Texas faces heated redistricting battle

AUSTIN, Texas, May 8 (UPI) -- A hot issue involving Washington politics has made its way onto the table of Texas legislators as they fight to solve budget, school finance and other issues in the final weeks of the session scheduled to close June 2.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, is pushing a Congressional redistricting to assure Republicans at least 19 of the state's 32 House seats. The GOP holds 15 seats but DeLay doesn't think that fairly represents the political sentiment of Texas.

DeLay says that 47 percent of the state's voters supported Republicans in Congress in the last election and it's unfair for Democrats to hold 17 seats. His plan could cost the seats of some well-known Texas Democrats, such as Rep. Martin Frost of Dallas.

A federal judge drew the current Texas districts after the 2000 Census, but now Republicans control both houses of the Legislature for the first time since Reconstruction and all statewide offices at the Capitol in Austin.

The DeLay plan may come up for a floor vote in a few days and Democrats are vowing to fight the plan although they may not have enough votes to block it.

State Rep. Richard Raymond, D-Laredo, filed a complaint under the federal Voting Rights Act charging that House Redistricting Committee Chairman Joe Crabb, R-Atascocita, shut out minorities by not holding statewide hearings.

"What has happened in the last week is something that is unconscionable," Raymond told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "We cannot stand by and sit silently and say, 'You violated Voting Rights, and it's OK. It was a bill that was passed in the 1960s -- it doesn't matter anymore.'

"It still matters."

Crabb didn't return calls Thursday to comment on the allegations from the south Texas Democrat. The only hearings on the bill were held at the Capitol in Austin.

Several Democratic members of the Texas delegation held a news conference in Washington on Wednesday to denounce the DeLay plan.

"This is the Tom DeLay life tenure act," said Rep. Lloyd Doggett, of Austin, whose district would be sliced up into four districts, one of them stretching 400 miles from Austin to the Rio Grande.