Doll Is Mine wrote::lol:

Doll Is Mine wrote::lol:

Today was a big day for Senator Henry Marsh. The legislator of twenty years took a rare day off during the Virginia Senate’s 46-day session, to attend President Barack Obama’s second-term inauguration in Washington D.C. For the 79-year-old black civil rights lawyer, attending a black president’s inauguration on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday is perhaps the most auspicious of occasions. Certainly nobody would object to him missing just one day. Looking at today’s legislative calendar, he would have seen that his absence wouldn’t be problematic, with nothing contentious on the agenda. (With the Senate split 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans, and with a Republican lieutenant governor acting as tie-breaker, that’s no small point.)

...

Today was also a big day for Senate Republicans. They knew that Henry Marsh would be at the inauguration today, and that the 20–20 split in the Senate would become a 20–19 split while Marsh was 100 miles north, among the throngs on the National Mall. So today was the day that they decided—without hearings, advertisements, notifications, or warnings—to take a chunk out of Marsh’s district, along with a handful of others, to ghettoize black voters in a majority-minority district and put 45% of voting-age citizens into new districts.


...Unbeknownst to anybody but the 20 Senate Republicans, the bill had been replaced with a radical redistricting, combining two senators into a single district (eliminating the district of 2009 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Creigh Deeds), reshuffling district boundaries throughout the state to absorb those changes (to Republicans’ apparent favor in a half-dozen districts), and creating a “black district.”

jerseyhoya wrote:When Democrats draw majority minority seats or call for more majority minority seats, that's standing up for minority representation. If Republicans do it, they're ghettoizing minority voters. Pick one.

After first distancing himself from the new legislative lines the Virginia Senate GOP forced through Monday, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) condemned his party’s political gamesmanship Tuesday.

“I certainly don’t think that’s a good way to do business,” McDonnell told reporters in Richmond, according to the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star.

jerseyhoya wrote:When Democrats draw majority minority seats or call for more majority minority seats, that's standing up for minority representation. If Republicans do it, they're ghettoizing minority voters. Pick one.

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:When Democrats draw majority minority seats or call for more majority minority seats, that's standing up for minority representation. If Republicans do it, they're ghettoizing minority voters. Pick one.

Have many of those Democrat-instigated reconfigurations been entirely dependent on waiting for key legislators to be unavailable for votes to authorize?

jerseyhoya wrote:

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:When Democrats draw majority minority seats or call for more majority minority seats, that's standing up for minority representation. If Republicans do it, they're ghettoizing minority voters. Pick one.

Have many of those Democrat-instigated reconfigurations been entirely dependent on waiting for key legislators to be unavailable for votes to authorize?

Obama's DoJ did not care what Texas's legislators, key and not key alike, had to say in their votes to authorize the maps.

jerseyhoya wrote:That said, the article there is absurd in its description of what happened. The Obama Administration was aggressive in mandating the drawing of majority-minority districts during redistricting. Texas is battling the DoJ in court over the federal government overturning Texas's plan for drawing too few majority Hispanic seats. When Democrats draw majority minority seats or call for more majority minority seats, that's standing up for minority representation. If Republicans do it, they're ghettoizing minority voters. Pick one.

jerseyhoya wrote:Obama's DoJ did not care what Texas's legislators, key and not key alike, had to say in their votes to authorize the maps.