April 30, 2001

Eagle Eye on Austin

HOUSE GIVES SEAL OF APPROVAL TO HATE CRIMES BILL
after a week filled with parliamentary hi-jinks and rhetorical warfare, the Texas House passed the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Act on Monday, April 23. Although the vote made headline news across the state, those familiar with the Legislature were not surprised by the House's final decision. Voting as a block, 77 House Democrats allied with ten House Republicans to advance the bill through the House over the opposition of 60 House Republicans. The outcome of the vote reflected action taken nearly two years ago when an identical bill cleared the House only to be stalled in the Senate. This scenario may play itself out again this session provided that the balance of Senate Republicans maintains their opposition to the measure.

Rodney Ellis, the Senate sponsor of the Hate Crimes Act, has worked feverishly to avert such a possibility. Because Senate rules require a 2/3-majority vote to bring any issue to debate, Ellis must convince no fewer than five Republicans to join the Democrats in support of the bill. He nearly succeeded in circumventing this rule last week when he attempted to force the issue to a vote while two staunch opponents of the bill were away on personal business. His gambit failed, however, when Governor Perry intervened at the last minute, convincing one Republican to withhold his vote until his colleagues were present (for more on this story, please see the April 24 edition of Eagle Eye on Austin).

Hate crimes advocates will undoubtedly attempt to keep the issue before the public throughout the remainder of the session, portraying their opponents as homophobic obstructionists, narrow-minded bigots, and political opportunists. With the session winding down, however, and deadlines drawing ever closer, the Hate Crimes Act once again faces the very real possibility of an unceremonious and fully justifiable defeat.

**VOTE ANALYSIS**

77 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted for H.B. 587. 60 Republicans voted against the bill. Reprinted below is a complete listing of how each member of the House voted on the measure.

MEASURE TO ALTER SELECTION PROCESS FOR APPELLATE COURT JUDGES FROM ELECTION TO APPOINTMENT CLEARS SENATE
The Senate passed a measure on Wednesday that would roll back the right of Texans to elect members of the State Supreme Court, Court of Criminal Appeals, and all other state appellate courts. According to the plan, members of these courts will be selected via gubernatorial appointment and would be subject to voter retention every six years. The author of the proposal, Senator Robert Duncan (R-Lubbock), believes that his plan would help insulate judges from the influence of campaign money, allowing them to be more impartial on the bench. The plan has also been endorsed by Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Phillips, who believes that the current electoral system exposes judges to potential conflicts of interest when they have to seek campaign cash from large law firms.

While it is true that the practice of accepting campaign cash from potential litigants may compromise the impartiality of some candidates for the judiciary, the Legislature will have a difficult time explaining why this fact warrants the disenfranchisement of every Texas citizen with respect to their judges. The ability of citizens to elect judges through competitive partisan races lends greater credibility to the court system, and helps rein in the practice of legislating from the bench. Retention elections held every six years on firmly entrenched incumbent judges couldn't hope to accomplish this purpose. The people of Texas have been fortunate to have the ability to elect their appellate court judges, and should not be denied that authority at a time when the task of reining in the imperial judiciary has become all the more difficult-and all the more important to the survival of our constitutional republic.

Brief Notes From Near and Far

U.S. HOUSE PASSES UNBORN VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE ACT
In a bipartisan 252 to 172 vote, the U.S. House Thursday passed pro-life legislation that would make it a federal crime to kill or injure an unborn baby in the process of attacking a pregnant woman. Rep. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who sponsored the Unborn Victims of
Violence Act, was encouraged by the vote. The bill had 95 co-sponsors. "A bipartisan majority in Congress is committed to closing this scandalous gap in federal law. Once everyone got beyond the shrill rhetoric and looked at the facts, they realized what we are trying to do just made sense," Graham said in a written statement Thursday.

Members of the Texas Legislature should take notice of the passage of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and extend its protections to pregnant women and unborn children in the state of Texas by passing the Pre-Natal Protection Act. Authored by Rep. Ray Allen and Sen. Ken Armbrister, the Pre-Natal Protection Act has passed the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, but has yet to be voted out of the House State Affairs Committee. The legislature should make this legislation a top priority during the coming weeks, and give the women and children of Texas the protection they deserve.

Commentary - Redistricting 101 by Ryan Bangert

As the 77th Legislative Session draws quickly to a close, the political machinations surrounding the decennial process of redrawing electoral lines have reached epic proportions. Mandated by the state constitution to reapportion electoral lines every ten years based on the results of the decennial census, many lawmakers are engaging in this once-in-a-decade contest known as redistricting with a passion for self-preservation appropriate for the TV show Survivor. Such zeal is understandable when one considers that redistricting can fundamentally alter the contours of the political playing field. According to one study, the voting history of a legislative district is ten times more important in determining election outcomes than campaign expenditures. Thus, creating a district containing a majority of friendly voters is paramount on every legislator's mind this time of year. This game of survival, however, necessarily has its winners and losers. Unfortunately, those who stand to lose the most are those citizens whose votes are discounted as a result of being placed in unfair districts.

Over the course of the current legislative session, lawmakers have consistently called for the drawing of "fair" district lines. This request is completely meaningless unless one knows what criteria a map must satisfy in order to be considered fair. Two primary "fairness" requirements govern redistricting throughout the state. First, districts must have equal or nearly equal populations in order to satisfy the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, incarnated in election law as the one-man, one-vote rule. Second, districts must be drawn in such a way that has neither the purpose nor the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on the basis of race or language group. In addition to these universal redistricting principles, there are a number of more flexible rules that lawmakers are mandated to follow. These rules necessitate the creation of compact districts by requiring that they be geographically contiguous, contain whole counties or be wholly located within one county, and avoid cutting county lines.

Although these guidelines constrain a great deal of misbehavior on the part of survival conscious lawmakers, a number of options exist within the rules that allow members to literally vote opponents right out of their seats. The most effective strategy used to accomplish this goal is known as packing, and involves squeezing as many voters as possible of an opposing party into one district while simultaneously shifting smaller yet comfortable majorities of voters from one's own party into surrounding districts. In this way, the party doing the packing can thoroughly dominate an area that splits its votes 50-50 between two parties by diluting the strength of an opposing party in all but a few districts. Packed districts can easily pass the one-man, one-vote rule, and actually cater to the goal of increasing minority representation by placing members of like ethnicity in the same district. The rules of compactness, however, are oftentimes completely ignored by lawmakers who attempt to pack favorable voters from disparate locations into their districts in a practice known as gerrymandering. These gerrymandered districts tend to resemble salamanders with their long, curvaceous lines and irregular shapes.

Packing is an excellent tool for protecting incumbents and guaranteeing the dominance of one political party, but is extremely harmful to our political process. Attempts to pack districts frequently produce lines that divide neighborhoods, mix rural and urban areas, and disenfranchise members of the minority party in a packed district, which in turn leads to voter apathy in the face of "fixed" election outcomes. Ultimately, packed districts tend to entrench divisions between voters in certain areas as suburban voters elect officials who will fight crime and cut taxes, while inner city voters elect those who will protect government social programs. These social divisions are expressed even more forcefully in the legislature itself as representatives from clashing districts engage in highly partisan ideological warfare.

Unfortunately, third-world banana republics are not the only places where packed districts can be found. In fact, the lines drawn by a Democrat House majority in 1991 that have delineated legislative districts in the state for the past decade are archetypical examples of packing. At present, Republicans occupy 72 out of 150 - only 48% - of the seats in the Texas House of Representatives; this in spite of the fact that 59.3% of all votes cast in the last election were for Republican legislative candidates. This apparent anomaly is quickly explained, however, when one considers the fact that 37 of these 72 members come from districts whose residents cast over 60% of their votes for Republican candidates. In effect, even though the current lines satisfy the one-man, one-vote rule, they actually reduce the value of each Republican vote to only 4/5 the value of a Democrat vote. This shameless packing of House districts by Democrats is the sole reason why a state could elect Republicans to fill every one of its 25 statewide offices, and yet hand its House gavel over to a Democrat Speaker.

This egregious packing of Texas House districts can and should be corrected by the current legislature. By simply drawing a plan that contains compact districts and reflects the voting trends in the state, the legislature could produce lines that would elect roughly 90 Republicans to the House. Judging by the plan recently released by the House Redistricting Committee, however, Texas Republicans have once again been handed the shortest end of the proverbial stick-and then beaten over the head by it. The plan creates 39 House districts that vote over 60% Republican, while simultaneously guaranteeing that Republicans will elect no more the 70 members to the House in 2002. Far from working to correct the vast abuses present in current district lines, the committee has released a plan that further entrenches those abuses while adding to them.

Citizens across the state should be alarmed at this shameless attempt by House Democrats to gerrymander their way to an undeserved majority in 2002. If the House cannot produce a fair plan, Governor Perry would be well within his rights to cast a veto and ask the Legislative Redistricting Board composed of the Lt. Governor, Comptroller, Attorney General, Land Commissioner, and Speaker of the House to come up with a better one. Although House Democrats would certainly complain about the "unfairness" of such an outcome (four of the five members of the LRB are Republicans), they would be well advised to first explain to the Republican voters of Texas why their votes should carry less weight than their Democrat neighbors. Republican members of the House, in turn, must staunchly oppose the current plan and defend the rights of their constituents to have their votes counted fully and fairly. Anything less would be an anathema to the idea of representative government, and unfit for the people of Texas.

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