Buyer’s Remorse; Seller’s Regret
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:49 pm
So how ’bout that 2003 redistricting? If there was any question of just how poorly the entire affair turned out for both parties, the imagery at the first panel of today’s symposium said it all. Rehashing the session, lawmakers from both sides repeatedly used the phrase “picking off a scab.”
“It was probably the single worst session I’ve been through,” Rep. Pete Gallego (D-Alpine) said.
“A textbook on how not to do it,” Sen. Robert Duncan (R-Lubbock) said of the book on 2003 redistricting that’s at the center of the symposium.
And former Lt. Guv Bill Ratliff, the Mt. Pleasant Republican who opposed it all back then, ended his remarks by lamenting the ways “we might’ve avoided all this.”
Though tempered by the academic setting, all of the old tensions still simmered on the panel, made up entirely of legislators who endured the ordeal. The Dems, of course, are still bitter about being bullied. “We could’ve won,” former Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos repeated many times throughout the panel, the disappointment evident in his voice. (When redistricting attorney J. Gerald Hebert was asked later in the day exactly how the Democrats would have won his answer was fairly unpersuasive.) For Republicans, there was the sense that all of their efforts only contributed to what became a national Democratic resurgence in 2006. “The war was ultimately lost,” Duncan said. And it came at the cost of further poisoning the relationships with their colleagues across the aisle.
“We no longer trust each other,” Gallego described the still-lingering effects on the House. The Legislature works “on the basis of relationships,” as Gallego said, and the personal animosity to which redistricting contributed is as bad as it has ever been.
The bad blood was evident in one exchange during the panel when Sen. Jeff Wentworth laid out an extended explanation of how he never found any evidence supporting a rather infamous claim made by Sen. Leticia Van de Putte.
“I think,” Barrientos coyly followed up, “that what you can then deduct from what Sen. Wentworth is saying is that somebody’s lying.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Wentworth shot back as he left the room. “And it’s Sen. Van de Putte.”
