Molly Ivins August 8AUSTIN, Texas — Ee-yeww boy, what a mess. We had three unconstitutional congressional districts, and now we've got 13 cases of allie-allie-in-free. How many Republican federal judges does it take to screw up an election? Just three. The short answer to "What does it all mean?" is: "Good for the Republicans, bad for the Dems." Which is why your basic D's are expected to scramble off to ask the Supreme Court for a stay of the three-judge panel's remarkable decision. In the meantime, now is the time for every Texan with a moniker like Marilyn Monroe or John Wayne to run for public office. Someone named Dicky Navy could file against Dick Armey. Surely there's another guy named Joe Barton in Joe Barton's district who'd like a job that pays $133,000 a year. At this point, it's not even clear whether candidates will be identified by party on the ballot. You know as well as I do that Texas voters are frequently confused and fond of voting for people named Jesse James or Sam Houston Smith. Remember the time we put the Wrong Don Yarbrough on the Texas Supreme Court? The Wrong Don, who was both a loon and a crook, said that God had told him to run, which led to Ben Sargent's great cartoon in which the Lord sighs, "Yeah, but I thought he was the OTHER Don Yarbrough." The trouble with the three-judge decision is not so much what it does to the districts as what it does to the process. Oddly enough, there was general agreement on what needed to be done to fix the three unconstitutional districts: not much. The plaintiffs, defendants and judges all drew three new districts that look pretty much alike, and all hands recognized that the incumbents were likely to be re-elected from them. How the judges then managed to scramble another 10 districts and change the electoral procedure in same is the great mystery. Under the decision, the results of this spring's primaries and the runoffs are out the window; the Nov. 5 elections in 13 districts will be like open primaries, with runoffs to follow on Dec. 10. Dec. 10 — now there's a day we're all used to voting on, with politics uppermost in our minds. We can count on a dramatic vote drop-off, with the contests going to the best-organized party. And what's the only organized party in Texas? Republican, of course. All the R's have to do is recruit one black candidate and one Hispanic candidate to run against each white Democrat, and presto — runoff against the Republican on Dec.
The Democrats promptly fell to fighting among themselves — what else? Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock said the judge's plan looks fine to him. House Speaker Pete Laney disagrees. Attorney General Dan Morales is undecided, of course. U.S. Rep. Ken Bentsen of Houston, who lost nearly 5 percent of his Democratic voters, said that "a renegade federal court" has "usurped state authority." Naturally, we all enjoy seeing a Democrat cuss the federal courts and stand up for state's rights. Isn't redistricting fun? For myself, I would not presume to detect the influence of partisanship in the decision of a federal judge, except that not only are all three of the judges in question Republican appointees but one of them is also Enid Jones, one of the scariest people ever to sit on a bench. For those who have forgotten, Jones used to be on Big George Bush's short list of Supreme Court nominees when he was prez, and the prospect terrified so many people that fellow federal judges planned to fly to Washington to testify against her. You may notice two interesting aspects of the new decision. One is that it switches two precincts in Rep. Steve Stockman's district, thus giving Stockman a chance at this December runoff scheme — the only way he could escape the wrath of voters who have been sorely embarrassed at being represented by a perfect nincompoop. But left miraculously untouched is Greg Laughlin's district, where the Republican nomination was won by the libertarian Ron Paul, who happens to have been supported by Enid Jones. Meanwhile, out in San Diego, the national Republican Party's platform committee was unable to bring itself to vote for tolerance. This does not surprise me, as I once saw the state Republican Party vote against civility and so understand that the right wing considers tolerance and civility to be Trojan horses — heads of camels under the tent, as it were, leading inevitably to abortion and homosexual marriage. What worries me is that I am no longer surprised by this phenomenon. A normal person, watching a party vote against tolerance and civility because they might cause homosexual marriage, would say: "But that doesn't make any sense!" But I am, alas, inured. I find it makes at least as much sense as cutting people off welfare to force them to get jobs that don't exist or making English the official language and then cutting funds for already-oversubscribed English classes. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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