When representative Greg Casar won his election last year, he became the first Latino to represent the Texas capitol city of Austin in Congress. A panel of federal judges had drawn his district’s lines after a prolonged legal battle over racial gerrymandering.
But under the map Texas Republicans unveiled last week, Casar would instead live in the modified version of his neighboring district to the west, which would swallow east Austin – a gentrifying but historically working-class area home to Mexican American and Black residents once forced by segregation laws to live on the east side of town.
“Even a conservative supreme court said central Texas Latinos deserve a district, and that’s why my district exists,” Casar said. “If Donald Trump is able to suppress Latino voters here in Austin, he’ll try to spread that plan across America.”
The American experiment has well and truly failed in the Information Age. Emotional ties to national politics guide most voters far more than self-interest or even oblivious interests of the local community. Gerrymandering has silenced local communities but has also become a weapon yielded that cannot be ignored. “When they go low, we go high” was naive back then. It’s suicidal now.
Gerrymandering is just a symptom of the monolithic fascism that is designed to funnel tax breaks to and end corruption investigations of the oligarchs who run everything. They steal our money and rape children right in front of our eyes, and they get away with it.
It would be nice to think Texas will do the right thing and provide representation, but they won’t. Blue state governors and legislatures need to adjust accordingly.
When the avenues for peaceful and lawful change are systematically obstructed, history shows that violent unrest and extra-legal responses become not only more likely, but inevitable.
So you don’t have so many people per riding? You just make them up.
