Talking Points Memo

Here we go again.

Texas Democrats have fled the state to thwart a highly unusual mid-decade gerrymandering maneuver that state Republicans are attempting to pull off to increase their party's share of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives ahead of next year's midterm elections and … stop me if you've heard this one before? Because nearly the exact same thing happened 22 years ago.

Referred to by TPM Editor-at-Large David Kurtz as the Great Texas Skedaddle of 2003, the story of how then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom Delay broke with over a half century of precedent in spearheading the re-redistricting of Texas in a blatant Republican power grab for a handful of U.S. House seats (and mostly got away with it) is something of an ur text for TPM. As Josh Marshall explained in a 2021 blog post about yet another Texas legislative standoff: "What happened in 2003 in Texas was a preview, prologue to almost everything that would happen over the subsequent two decades. It presaged the debt ceiling hostage taking; it presaged Merrick Garland; and it presaged Donald Trump." Without an actual law mandating when redistricting must occur, precedent proved an insufficient bulwark to the ascendent view among Republicans like Delay that power was all that mattered.

Of course, when Democrats tried their own norm-breaking scheme — hightailing it out of state to block the redistricting measure — Delay called for them to be arrested and "insist[ed] that the Constitution be upheld." Using an early TPM coinage, all the way back in 2003, Josh Marshall called this a classic example of "up-is-downism."

We're now awash in up-is-downism and the notion that institutional norms can prevent abuses of power seems quaint if not naive. But in watching nearly the exact same scenario play out in Texas this week that we saw in 2003, there's something normalizing in the predictability of the playbook. We've been pointing to the direction the Republican Party has been trending for over 25 years. We not only understand this moment, but how we got to this moment. We think that is pretty valuable these days. We hope you do too!

NOT ALL HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

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