Texas Fraud

Mon Oct 18th, 2004 at 19:26:45 GMT

(From the diaries -- kos)

This year's Congressional elections in Texas will be carried out under newly drawn Congressional District boundaries. The old boundaries were redrawn while Texas Democrats screamed bloody murder and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay tried to get the FAA to intervene (for which he was recently ethically reprimanded by the House ethics committee).

But, Democrats appealed the legality of the redistricting. The Texas boundaries had already been redistricted by a court when the legislature of Texas failed to reach agreement on boundaries. The Democrats said that you couldn't do it all over again without a census in between for purely partisan reasons. The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to act in time for this election, but today has sent the case back for further consideration of whether it was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R) was subpoenaed in Houston to an October 25, 2004 deposition concerning his role in the controversial dispute between Democratic Legislators and the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) during last year's redistricting struggle. Texas State Representative Lon Burnam (D--Fort Worth) subpoenaed DeLay in his ongoing lawsuit challenging DPS's use of public funds to achieve political ends and for its destruction of documents following the exodus of Democratic Legislators from the State to prevent a quorum in a redistricting effort that Democrats claim was illegal.