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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Czar Tom
Wednesday 29 October @ 14:43:12 |
 by Jim Hightower
Tom DeLay, the loopy majority leader of the U.S. House, didn’t have enough to do in Washington, so in his spare time he’s become the new Czar of Texas.
He swept into our state capitol early this year with a brand new scheme to redraw the boundary lines of our congressional districts.
Never mind that redistricting had already been done just two years ago by a bipartisan panel of judges, Tom doesn’t have any patience with bipartisanship. He didn’t like those old lines because, he whined, the people just weren’t electing enough Republicans to congress.
So Tom took charge of our state government, drawing a new map with congressional districts rigged to eliminate six to eight Democrats. In a silent coup, he even shipped our inept governor out of state so he wouldn’t get in the way while Tom himself was browbeating legislators in back rooms to force out his new map for Texas’ congressional seats. No Democrats were consulted and no public hearings were held—the little czar simply ruled.
And what a map he drew! It’s filled with districts that look like U-turns, curlicues, squiggles, and snake trails. Take my town of Austin, which DeLay hacked up into three convoluted districts. This effectively leaves our state capitol as the only one in the country with no U.S. representative of our own.
Instead we’re now in a Houston district, a San Antonio district, and—in a tribute to the art of gross gerrymandering—a Rio Grande Valley district that looks like a Picasso snake, running for 350 miles all the way from Austin to the Mexican border.
It’s bizarre. For example, The Tavern, a local restaurant, is in the Houston district, but its parking lot is in the San Antonio district. The University of Texas football stadium is in the San Antonio district, but its baseball field, right across the street, is in the Rio Grande Valley district.
Czar Tom is out to sovietize our political system.
Jim Hightower is the best-selling author of “Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back,” on sale now from Viking Press. For more information, visit http://www.jimhightower.com.
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