If you're looking for a powerful argument against the powerfully destructive practice of gerrymandering — which Republican pols, almost exclusively, control nationwide — look no further than this economic developer's observations about Texas:
"People outside Texas often believe that the state is almost monolithically white, rural and conservative. In fact, less than 40 percent of Texans are white non-Hispanics. For every new white resident that Texas welcomed over the past decade, there have been three Black residents, three Asians, three people with multiracial backgrounds and 11 Hispanics. Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin and Houston also have large L.G.B.T.Q. populations."
To boot, Texas's urban centers are hubs of economic innovation, advanced medical care, world-class education institutions and cultural sanity.
And yet, mostly through gerrymandering's suffocating power in terms of political representation and expression, Texas stands proudly as a model of political mossbackism, philistinism, racial intolerance and official misogyny. The state's Republican pols have their citizens in a retrogressive headlock, slicing and dicing the electoral scenery from precincts to congressional districts.
Which takes us back, once again, to the immense challenge that lies before congressional Democrats. Among the assorted reforms in their proposed voting-rights bills is a federal end to gerrymandering. Absent such a ban, Texas — as well as others states with populations increasingly incommensurate with redneck politics — will go right on sending more Louie Gohmerts to Congress, retarding essential state legislation (climate change, anyone?), violating women's rights, discounting minority needs and depriving the poor of accessible healthcare.
Yes, the Dems have a lot on their plate. But, along with a half-dozen other electoral reforms, gerrymandering's total abolition cannot be served as a side dish; not if American citizens, everywhere, are to have the right to true representation.