Traditionally, state legislatures and courts spend the year after the national Census redrawing Congressional maps to fit the new demographic realities. The party in control of the most state legislatures and governorships at that moment in time is able to muscle through federal Congressional redistricting maps tailored to benefit itself. And then, having spent a year maneuvering for advantage, the parties back off the issue and accept that the new maps will stay in place until the next Census. That, at least, is how things have worked in the past.

Recently, however, having gained control over more state legislatures than it's had since 1952 (twenty-one to the Democrats' sixteen, plus twenty-nine governorships), the GOP has not only redrawn the state electoral maps after the Census, it has broken with the decennial tradition and rammed through redistricting plans in mid-decade, most notably in Texas but also in Colorado, where the State Supreme Court recently tossed out the Republican legislature's new plan.

This aggressive Republican drive represents a Congressional power grab unprecedented in scale and timing. It is being executed with the encouragement of White House operatives from Karl Rove on down, with the full-throttle support of GOP House majority leader Tom DeLay. And its aim is to shore up the party's Congressional majorities for the next decade.

Amid the brouhaha over redistricting in Texas earlier this year, Representative Martin Frost's office requested that Library of Congress researchers investigate when the last mid-decade redistricting occurred. David Huckabee, specialist in American national government for the Congressional Research Service, wrote back that "there are no prohibitions for states to revisit the issue of redistricting during the decade following the census, but they appear not to have done so except in response to legal action during the past 50 years." In other words, actions like those undertaken by Texas Republicans have never in living memory been launched by either political party.

"There's been a gentlemen's agreement over time by both parties that you only do redistricting in a year ending in one," explains Representative Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat. "If a party gains ascendancy later in the decade, it's unprecedented to do it at the next election." Redistricting, says Rob Richie of the Center for Voting and Democracy, "is a longstanding blood-sport. The Democrats traditionally had stuck it to Republicans because they ran so many more states. But they weren't creative enough to realize they could do it mid-decade."

The Texas redistricting fight, which featured Democrats fleeing to New Mexico and Oklahoma to prevent the legislature from having a quorum and federal law enforcement officials sent into action by Republican politicians to track down the absentee Donkeys, received by far the most publicity. Wrongly, much of the media portrayed it as a quirky Texas cowboy story with no wider ramifications. In reality, however, this was a power grab orchestrated by the national Republican Party and clearly intended to consolidate power nationally.

To recap the Texas saga in brief: State Republicans, goaded by Tom DeLay and supported by DeLay-sponsored political action committees (Americans for a Republican Majority and Texans for a Republican Majority), as well as the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, successfully broke the Democratic resistance to mid-decade redistricting. On October 13, they managed to pass a redistricting plan that all concerned agreed would likely give the Republicans an additional seven seats in the House of Representatives.

On many levels, it was a sleazy political power play. Supporters of redistricting were buoyed by having one of the country's top redistricting attorneys serving both the State of Texas and Republican lobbying groups most active in pushing for the state to implement a new Congressional map. Since May of this year, according to the Texas Attorney General's office, the State of Texas has paid three attorneys more than $200,000 to do legal work on the redistricting issue. One of them, Andy Taylor, is also being paid for his redistricting expertise by the avowedly partisan Texans for a Republican Majority. (Taylor, along with DeLay, Rove and a number of state Republican politicians, did not return my calls requesting interviews.) TRM, largely bankrolled by a Republican front organization named the Texas Association of Business, has spent the past several years working to achieve Republican control of Texas's political machine, at least in part with the intent of parlaying this power into a redistricting advantage for federal Congressional elections.

While the attorneys and the political players argued that the redistricting was solely concerned with divvying up the Texas Congressional delegation to more accurately reflect party loyalties in the Lone Star State, opponents believe that they were attempting to nullify the impact of a large number of conservative voters who split their votes between Republicans in presidential and local elections and Democrats in Congressional races.

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