received an F grade from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project<\/a> because it was rated so politically unfair.<\/p>\nBut in other Democratic-controlled states, such as New York, California, Colorado and Washington, redistricting is handled by non-partisan, independent commissions, rather than the state legislatures.<\/p>\n
Texas Republicans currently hold 25 out of 38 congressional seats in the Lone Star State.<\/p>\n
They hope the new maps could increase that number to 30 – all in constituencies that Trump won last November by at least 10 points.<\/p>\n
Ahead of next year’s midterm elections, Texas’ redistricting could help pad the slender Republican majority in the US House, where Trump’s party currently has 219 of 435 seats, while Democrats hold 212. <\/p>\n
The new map would include a redistricting of the Rio Grande Valley and combine two districts in the state capital of Austin currently held by Democrats. <\/p>\n
In northern Texas, the map would expand a district currently held by Democratic congresswoman Julie Johnson to include rural Republican strongholds. <\/p>\n
It would also redraw four Houston-area seats, including one held by Democratic congressman Al Green. <\/p>\n
Texas state legislator Todd Hunter, a Republican who sponsored the measure to redraw the map, called it “a good plan for Texas”.<\/p>\n
This is the third time in the past few years that Democrats have fled Texas to deny Republicans a quorum.<\/p>\n
The party’s legislators took off for to Washington DC in 2021 in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to block the passage of new election rules.<\/p>\n
Texas Democrats also left for Oklahoma in 2003 in a bid to stop redistricting that Republicans eventually managed to get approved.<\/p>\n
States typically undergo redistricting every 10 years, when voting maps are redrawn to account for population changes. <\/p>\n
The most recent US Census was in 2020. Redrawing district lines in the middle of a decade is unusual. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Democratic state lawmakers have fled Texas in a bid to stop a vote on a new congressional map that would heavily favour Republicans. The redistricting, unveiled by Texas’ majority Republicans last week and backed by President Donald Trump, would create five new Republican-leaning seats in the US House of Representatives. Two-thirds of the 150-member Texas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34350,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-us-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34351,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34349\/revisions\/34351"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}