In Texas Senate, a Racial Outburst

washingtonpost.com
In Texas Senate, a Racial Outburst
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 20, 2003; Page A06

AUSTIN, Sept. 19 -- If not exactly a love fest, the Texas state Senate is, by tradition, a relatively sedate and collegial body whose members proclaim their love of consensus and take their seats to hear colleagues deliver speeches of "personal privilege."

So it was a measure of how incendiary the Texas fight over congressional redistricting has become when several of the chamber's Democrats -- all but two of them black or Hispanic -- on Thursday denounced their all-white Republican brethren as racists, supremacists and bigots.

"The last time I was treated the way we were on the Senate floor was when I was about 6 years old when I first entered the first grade, and I was just a little Mexican boy who had his first taste of what white supremacy was like," said Sen. Frank L. Madla of San Antonio, heretofore regarded as a moderate to conservative.

Sen. Mario Gallegos Jr., a Democrat from an inner-city district in Houston, attacked a Republican colleague, Sen. Tommy Williams, who represents a wealthy suburban enclave north of Houston called the Woodlands.

"The people from the Woodlands did not elect me," Gallegos told reporters. "That's a gated community. The nearest gated community to me in inner-city Houston is the county jail."

Ironically, the racially loaded outburst was triggered by what the majority Republicans regarded as a conciliatory gesture: Rather than imposing a threatened fine of $57,000 on each of 11 Democratic senators who fled the state for 45 days this summer to block progress on the GOP redistricting plan, the Republicans voted to place the Democrats on "probation."

Several Republicans said that should have laid the matter to rest. It didn't.

"The very word 'probation' to a senator is condescending and patronizing," said Harvey Kronberg, who edits an independent newsletter on Texas politics.

From the outset of their bitter fight over redistricting last spring, the Democrats have insisted that the Republican maps would disenfranchise minorities in Texas, who comprise nearly half the state's population. They say the GOP's goal -- to shift five or six congressional seats into the Republican column -- could be accomplished only by packing some blacks and Hispanics into "super-majority districts" while carving up other minority communities to dilute their electoral clout in districts that have elected liberal white Democrats to Congress.

"This is not particularly revolutionary -- the Democrats did it to Republicans a decade ago," Kronberg said. "They'd take Republican population centers and fracture them into predominantly Democratic districts. But Democrats doing it to Republicans was essentially a white-on-white battle; a decade later, Republicans doing it to Democrats becomes a white-on-color battle."

The Republicans, for their part, have not agreed among themselves on how to draw the lines on a new congressional district map. It may take a week or more, and heavy horse-trading, before they produce a plan. But they profess astonishment at being accused of racism, insisting that what they are up to is no more than aggressive partisanship.

"It has nothing to do with race, and I am offended at the insinuation that anything we've done has been racially motivated," said Sen. Craig Estes of Wichita Falls, in north Texas. "It's Democratic spin to keep from facing the fact that all the citizens of Texas have elected mostly Republicans."

Republicans insist that any map they draw would produce at least as many black and Hispanic lawmakers as already serve in the U.S. House. Independent analysts agree that would be the case, noting that the courts would reject any map that is likely to eliminate a seat for a minority member of Congress.

"It may well turn out there will be some more opportunities for blacks or Hispanic Democrats to win seats in Congress," said Earl Black, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston. "It's the white Anglos in the current congressional delegation who are the endangered species."

Still, having been forced into a corner by the Republicans who control the state legislature, the Democrats are sharpening their rhetorical swords.

"I was suspended from school in San Antonio as a little girl, and my offense was that I accidentally spoke Spanish in the playground," said Sen. Leticia Van De Putte, the Senate Democratic leader. "And so now as a senator, I stand up and try to represent my constituency and say these maps try to disenfranchise minority voters. It reopens those times in Texas history when African Americans and Hispanics would not be allowed in the political process."