Yesterday, Tom DeLay received what appeared to be encouraging news from his home district — the Republican Party of Harris County still likes him.
The county party’s Executive Committee, which comprises the Republican precinct chairs, unanimously approved a resolution in support of DeLay at its quarterly meeting Monday night. About half of the more than 400 committee members attended, a party spokesman said.
“While our support of Congressman DeLay was never in question, Monday night’s action sent a clear message to anyone who might consider challenging Tom,” county GOP Chairman Jared Woodfill said in a news release Tuesday.
I’m sure the House Majority Leader appreciates the support, but I don’t necessarily see this as great news for DeLay. The fact that a Texas Republican committee had to vote at all to announce their support for their own Republican congressman shows just how precarious DeLay’s future has become.
In fact, as John Judis explained in this week’s New Republic, DeLay’s problems in his own district are at least as serious as those he faces on Capitol Hill.
Beverly “B.K.” Carter, grandmother and longtime editor of The Fort Bend Star, a weekly she publishes out of a strip mall in Stafford, Texas, holds up her a newly acquired T-shirt. It has a picture of Tom DeLay, Carter’s U.S. representative, and says, “The Best Congressman Money Can Buy.” She chuckles at the shirt but then frowns at the thought of the man it depicts. “Every year he has done things that were questionable. Imagine standing out on a golf course in the Marianas and saying those sweat shops were an island paradise,” she says, referring to DeLay’s efforts, on behalf of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, to maintain the Mariana Islands’ exemption from U.S. labor laws.
Carter, you might think, is a Democratic loner in DeLay’s district. But she’s not. She is a lifelong Republican and is currently a Republican precinct chair in Fort Bend County, the heart of DeLay’s 22nd congressional district.
And, as luck would have it, it’s only going to get worse.
When DeLay orchestrated Texas’ re-redistricting fiasco in 2003, he gave up some heavily-Republican parts of his 22nd congressional district to boost the chances of electing more GOP House candidates. What DeLay may not have appreciated are the demographic changes in his own district that may put his career at risk in the very near future.
When DeLay first won office, the district was predominately white, with a few pockets of black voters. Because the area’s population has ballooned 18 percent since the 2000 census, there are no dependable figures about the district’s overall composition, but both Republican and Democratic leaders agree that, without losing its high levels of wealth and education, it is becoming a “majority-minority” district, in which whites are outnumbered by other ethnic groups. Latinos and blacks moved into the district in the late ’80s. And, in the ’90s, middle-class Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, and Chinese immigrants began to pour in. Two Hindu temples now vie for attention with the Baptist megachurches.
Extrapolating from the census would put the African American population at about 10 percent, Latinos at over 20 percent, and the Asian population at close to 15 percent. The results in Fort Bend County are even more dramatic. In 1980, the area’s public schools, which attract all the area’s children, were 64 percent white, 16 percent black, 17 percent Latino, and 3 percent Asian. Today, they are 29 percent white, 31 percent black, 21 percent Latino, and 19 percent Asian.
This may be Texas, but these minority and ethnic groups aren’t exactly reliable DeLay supporters. Indeed, they’re not even Republicans. In a state legislative race last year in the area, a Vietnamese businessman, running as a Dem, beat an eleven-term conservative Republican — who was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in Austin.
If you put the district’s disillusioned white professionals together with a majority of the Asians and large majorities of blacks and Latinos, you get a coalition that could unseat DeLay and, over the long run, perhaps, lay the basis for a Democratic resurgence in the area. … Says Texas Monthly executive editor Paul Burka, “That demographic tidal wave is headed Tom DeLay’s way.”
So, the race is on. Who’ll bring down DeLay first, prosecutors or voters?