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Power hungry racist Republicans redraw Texas

From the Washington Post:

Texas Republican leaders unveiled a congressional redistricting plan yesterday that Democrats characterized as an illegal attempt to solidify GOP control of the U.S. House by diluting the political influence of minority voters while handing Republicans at least seven more seats in Congress. ......

"The map is clearly illegal and will be struck down by the courts," said Rep. Martin Frost (D-Tex.), one of seven Democrats whose chances of reelection would be endangered under the new district lines. "I don't know what the Justice Department will do, but if they play it straight they'll knock it down, too."

Republicans said they are confident the redrawn district lines can withstand the expected legal challenge. "This has been thoroughly reviewed by several sets of lawyers, and we think it fully complies with the Voting Rights Act," said David Beckwith, spokesman for Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the presiding office of the state Senate.
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According to an analysis by Frost's staff, the GOP plan would "disenfranchise" more than 2.1 million black and Hispanic voters by "packing" them into a handful of districts and diluting their influence in other districts.
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Frost said that under the GOP plan, his district around Fort Worth would be "chopped into five pieces," and that black voters in the district would be "attached as a tail to [another] district that runs all the way north to the Oklahoma line. There is no way the courts will uphold that."

A Republican official did not dispute the purpose of the new redistricting plan. "We're not going to get them all, but it puts a number of them behind the eight ball," he said of the Democrats. "Virtually every Anglo Democrat is going to have a rough time."

All of the most endangered Democrats are white. State Rep. Garnet Coleman, a black Democrat from Houston, called the Republican plan "racist" and said that its central purpose is the elimination of elected white Democrats.

"That is the target, because they want to change the face of the Democratic Party to black and brown so they can continue to run racist innuendo in their campaigns," he said. "It is the elimination of [Texas] Anglo Democrats in the U.S. Congress."