Despite the chaos caused by the re-redistricting crusade, from Austin’s local perspective the falling of the maps has settled into a soothing rhythm, like the tides. Good map, bad map, good map, bad map. When the House and Senate sent their adopted redistricting proposals to conference, both were Good Maps — ones that left Travis County basically alone, Lloyd Doggett‘s Austin-based District 10 intact, and the Voting Rights Act less violated. But what has emerged from the conference committee is yet another Bad Map, splitting Travis Co. three ways and the Austin metro area five ways, not only to screw Doggett (reviled by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay) but — even more so — to screw Doggett’s Dallas colleague Martin Frost, one of the most powerful Dems in the U.S. House. Frost’s District 24 is majority-minority and covered by the VRA, so if the Lege decides to turn it into White Suburban Paradise, it has to come up with another majority-minority district somewhere else. That would be South Texas, but there aren’t enough people to cram another district into the Valley without stretching it way up into Travis Co.
So the new, vacant District 25 proposed by House mapmaker Phil King stretches from Rio Grande City all the way to the corner of Lamar and St. Johns, picking up Hyde Park, Windsor Park, Cherrywood, Central East Austin, and North University, ending at a point more or less at Bass Concert Hall. It likewise swoops west of I-35 to pick up the heart of South Austin; in the middle, Downtown, the UT campus, Travis Heights, and points west end up in GOP Rep. Lamar Smith’s District 21. Doggett currently lives in that district; the new District 10 would stretch from the northern part of Travis Co. all the way to the Houston suburbs and be almost assuredly won by a Republican. But, despite the fact that this stretch of Travis Co. is almost indistinguishable (demographically) from Williamson Co., the Lege has decided that Round Rock deserves the honor of having its own congressman, while Austin does not.
While there is no such thing as a done deal here, it appears unlikely that Travis Co. will be restored before the Lege washes its hands of re-redistricting; it’ll be up to the courts to put Austin back together. That’s not such a far-fetched hope, since even the GOP’s own lawyers reportedly think King’s act is a VRA nightmare, and the U.S. Supreme Court has signaled its restlessness with blatant gerrymandering that sacrifices obvious community interest to supposed racial abstractions. In King’s map, the citizens of Austin are almost evenly divided between the three districts and form a majority in none of them. Austin is America’s 18th-largest city and, if this map is approved and implemented, could become by far the largest U.S. city without a representative in Congress.
This article appears in October 10 • 2003.