This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, K-12 education, postsecondary educational attainment, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, environmental issues, and Ethnic Studies at the state and national levels. It addresses politics in Texas. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
Accountability Without Justice: The Continuing Agenda to Demonize K-12 Public Schools to Set the Stage for Further Privatization
by
Angela Valenzuela
September 15, 2025
Students attend a math and reading workshop at a STAAR summer camp held at Dobie Middle School on July 23, 2025. Texas lawmakers are again trying to revamp the state's standardized test during this year's special session. Photo credit: Ilana Panich-Linsman for The Texas Tribune
After a grueling regular session and two special sessions, the Texas Legislature finally passed House Bill 8 (HB 8), birthing what they are calling the Student Success Tool—a revamped statewide assessment system set to roll out in the 2027–28 school year. The current STAAR contract remains in place through 2026–27, ensuring no immediate change. This is the story of progress that sidesteps transformation.
The new system shifts away from the single, high-stakes STAAR exam toward a series of three shorter tests administered at the beginning, middle, and end of the year in reading/language arts, math, science, and social studies, with a dedicated writing component. Only the end-of-year exam will count for accountability purposes (Houston Chronicle, 2025; Texas Tribune, 2025). The legislation also sets strict testing windows to reduce classroom disruption, limits the number of district benchmark exams, and guarantees parents access to results within 48 hours (Houston Chronicle, 2025; Good Reason Houston, 2025). It eliminates the English II end-of-course test, allows students to substitute qualifying scores from the SAT, ACT, AP, or IB in place of state tests, and mandates automated rescoring for certain writing responses (Raise Your Hand Texas, 2025). Additionally, the Texas Education Agency must define cut scores earlier and with greater transparency.
There are glimmers of relief here—less redundancy, faster feedback, and a nod toward flexibility. But they do not add up to the seismic shift advocates hoped for. HB 8 may reduce some burdens of testing, but it adds more high-stakes checkpoints and keeps the same fundamentally punitive system alive. As one major editorial put it, this is “not real reform—merely a rebranding of STAAR, expanded under a new label” (San Antonio Express-News, 2025). Educators continue to warn that the bill “overemphasizes high-stakes testing and punitive ratings… forcing teachers to teach to the test rather than focusing on critical thinking, creativity, and deeper learning” (Texas AFT, 2025). The so-called advisory committee on accountability, established under the bill, has also been criticized as underrepresentative and largely preordained to affirm TEA priorities, meaning community voices may not drive the process (Texas AFT, 2025).
Why, then, does this fetish for high-stakes testing persist, even as it fails our students and schools? One answer lies in the broader political narrative it enables. By repeatedly labeling public schools as “failing,” the system creates a crisis frame that makes it easier to justify diverting public dollars to charter schools, vouchers, and private alternatives.
Indeed, in the very same session that produced HB 8, lawmakers advanced a $1 billion voucher plan, offering families up to $10,000 per student for private tuition. Critics note this policy disproportionately benefits wealthier families, lacks meaningful accountability, and threatens to drain already scarce funds from neighborhood public schools (Houston Chronicle, 2025; Texas Tribune, 2025). In this sense, HB 8’s surface-level reforms play into a broader agenda that demonizes public schools and sets the stage for privatization.
So, did public education advocacy organizations succeed? They secured incremental wins: less disruptive testing, faster feedback, cancellation of some exams, and improved transparency. Yet the core system endures. Schools are still judged primarily by test scores, accountability remains narrow, and meaningful change is postponed yet again.
References
Churchill, L., ProPublica, & Simani, E. (2025, Aug. 13). Some Texas private schools hire relatives and enrich insiders. Soon they can do it with taxpayer money, Texas Tribune.
Gavel Down, Mic Drop: Rep. Vincent Pérez Ends Session
with Facts
Sine Die might be Latin for “the end,” a towering Rep. Vincent Pérez stood firm—not just in opposition, but in defense of democracy. He made damn sure the 89th Second Special Session of the Texas Legislature didn’t close without a reckoning—to which the video below attests and about which Substack author Michelle H. Davis writes.
While Republicans used this session to pass gerrymandered maps, ramp up voter suppression, and double down on attacks against women, trans people, students, and anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into their dystopian playbook— it was Rep. Pérez who reminded Texans what public service is supposed to look like.
Before the gavel dropped, Republicans introduced HR 128—a petty, authoritarian stunt masquerading as a rule change. The goal? Punish future quorum breakers with everything from fines and budget cuts to taking away parking spots like this was high school. But Rep. Pérez wasn’t having it. He stood up and made it clear: this wasn’t about enforcing “duty.” It was about silencing dissent.
And he said so — loud and unapologetically.
Rep. Vincent Pérez
“This is not discipline for a member, but disenfranchisement for the people who sent them here.”
He didn't stop there.
When Rep. Tony Tinderholt tried to derail the conversation — turning it into a petty debate about per diems and attendance—Pérez flipped the script.
“The maps before this body were the most segregated since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It was my duty to stand up against that injustice.”
Then came the knockout punch. When Tinderholt pushed harder on the per diem issue, Pérez fired back with a line that deserves to be carved into the chamber walls:
“There are representatives on both sides of the aisle, both republicans and democrats, who sit in this chamber who collect the $221...and are about as useful as the chairs they sit on.”
It was more than a zinger. It was a gut-check—not just for Tinderholt, but for everyone watching this session spiral into yet another exercise in intimidation disguised as governance.
Let’s be clear: Pérez didn’t just win the argument. He reframed it. He forced the chamber to confront the moral rot at the heart of what the Texas GOP is doing — from rigging maps and expanding the STAAR test, to criminalizing abortion and policing public restrooms.
He called out structural racism. He defended the right to dissent. He reminded everyone that elected office belongs to the people—not to the party in power.
In a session defined by fear, fascism, and manufactured outrage, Rep. Vincent Pérez stood apart.
We need more of that. More fire. More clarity. More courage.
So yes, Sine Die — this special session is over. But if Texas is going to have any kind of democratic future, voices like Pérez’s can’t just echo in the chamber. They need to echo across the state.
Because dissent isn’t disorder. It’s democracy.
And Rep. Vincent Pérez just gave us all a masterclass in both.
Two weeks into the 30-day special session, Republicans decided they’ve done all the damage they can do for now and called Sine Die late last night.
But did they pass flood relief?
SB3 mandates outdoor warning sirens in Texas flood-risk areas. It uses state grants to help pay for sirens, but makes them legally required for local governments in disaster-designated regions. SB5 is a funding bill for Texas’s FEMA match and disaster needs, gauges, as well as forecasting and weather technology.
Both of these bills passed both chambers unanimously.
Several bills regarding disaster preparedness died. Another bill that was debated aimed to synchronize communication equipment (walkie-talkies and radios) across agencies. That bill died, too.
SB1 prevents youth camps from getting licensed if cabins are in a floodplain. HB1 overlaps with SB1 but is somewhat broader in accountability and enforcement.
Is it enough? Would it have prevented the July 4th tragedies? Will it prevent more tragedies in the future? The sirens are needed. The gauges are needed. Changing the license and regulation requirements for youth camps is needed.
Republicans wanted to premise this special session (and last) as flood relief, even though it was all about a power grab for the pedophile protectors in DC. That was their “emergency items.” It ought to be enough for them NOT to call a third special session.
Vince Perez (D-HD77) was definitely the breakout star of the Second Special Session.
He did it again last night. Before Republicans called it quits on the Special Session last night, they introduced HR128 to “punish” would-be quorum breakers. Higher fines, censure, loss of seniority, loss of operating budget, loss of chairmanships, loss of parking places, and a bunch of other nonsense.
Representative Perez did not hold back. He reminded members that their oath of office wasn’t about perks or power, but about stewardship and that every seat in the chamber belongs not to the politician, but to the people who sent them there. Perez said, a direct attack on the communities Republicans don’t value, “not discipline for a member, but disenfranchisement for the people who sent them here.”
Then came the clash with Rep. Tony Tinderholt (R-HD94). True to form, Tinderholt tried to boil the whole debate down to money and duty. Where was Perez during the quorum break? Shouldn’t he be in Austin? Shouldn’t he pay taxpayers back for the per diem?
Perez wasn’t having it. He turned the conversation right back to the root cause: “The maps before this body were the most segregated since the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” he said. “It was my duty to stand up against that injustice.” Perez hammered Tinderholt for defending maps that give white Texans three times the political power of Latinos and five times that of Black Texans, calling it what it was. Structural disenfranchisement.
When Tinderholt pressed him on the $221-a-day per diem, Perez cut deep. “There are people in this chamber who collect the 221 bucks and are about as useful as the chairs they sit on,” he said. And reminded everyone (most of all Tarrant County residents) how Tinderholt is leaving the Legislature to run for a county commissioner seat stolen from the Black community.
Perez flipped the attack into a full indictment of GOP gerrymandering, racism, and small-minded politics. It was a reminder that while the GOP is busy rewriting House rules to punish dissent, Democrats like Perez are the ones reminding Texans why dissent matters.
So, what else did Republicans do in this special session?
They passed the gerrymandered maps. Then, a resolution was passed to punish would-be quorum breakers.
They passed HB8, which expands the STAAR test. Yes, you heard that right. Texans wanted the state to eliminate the STAAR test. Instead, they expanded it, quadrupling the number of tests students will have to take in a year. Every Republican voted in favor of it. The Democrats who joined them:
Cesar Blanco (SD29)
Chuy Hinojosa (SD29)
HB7 passed. This bill bans the manufacturing, mailing, prescribing, or distributing of abortion pills in Texas and creates $100,000 bounties on women who take them. Because our maternal mortality rate is higher in Texas than anywhere else in the developed world, and Republicans want more women to die. Chuy Hinojosa was the only Democrat who voted in favor of this bill.
Then, of course, the Republicans enacted the “Pee Pee Police” bill with SB8. This bill segregates bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and other multi-user facilities strictly by biological sex. While they haven’t done it yet, they always add to their oppression each session. So, if we don’t flip the House in 2026, expect that in 2027 Republicans will be looking to station a DPS officer at the door of every public restroom in Texas, to look under the skirts of suspected transgender women.
SB12 gives the Texas Attorney General direct authority to prosecute all criminal offenses under Texas election law. But now that Paxton’s leaving office, they’re just hoping to get lucky with another crook in office to target people of color and the elderly with made-up crimes again.
Of course, there was also HB25, which makes Ivermectin available over the counter.
SB54 makes it harder for voters who have recently moved to cast a full ballot because it would be a Legislative Session, special or regular, without some form of Republican voter suppression. Renters, students, and low-income people who move often will be disproportionately disenfranchised. Which means we have to work twice as hard to register those voters, y’all.
HB26 allows sheriffs and constables in Harris County to contract directly with local governments (cities, MUDs, school districts, etc.), property owners’ associations, and private landowners. It prohibits the Harris County Commissioners’ Court from stopping or restricting these contracts. HB192 prevents Harris County from reducing police budgets without a countywide election, as enforced by the governor’s office and comptroller. This is part of the broader GOP playbook to punish and control Harris County (the state’s most populous Democratic stronghold).
Then there was HB16, which flew under the radar despite its size. It’s a judiciary “clean-up and reorganization” bill. It makes hundreds of tweaks across the court system, touching everything from judicial districts to clerk duties, salaries, jurisdiction, and municipal court security.
SB18 creates a new permit exemption in Texas water law. It cuts regulatory red tape for small, locally operated flood-control dams. I see both good and the potential for harm in this bill, and I always worry about anything framed as “deregulation.” However, the Sierra Club testified in favor of it.
SB11 gives victims of sex trafficking a legal shield in court, ensuring that juries can consider coercion as a defense. It was ironic that it was passed, considering the party in charge is the same party protecting the Epstein pedophile ring in DC. But I suspect they just tacked this one in there to pretend like they were actually doing something good for the people of Texas. When you stack it all up, Texans didn’t get real flood relief, didn’t get accountability, didn’t get protection from the next disaster.
What we got was more criminalization, more voter suppression, more privatized policing, more attacks on women, kids, and trans people, and more power consolidated in the hands of a Republican Party that governs like the Constitution is optional. This was a session about control. The fascist drumbeats of Republican rule grow louder with every session, every new map, every gag order on dissent.
So let’s call it what it was. Another round of Republican cruelty packaged as governance. And let’s pray it stays dead until 2027.
Power in Numbers, Silence in Maps: A Mid-Decade Redistricting Fight for Racial Justice in Texas
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
The Houston hearing on redistricting was especially animated—you can listen to it here. The community has spoken. To get a sense of perspective, here is the demographic breakdown that typically informs redistricting—albeit not mid-decade redistricting decisions, which makes the current moment an alarming outlier. This deviation is directly attributable to Donald Trump, who explicitly called on Texas lawmakers to redraw maps in his favor by securing more white, Republican-leaning seats in Congress.
The goal? To tip the fragile partisan balance, so that Donald Trump can shield himself from political accountability, and entrench minority rule in a state whose population growth has been overwhelmingly driven by communities of color. In essence, this maneuver seeks to weaponize redistricting—not as a reflection of demographic reality—but as a tool for partisan and racial power preservation.
As I describe in an earlier post, these are sin vergüenza, or shameless, politics. Heck yeah, people are angry.
Texas gained 4 million new residents between 2010 and 2020—the largest numerical increase of any U.S. state during that decade. Here's the racial and ethnic breakdown of that growth:
1.98 million were Latino or Hispanic
613,092 were Asian American
550,887 were Black
187,252 were white (non-Hispanic)
In other words, over 95% of the state’s growth came from communities of color. Latinos alone accounted for nearly half of that increase, while Black and Asian American populations also grew substantially. In stark contrast, white (non-Hispanic) Texans made up fewer than 1 in 20 of the new residents. These numbers reveal a profound demographic transformation: the population growth that earned Texas new congressional seats and political clout was overwhelmingly driven by people of color.
Yet despite this reality, current redistricting efforts—particularly this mid-decade attempt—continue to sideline the very communities responsible for the state’s expansion. Partisan gerrymandering tactics like packing voters of color into a limited number of districts or cracking them across many remain prevalent, effectively diluting their political voice.
When district lines are drawn in ways that suppress representation rather than reflect it, the process becomes not just politically manipulative—it becomes racially discriminatory. Such actions fundamentally violate the principles of democratic fairness and challenge both the spirit and the letter of the law of the Voting Rights Act.
Even more concerning is the continued overrepresentation of white Texans in political power structures. Although they accounted for less than 5% of the state’s growth, redistricting proposals often seek to preserve or expand white-majority and Republican-leaning districts.
This creates a deep misalignment between the population and its political representation, reinforcing long-standing patterns of racial exclusion. In doing so, redistricting becomes a tool not for fair governance, but for protecting the power of a shrinking demographic at the expense of an increasingly diverse majority.
At the end of the day, we must get these folks who are protecting their own incumbencies and colluding with Trump to tip the scales in Congress—out of power. This is why these hearings—and our voices—matter.
In 2021, Texas gained two new congressional seats due to explosive population growth—95% of which came from Latino, Black, and Asian American communities. But instead of drawing maps that reflected this demographic reality, the Republican-controlled Legislature crafted district lines that preserved incumbent power and reinforced the dominance of conservative white voters, particularly in urban hubs like Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.
As Texas Observer journalist Justin Miller reports, those maps—already facing legal challenges for racial gerrymandering—are now being reopened in an extraordinary mid-decade redistricting push, orchestrated under pressure from Donald Trump. Governor Greg Abbott has convened a special session citing a dubious Department of Justice letter as justification, but legal experts argue this is little more than a convenient excuse to give Republicans additional congressional seats ahead of the 2026 elections.
As Miller highlights through his interview with redistricting expert Michael Li, this maneuver is both legally questionable and politically unprecedented. To prove racial gerrymandering, one must show that race predominated in the drawing of district lines. Yet Texas Republicans have long claimed that race played no role in crafting their 2021 maps—only partisanship. If that’s the case, there should be no constitutional need to redraw them.
The fact that they are now attempting to redo their own map—a map they previously defended—lays bare the real motive: a naked bid for political advantage. In a state where communities of color have fueled nearly all population growth, redrawing districts to suppress their representation is not just aggressive; it’s anti-democratic.
As Miller makes clear, this is a power grab dressed in legal pretense, with deeply troubling implications for racial equity and representative government in Texas.
In 2021, the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature redrew the state’s political maps that determine the lines of power in the Texas House, the Texas Senate, and the representatives in U.S. Congress. Thanks to a decade’s worth of population growth fueled by Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans, Texas gained two new congressional seats—bringing the state’s total to 38, second only to California.
From a partisan perspective, the maps were primarily about incumbent protection—one new seat went to Republicans in the Houston area, and one went to Democrats in Austin, while the rest of the existing seats were all made either redder or bluer
From the perspective of racial representation, it was a further continuation of the Texas tradition of maximizing the power of conservative Anglo voters at the expense of communities of color—especially in Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.
Timing-wise, that re-mapping was done as it typically is: after the decennial federal census. Yet, just four years later, Republicans are—upon receiving orders from their supreme leader President Donald Trump—coming back to Austin for a second bite at the gerrymandering apple as Team MAGA hopes to shore up its razor-thin majority in the U.S. House in 2026.
Governor Greg Abbott has put redistricting on his call for the current special legislative session, which convened Monday, citing the need to address constitutional concerns around a few specific racially gerrymandered congressional districts in Houston and DFW (something Trump’s Department of Justice quite conveniently chose to criticize and about which the Texas GOP has never before cared).
There are reports that Republicans will try to redraw as many as five currently Democratic districts—from South Texas and Houston to Dallas and possibly Austin—to favor the GOP to flip in the upcoming midterms.
That’s a tall task and a politically dicey maneuver—and one we saw 20 years ago. The Texas Observer spoke with Michael Li, a Texas native and longtime redistricting expert at the Brennan Center, about Tom Delay, dummymanders, and the long history of racial gerrymandering in the state.
TO: Texas was sued in 2021 for violating the Voting Rights Act by racially gerrymandering its new maps. Can you give a brief overview of what’s transpired since then?
The trial on the challenges to the 2021 map just concluded in June. … The briefing on that will continue into the fall and at some point in the coming months the court will rule. But of course, in the interim, some of those claims could be mooted out with respect to the congressional maps. So the [state] legislative map claims could still go on, but the congressional could become moot if the state draws new maps. So it’s this sort of bizarro world—this is the world without Section 5 of the [Voting Rights Act], where we had preclearance.
And we’re at the point now in 2025 where the state’s maps have kind of been under litigation for decades now.
Well, every map since the 1970s has been challenged or redrawn in part because they were racially discriminatory or violated the Voting Rights Act. This is nothing new for Texas. Whether Democrats drew the maps or Republicans drew the maps, Texas has struggled for decades to draw maps that fairly represented communities of color.
And in this decade, the map, I think to most objective observers, underrepresents communities of color—who are 95 percent of the population growth [of the] last decade. So you already under-represent those communities, and by redrawing this map you could make a bad map even worse, as hard as that is to believe.
So there were rumblings over the past month of the Trump administration pressuring Republicans in Texas to redraw the maps again, to expand their numbers in the U.S. House. Obviously that has now become a concrete thing. But, you know, we saw this DOJ letter that, right before Abbott put out his special session agenda, specifically lists racially gerrymandered districts in Houston and the DFW area that the state needs to correct. What do you make of that? Was this just a blatant way to create a pretext for Texas Republicans to open up the maps again?
Well, the letter feels very pretexual. It’s hard to make sense of the letter from a legal perspective. Just because you have districts with a lot of minorities and different minority groups doesn’t make it a racial gerrymander. What you have to do for a racial gerrymander is that race has to dominate in how you decided to draw the map. Texas has insisted throughout the [El Paso] litigation that it couldn’t be a racial gerrymander because they didn’t consider race. Race could not predominate if you didn’t consider it.
The letter doesn’t make any sense legally, it doesn’t actually make sense factually, and the fact that the state is using that letter to reopen up the map-drawing process I think is very pretextual.
Because if it was true that, as the state has claimed, there was no racial component to the drawing of the maps, then they could ignore the letter and say “Sue us.”
Right, and in fact Ken Paxton’s office even responded to the letter saying, “No, no, no, we didn’t consider race at all. We did this for partisanship.” Well, that’s fine. If you did it for partisan gerrymandering and you didn’t consider race at all, there is no constitutional problem with these districts. But the fact that Governor Abbott has said [in his special session call], we need to have constitutionally drawn maps—certainly their grasping onto the letter feels like a convenient excuse to do something that [they] already wanted to do for other reasons.
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We’re hearing that Republicans want to add as many as five more districts, but that does not necessarily mean that they’re going to target the ones that are named in the DOJ letter. It gets messy very quickly, there’s all these cascading effects with changing lines and stuff, but they can kind of just open up the maps entirely and just start changing everything.
Yeah,I don’t think they’re bound by those districts alone.If you actually redraw the districts that are named in the letter, that’s just buying like a Texas-sized legal fight. You’re just inviting the argument that you’re intentionally discriminating against communities of color because these are in many cases long-standing districts that have been represented by Black and Latino members.
And it’s worth mentioning that, last decade, Texas was found by a three-judge panel in Washington [to have] intentionally discriminated when it drew its maps. The court in the preclearance case said, like, there’s more evidence of intention to discriminate than we have room or need to discuss. So there’s a lot of danger in attacking these districts.
Reportshave said the GOP’s tentative plan to draw new Republican seats would be to target districts in South Texas, Henry Cuellar’s district and Vicente Gonzalez’s, Julie Johnson’s district in the Dallas area. The Houston area, and potentially in Austin. In terms of just the partisan gerrymandering aspect of this, does that strike you as especially aggressive?
From both a partisan perspective and a racial perspective, many of those are majority non-white districts—with the exception of Lloyd Doggett’s district in Austin. So you’re talking about targeting the political power of communities of color in a pretty aggressive way. But it’s also aggressive politically. Republicans in Texas already hold two-thirds of the congressional seats. If they add another five, they end up with 80 percent of the seats—in a state where they get around 55-56 percent of the vote at best.
This has “dummymander” written all over it. And again, last decade is a cautionary tale. [Republicans] drew the maps very aggressively last decade and it looked pretty good for them. And then [in 2018] they lost the Dallas seat that Colin Allred won and the Houston seat that Lizzie Fletcher won, and they almost lost a bunch of seats around the Austin area. Texas is growing so fast, it’s changing so fast, it’s becoming more diverse so fast. So it’s really hard to predict what the future electorate of Texas looks like. Because when you gerrymander, you’re making a bet that you know what the politics of a place are going to be.
And in many places, that’s true because, you know, they’re not changing that much. In Texas, it’s just the opposite of that. You can easily be too smart for your own good..
Right. And in 2021 with the current set of maps the consensus was it was a Republican-favored map where they expanded their numbers a bit but it was fairly tempered compared to past maps and was more about protecting the current status quo for incumbents. And then they saw 2022 and 2024 where Republicans won at big levels statewide and saw specific gains in South Texas in the Valley and some backsliding in the suburbs like Fort Bend and Collin counties. So it feels like they’re kind of looking back and being like, “Damn, we should have been more aggressive.” And they’re at risk of short-term political gain right now based on potentially over-reading or over-interpreting what could be some electoral aberrations.
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. If you talked to a lot of Democrats after 2018, they thought they knew what the future of the state was going to look like. They were wrong.
They were pretty confident that they were going to flip the Texas House in 2020. And that didn’t happen.
Right, and 2022 and 2024 were certainly good for Republicans, but things have changed. One being Joe Biden is no longer President and Donald trump is. And if you were trying to be in a good position for the rest of the decade, you might not want to be so aggressive.
But maybe they’re thinking this will be good enough for 2026 and we may lose seats in ’28 or ’30, but oh well. That is the world that the Supreme Court left us in because they said: partisan gerrymandering, we’re not gonna police it.
So the last time, infamously, that something like this happened was back in was in 2003 with Tom Delay in the mid-decade redistricting where they came to Austin and redid the congressional maps with explicit intentions of packing and cracking Democratic districts, really gutting the entire base of the existing conservative rural Democratic members, and also breaking up Austin into seven different pieces or whatever. What do you see as key similarities and differences with the situation now?
A key difference is when they redrew the maps in the 2000s, it was to replace a court-drawn map. The Legislature had deadlocked in 2001 because the Democrats still controlled the Texas House and they couldn’t agree on a map and so a court drew a map. And the court took a conservative approach in terms of not making a lot of changes based on the 1991 maps. … And the 1991 map was a fairly infamous and aggressive Democratic gerrymander, because Democrats controlled the process in 1991, and so by the early 2000s Republicans were winning the majority of the state vote but Democrats still controlled a majority of congressional seats. Republicans thought well that seems unfair. … Whether you agree with how aggressive they were or not, they did sort of have a case. This decade it’s different right, because Republicans drew this map. They got what they wanted and now they’re redrawing it. I can’t think of another example in the country where a party redraws the map that it drew. … That’s really unprecedented.
And also, going back to the point, if you accept the premise of the 2000s that seat share and vote share should kind of be alike, well Republicans have 67 percent of the seats. They don’t win 67 percent of the vote—and they certainly don’t win 80 percent. If you accept the arguments from the Tom Delay cycle, well gosh you actually should have more Democratic seats.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
