Invoking the ‘Texas Tots’ Could Disrupt Democratic Dreams of Gerrymandering

Multiple political issues are on a collision course, with Democrats pushing to redraw House districts while floating statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. But Republicans have an ace in the hole: the “Texas Tots” provision in the law that in 1845 added the 28th star to the flag.On Sunday, two Democratic governors struggled to cast gerrymandering the district map of Texas as an unfair tactic used only by Republicans. Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois was pressed by the host of “Meet the Press,” Kristen Welker: “Every major group,” she said, “that rates the fairness of congressional maps gives your state an F.”The host of “Fox News Sunday,” Martha MacCallum, asked Governor Kathy Hochul to defend New York’s 2023 congressional map. Drawn by Democrats, it was thrown out by the state’s Democratic-dominated court of appeals for being unfair to the GOP. On Thursday, President Clinton’s former strategist, James Carville, pushed Democrats to “save democracy” by gerrymandering more. He also urged them to “unilaterally” make Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., states, though they’d lack the power to do so even if they held Congress and the presidency.As this columnist wrote in January, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is building support for D.C. statehood. On Friday on X, Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican, suggested returning the district to Maryland instead, writing that it “doesn’t meet the criteria we’ve historically applied to statehood.”Republicans, however, do have the unilateral ability to add states right now with majority votes at Austin and in Congress. The Treaty of Annexation that brought the Lone Star State into the union allows for up to four “new states of convenient size in addition to” Texas to “be formed out of the territory thereof.”The Texas Tots could add eight Republican senators and electoral votes to match. The change wouldn’t have to overcome the Constitution, which set up the capital as neutral, or convince Puerto Ricans, who’ve rejected statehood referendums. Combined with redistricting, creating, say, four California Kids in response would be impossible.Texas was solid for Democrats when admitted, and it sought to maximize the map to protect slavery and render the Whig Party a permanent minority. Most Americans backed annexation, swept up in President Polk’s expansionist frenzy.Frederick Merk wrote in 1963’s “Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History” that some in the press criticized “the shortcomings of the treaty.” Yet “such lamentation as The New York Sun permitted to escape its lips was heard nowhere else in the nation.”The Sun’s editor, Moses Beach, urged the Senate not to “adopt, in blind haste, an imperfect, inadequate,” and “semi-legal treaty,” warning it would “never be forgiven.” His caution was prudent. The annexation sparked the Mexican War in 1846 and led to the Civil War in 1860.Although bigness came to define Texans, the dream of creating the Tots endured. Vice President John “Cactus Jack” Garner — a Democratic speaker of the House — told the New York Times in 1921 that his state “should have at least ten senators” as the treaty allowed.Garner noted that Texas was “twice as large and rapidly becoming as populous as New England.” Today, thanks to gerrymandering, New England is a Democratic bloc. The seven states in the region have not a single competitive district, sidelining Republicans like the Whigs.During the 2004 fight over gerrymandering, an article in the Texas Law Review again advocated for the Texas Tots. Two Texas Republicans, Vasan Kesavan and Michael Paulsen, wrote, “have been thinking waaaaay too small.” Slicing up the state, they argued, was not an option but a requirement under the law. “The Republic of Texas’s consent to annexation,” Messrs. Kesavan and Paulsen wrote, “was based on the latter’s consent to future subdivision.” The lawyers called Texas “just too darned big,” and noted that West Virginia had been created under Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution, which permits partitioning of states.Odds of creating the Texas Tots are long. Yet Republicans could raise the prospect to counter Democratic rhetoric about changing the nation’s maps, forcing them to contest elections on political lines as they exist, not redraw them because democracy isn’t producing the results they want.

Invoking the ‘Texas Tots’ Could Disrupt Democratic Dreams of Gerrymandering

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