DeLay, who first came to Congress in , left the House voluntarily in as he was facing a tough re-election fight. He served as majority leader, the House's No. State law prohibits corporations from giving directly to political candidates and their campaigns. Prosecutors argued that the money to state candidates helped the GOP take control of the Texas Legislature, which then adopted DeLay's redistricting plan that resulted in more Republicans being elected to Congress in Tom pushed to do it.
In the spring of , Texas Republicans, who were now dominant in both the State House and Senate, proposed a new congressional map that promised to add between five and seven new Republicans to the Texas delegation. At the time, DeLay said that, with fifty-seven per cent of Texas voters backing Republicans for Congress, it was only fair that the G.
If a mid-census redistricting was necessary to align the seats with the popular vote, the Republicans argued, so be it. So most of them took off for Oklahoma. There was some precedent for this kind of action in Texas.
In , a group of liberal state senators, known as the Killer Bees, fled the state to deprive the majority of a quorum in a dispute over the date of the Texas Presidential primary.
Laney was on his cotton farm, in the Texas panhandle, on May 11th when he and his Democratic colleagues decided to leave the state for the Oklahoma town of Ardmore, just across the border. Most of the legislators travelled from Austin by bus, but Laney flew in his private plane, a seven-seat Piper Cheyenne. The problem was that they misled the F. And what really bothers me is that they had Homeland Security, the F. However, eleven Democrats in the Senate, determined to deprive that body of a quorum, also decided to flee the state, this time to Albuquerque.
Under his guidance, and with the upcoming Texas-Oklahoma football game in Dallas as an incentive to wrap up business, the Senate ratified the new congressional districts on October 13th. Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, in , most legal fights about redistricting have concerned the rights of racial minorities. He asserted that the number of Hispanic representatives could grow from six to eight, and the number of African-Americans from two to three.
These predictions were, for the most part, accurate. From the beginning, it was evident that the agenda of the Republican mapmakers in Texas was more political than racial. Shortly after the redistricting plan passed, Joby Fortson, an aide to Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, sent a candid e-mail to a group of colleagues that makes this point more clearly than any public statement issued by the participants. His district disappeared. On October 14, , Texas Democrats challenged the new congressional districts under the Voting Rights Act, but three months later a three-judge panel ruled that the rejiggering of the lines had not diluted the voting power of African-Americans or Hispanics.
Then, in a major surprise, the Supreme Court issued an opinion that may have changed the rules of the redistricting game for good. The Constitution established the House of Representatives as the branch of government most closely attuned to changes in the national mood.
In the late seventeen-eighties, there were claims that Patrick Henry had tried to gerrymander Madison himself out of the First Congress. But the frequency and boldness of contemporary partisan gerrymandering make its nineteenth-century antecedents look genteel.
Partisan gerrymandering has become a precise science, where mapmakers use computer data from census and election returns to design the political makeup of each congressional district. Republicans currently hold a to advantage in the House, which means that Democrats would need to win only seventeen new seats—or about four per cent of the Congress—in order to regain the majority.
Outside Texas, only two incumbents lost in the congressional elections, and only in twenty-one seats did the winner have less than fifty-five per cent of the vote. In , Democrats in Pennsylvania presented the Supreme Court with a direct challenge to the practice of partisan gerrymandering. Following the census, Republicans controlled the governorship and both houses of the state legislature, so they essentially had a free hand in shaping congressional districts to their liking.
The commonwealth has become more Democratic in recent years, but the G. In , the first election to reflect district lines, Republicans won twelve of the nineteen congressional seats—even though a Democrat, Ed Rendell, was elected governor.
The former Houston-area congressman opted to have Priest sentence him instead of the jury. His three-year prison term is for conspiracy to commit money laundering.
He will remain free pending an appeal, a process that could take years. He also received 10 years probation on a separate charge of money laundering. In court, DeGuerin portrayed his client as a man who had already been punished enough by the six-year case that led to his precipitous fall from the public stage and the ruin of his political life.
DeLay was indicted in , three years after House Republicans had elected him majority leader. Former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert R-Ill.
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