TEXAS LEGISLATURE GERRYMANDERED - I AM SHOCKED

It’s amazing the kind of honesty that will come out when someone, or something, is forced to defend themselves in court against harsh accusations.  And that’s exactly what we’re seeing with the State of Texas defending its new strict voting laws against the Department of Justice’s accusations that they’re targeting minorities.

You see, Republicans in the state of Texas are trying to keep the Department of Justice from overseeing their new voting laws by claiming that yes, the GOP gerrymandering within the state in 2011 did seek to disenfranchise Democrats. However, they’re claiming it did so only along partisan party lines—not racial.  They freely admit their redistricting plans were meant to weaken the voting power of a political party, they just insist those redistricting maps had nothing to do with race.  So that’s evidence that their strict new voting laws can’t possibly be about keeping minorities from voting—just Democrats.

Read the rest of the article at Forward Progressives of the chicanery revealed under oath in the court testimony by the attorneys representing the State of Texas, when they have sworn to tell the truth.  Of course, we are a post-racial society, so the gerrymandering can't possibly be about race.

Justice John Roberts, are you paying attention?  I expect not, or if you are, you excuse yourself from your responsibility in the farcical decision that the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had to be ripped out, because everything is hunky dory out and about in the land of the free with regard to voting rights.  Things may be bad, but they're not as bad as the 1960s.

Oh my, do I miss Molly Ivins.  "You can't make this stuff up." That's as far as I can go, but Molly would have hit one out of the ballpark with the story.  But wait!  Molly speaks from the grave.

When I linked on Facebook to the article on the Texas defense of its gerrymandered districts, that they admit are for the purpose of weakening the power of the Democratic Party in the state, a Facebook friend posted the link above to the website with Molly Ivins quotes.  More than one of the quotes were apropos to the situation.

"The first rule of holes: when you're in one, stop digging."

"It's like, duh. Just when you thought there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties, the Republicans go and prove you're wrong."

"It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America."

Then the discussion wandered off to considering how many citizens today know the meaning of gerrymander.  I remember learning the word in my elementary school civics class.  I even remembered the name Elridge Gerry, after whom the practice was named, and another friend from Gerry's home town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, pointed out that the name was pronounced with a hard "G".  My teachers did not use the hard "G", but I'm grateful to them that I know the meaning of gerrymander.