The GOP’s Texas Power Grab

One of the major goals of the “southern strategy” pioneered by the Republican Party during the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard Nixon was to taint the Democratic Party as the party of “nigger lovers.” More specifically, the GOP understood they could use race as an issue to wedge whites away from a Democratic Party that increasingly seemed to have enlisted in the civil rights movement.

The Texas GOP is seeking to redraw the state’s congressional electoral map to cram the state’s minorities into a few, already Democratic districts. Democrats argue the plan violates the Voting Rights Act by concentrating black and Latino voters into fewer districts, creating a majority of largely white congressional districts more likely to vote Republican.

If DeLay has his way, Republicans increasingly will be white suburbanites and urban minorities will be Democrats. When partisan politics becomes electoral apartheid, that’s southern strategy for the 21st century.