political hardball is all well and good until it actively undercuts the very foundations of the democratic process that this nation was supposedly built on.
This all then begs the question: What can we, as ordinary citizens, do to slow down, if not outright stop, this erosion of our chance to have a meaningful political voice? First and foremost, the solution begins with bombarding the Office of Texas Governor Greg Abbott — the man who is preparing to knock over the first domino in all this by signing HB-4 into law. Use any means of communication you can (all linked here) to tell him and his staff that this bill, this affront to the American democratic conscience, cannot become law under any circumstance. Fill his inbox, his mailbox and his answering machine with your demands and voices, lest they be muzzled by this rapidly approaching wave of disenfranchisement. If Abbott and his team is unresponsive, then find the next state and next governor that is considering participating in this political arms race, and let them know that this race is going to come at the cost of the political power of the American people. For democracy to survive as both an ideal and a practiced principle in this country, you cannot turn a blind eye and stay silent on this matter. Speak up before you cannot.
