Redistricting, the political map-making process where officeholders seemingly get to choose their own voters, was a sprint at the Texas Legislature this year. COVID-19 delayed the 2020 census, so it was mid-August, months later than usual, by the time lawmakers received data showing that nearly all of Texas’ population growth over the past decade, the most of any state, occurred in Hispanic, Asian and Black communities. Members of Texas’ biennial, part-time Legislature would normally have retired to their home districts already, but instead they were still in Austin, embroiled in a special session that Governor Greg Abbott had called to ram through new voting restrictions that Democrats in the Texas House had fled the state to try to stop.
After the House Dems cracked and returned to Austin this summer, Abbott got his new voting law and then demanded yet another special session to quickly redraw political districts. The redistricting process occurs every 10 years, and in Texas, rarely reflects the state’s actual demographics. This year, Republican-led committees called last-minute hearings with limited testimony to crank out new maps that grow GOP power while diluting the voting strength of the state’s growing minority communities. On October 12, the House Redistricting Committee gave only 24 hours notice for a hearing on new congressional maps and provided a 12-hour window for people to register to testify. In the hearing the following day, some Democratic lawmakers admitted they were struggling to keep up. The handful of advocates who managed to attend vented their frustration.
“You can see how empty this room is,” Jessica Weldon, with the progressive group Battleground Texas, told lawmakers. “I would like to call out that this was an unnecessarily rushed hearing, an opaque process, and it seems intended to obscure the view of the public.” The committee approved the maps that same day; the rest of the GOP-dominated Legislature quickly approved them. Abbott signed the new districts into law less than two weeks later.
