Sorry about the headline: Add "Cowboy Politics" to your bloglist.The unnamed author(s) sent us a note saying they were up and running. They've got one post (hey, during that first week in 1984 we once had only one issue) and it's on Kay Bailey Hutchison, Rick Perry, and the prospects of a shootout for the Governor's Mansion. The address for the new folks: www.cowboypolitics.blogspot.com.
Gov. Rick Perry tries some shuttle diplomacy to see whether he can get the two legislative leaders on the same page, the better to try to get the House and the Senate moving in the same direction.Looking for a newspaper clip on the Internet the other day, we stumbled on what appeared to be the story we sought. It was about Gov. Rick Perry telling a Tyler audience about the prospects for a special session of the Legislature. But instead of what we expected -- an account of Perry's efforts to negotiate a deal the House and Senate could swallow -- it said Perry had given up trying to solve school finance until legislative leaders had a viable plan. Then, we noticed, we had the right paper, the right people, the right issue, and the wrong year. When we quit the 2004 story and found the 2005 story, it had Perry predicting a special session by the end of this month, after he brought Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Tom Craddick together for the sort of deal that has eluded all three men for the last two years. Perry has met with both Dewhurst and Craddick. Several senators, apparently at the behest of Perry -- who badly needs a school finance bill -- and Dewhurst -- who badly wants one -- have been calling House members to see whether they're anxious to come back to Austin. The theory, apparently, is that legislators confronted by angry constituents will want to come back to Austin to finish the job. In Austin, Perry is trying some shuttle diplomacy to see whether he can get the two legislative leaders on the same page, the better to try to get the House and the Senate moving in the same direction. One plan, which is under discussion but to which no fingerprints can adhere, would start with the $2 billion to $2.5 billion that's in the state treasury but which went unspent when school finance fell apart. Add to that the roughly $1 billion that a $1 additional tax on cigarettes would produce. If lawmakers can close the two biggest loopholes in the state franchise tax -- one is the Delaware Sub and one is called the Geoffrey's loophole -- they'd get another $750 million to $800 million. That's enough money to get a 25-cent cut in local school property taxes and to cover other spending that tax cut would trigger (the school finance system is a tricky thing). And that might be enough to buy political cover for Perry and anyone else who's in trouble because of what the Lege didn't do during the first five months of the year. Timing is a problem, if not for the schools, then for the politicians. A quick fix on school finance might put changes in place in time for the school districts to figure new budgets, but it wouldn't deliver goodies to taxpayers before next year's primary elections. It takes a while for a property tax cut to wend its way through school budgets, tax authorities, mortgage escrow accounts and the like. That was one reason lawmakers tried to solve this mess in a special session a year ago; a solution then would have produced results -- and presumably, happy taxpayers and voters -- in time for the March 2006 elections.
The federal judges who okayed the current congressional maps in Texas have, on reconsideration, approved them again.Their opinion can be downloaded here: www.texasweekly.com/documents/20050609redistricting.pdf Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, in a statement, said the ruling "should end the matter, and it is time to move on." Nina Perales, a San Antonio lawyer who represents the G.I. Forum, said she is still digesting the opinion but said her clients "are as unhappy with this now as they were in 2003" when the court first ruled. Officially, the lawyers on the losing side are still talking to their clients and reading the opinion and all that. Unofficially, they plan to appeal. Cases like this go straight from the three-judge trial court to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that would be the next stop on the appeal express. A quick history, in case you haven't been thinking about redistricting in your spare time. Several different groups sued to stop the state from putting new congressional maps in place, including Texas Democrats, congressional Democrats, the G.I. Forum, and the Texas NAACP. They had different angles, variously arguing that the maps were overly (and unconstitutionally) partisan, that they were drawn to minimize the voting power of minorities, and broadly speaking, that the new maps removed some Texans' a reasonable chance to elect candidates of their choice to the U.S. House. Three federal judges were impaneled to hear the case. They ruled in the state's favor, saying the new congressional maps are legal. The plaintiffs appealed to the Supremes, who had been working on a different redistricting case from Pennsylvania. Instead of ruling on the Texas maps, the high court sent the case back to the three-judge panel and told them to view it through the filter of the Supreme Court's ruling in the Pennsylvania case. What came down this week is that ruling. The Pennsylvania case -- styled Vieth vs. Jubelirer -- was based on the idea that partisan gerrymandering had resulted in an unfair map that disenfranchised some voters. The Supremes decided that wasn't the case, but the justices weren't in agreement on several points. One in particular is tantalizing to redistricting lawyers and political geeks: The court left open the idea that there might be a line to be drawn between fair and unfair partisanship in the design of political districts. In this newest opinion, the Texas judges (Patrick Higginbotham of Dallas, who is on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and trial judges Lee Rosenthal of Houston and T. John Ward of Marshall) say they were right about the partisan mapping the first time. That doesn't solve the puzzle about how much partisanship is too much partisanship, but without direction about what's in and what's out of bounds, the Texas judges decided the maps are fair. "We conclude that claims of excessive partisanship before us suffer from a lack of any measure of substantive fairness," they wrote. The court did say the non-competitive districts on the new map that some see as a "stain" aren't all that unusual. "The argument ignores a historical fact; the Texas delegation has enjoyed non-competitive districts for at least the past four and a half decades, long before there were two political parties of any strength in the state," the judges wrote. They agreed with the state's argument that the new maps produced a big swing from the Democrats to the Republicans because the old map was unfair and the new map was a truer reflection of the voting strength of the two parties. They limited the new opinion to that question about partisan gerrymandering. If the case goes up the food chain, other issues will be open just as they would have been had the Supremes heard the original appeal. One of those -- whether mid-decade redistricting violates constitutional standards of "one man, one vote" -- got the Texas judges' attention, though they didn't rule on it, since they were concerned mainly with the Vieth case. But they did go on about it. Redistricting is required every ten years, when the census comes out. Lawmakers are required to draw districts that have the same number of people in them -- that's one man, one vote. But a mid-decade like the one in Texas is done with numbers from the beginning of the decade and ignores population changes that took place in the meantime. The argument is that the mid-decade maps violate the constitutional rule because they use out of date census numbers. And since there aren't any better numbers, the defendants contend mid-decade redistricting is unconstitutional. In a concurring opinion, Ward suggested a statewide census that would form the basis for mid-decade maps, and said he'd have tossed the congressional maps on that basis if he and the other judges weren't limited to the political gerrymandering arguments from Pennsylvania.