Austin Chronicle: Quote of the Week & Point Austin

Point Austin: Coming Home to Austin

Latest gerrymander reflects Capitolcontempt for capital

By Michael King

You've got to wonder whatit will take to make "True Orangebloods" (as they like to call themselves)finally have quite enough of Rick Perry and his carpetbagging friends from theTexas provinces. The 82nd legislative session has not exactly been a friendlyone for the folks at UT-Austin. First there were Perry's broad-stroke budgetcuts, dictated not by fiscal necessity (hence the refusal even to considerrational deployment of the Rainy Day Fund) but by political dogma, adheringblindly to a "no tax" fanaticism even while forcing state costs downward ontocounties and cities lacking the capacity to bear them (even forbidden by statelaw from adequately doing so). On the budget block, higher education was treatedas shabbily as public schools, perhaps with a little less fanfare.

Then came the clumsy attempts to turn universityeducation into simply a cost-center rather than an investment in citizenship andthe future. Perry began promoting a cut-rate, $10,000 degree, with a cronycomparing the difference to that between a utilitarian "Chevy" and a luxury"Cadillac" education. (Folks driving Cadillacs are endlessly eager to tightenother people's belts.) Finally, an appointed education "consultant" to the UTSys­tem board of regents began denigrating the usefulness of university researchand suggested that most undergraduate teaching could be accomplished by low-paidand untenured lecturers (better known in the academic trade as itinerant,expendable sharecroppers).

In fairness, $200,000 consultant Rick O'Donnell was sentpacking after an uproar from UT administrators and even the Texas Exes, not tomention a newspaper analysis of his own "scholarship" at the Texas Public PolicyFoundation that showed it was riddled with elementary errors. Yet can youimagine the uproar at the Forty Acres (and across the state) if some hired gunproposed slashing UT football expenditures (or those at A&M) to a level thatrepresented, oh, $10,000 a player? Or perhaps the suggestion that most coachingcould be handled quite well by 25-year-old graduate assistants – younger,cheaper by the dozen, and much less likely to create market-rate salary warswith the likes of Florida and Ohio State?

Twisting the Knife

I'm pondering these unanswerable questions in the wakeof the Lege's latest assault on Austin, the proposed five-way split ofcongressional districts that would leave most of Travis County "represented" byfar-away Republican congressmen. Even Tom DeLay never contemplated quite thisradical a vivisection of the capital city of his home state; SenateRedistricting Chair Kel Seliger now has bragging rights over theHammer.

Longtime Austin Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who's gotten wearilyaccustomed to being targeted by GOP lawmakers determined to draw him out ofCongress since they can't defeat him at the ballot box, says he's ready to "livein a Winnebago" if that's what it takes to outfox the GOP gerrymander. He toldthe Chronicle's Lee Nichols thatthe latest map is "cunning and malicious, but it's definitely not crazy. Theyhave a well-conceived scheme to impose [Republican] rule on our county." Anearlier four-district map, proposed by San Antonio Republican Lamar Smith,Doggett said, "had a dagger he plunged right into the heart of our community,and now they're just twisting and turning it to cut us up one more way. ... It'smore of the same, though a more vicious attack perhaps, in that it's really fivecrooked congressional districts."

Whatever the final map looks like – and there willlikely be several iterations on the way through the committees and the courts –you have to wonder at such a persistent, even obsessive "republican" (i.e.,allegedly representative) effort to make certain that the citizens of TravisCounty be prevented from electing a member of Congress who actually representsour interests, as we see them.

A simpler way to put it: Why do these guys hateAustin somuch?

No Education WithoutRepresentation

Of course, conservative legislators – Republican andDemocratic, stretching back decades – have always had a hate-love relationshipwith the capital city. Even while many of them attended UT or its law school –heaven forbid Lone Star offspring go east or west for college – they learnedearly that Austin-bashing and attacks on the "People's Republic" always playwell in the provinces. Yet like many a once-homesick freshman, given a taste ofthis den of sophisticated iniquity, they find reasons to hang aroundpost-graduation. Many maintain (campaign-financed) homes here as well as intheir districts, and if threatened with exile by defeat or retirement, theyslide effortlessly into the lobby rather than return to the less-cosmopolitanPiney Woods or played-out oil fields. Just can't keep 'em down on the farm,after they've seen UT.

Fair enough. After all, most of us who live here now aresometime immigrants. But if we're good enough to welcome all these wanna­beAustinites at Homecoming, we should be damn well good enough to have our ownelected representative in Washington, D.C., and not have to go begging to a hostile proxyofficial in San Antonio or Fredricksburg orby-God FortWorth when we want our voices heard on federal matters.Austinites may not be a "protected class" under the Voting Rights Act – and Godknows that statewide, African-Americans and Hispanics are much more abused bythis tyrannical voting-fraud-by-gerrymander than we are – but it's about timethat these citified country boys acknowledge that we have a constitutional rightto actual, effective representation in Congress.

Those suburbanites who joined the tea party backlash inNovember thought "waste and fraud" were on the chopping block, only to discoverthat their own school districts would be savaged by budget cuts, along withhealth care and nursing homes. In the same way, the thousands of Texas Exes whoclaim undying loyalty to UT-Austin need to open their eyes and see what'shappening to their beloved alma mater and her home, all in the name of Perry'spresidential ambitions and the divine right of rich white folks to runabsolutely everything.

The eyes of Texas are upon you.

The Senate Redistricting Committeehas scheduled a public hearing on the latest redistricting map: Fri­day, June 3,9am, in Room E1.016 in the Capitol Extension.