# 2003 Texas Redistricting The mid-decade re-mapping of Texas's congressional districts, engineered by House Majority Leader [[Tom DeLay]] — a norm-breaking power play that produced the "Killer D's" quorum walkouts, flipped six US House seats to the [[Republican Party]] in 2004, and became a national template for aggressive [[Gerrymandering]]. ## The Mid-Decade Power Grab Congressional maps are normally redrawn once a decade, after the census. In 2003, having won control of the Texas Legislature, Republicans led by [[Tom DeLay]] moved to redraw the state's congressional map mid-decade — an unusual and openly partisan move designed to replace a court-drawn map with one engineered to maximize GOP seats. The effort was tied to DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC), which had helped Republicans capture the statehouse in 2002. With that majority in hand, DeLay pushed the re-redistricting from Washington, treating a state legislative process as an instrument of national House strategy. ## The Killer D's Texas Democrats, lacking the votes to stop the map, broke quorum instead. In **May 2003**, more than fifty House Democrats — the "Killer D's" — fled to Ardmore, Oklahoma, staying beyond the reach of Texas authorities to deny the House the quorum it needed, killing the bill in the regular session. When Governor [[Rick Perry]] called special sessions, eleven Senate Democrats — the "Texas Eleven" — fled to Albuquerque, New Mexico in July 2003, holding out for about forty-five days until one senator returned and broke the standoff. Perry ultimately called three special sessions. The map passed in the fall of 2003. ## The Payoff and the Fallout The engineered map delivered: Republicans went from 15 to 21 of Texas's US House seats in the 2004 election, with veteran Democrats like Martin Frost among those defeated. It was a demonstration that a party willing to break the mid-decade norm could redraw the electoral map at will. The legal and personal fallout followed. DeLay was indicted in September 2005 on conspiracy and money-laundering charges over a $190,000 swap of corporate and party money through TRMPAC and the RNC; he was convicted in 2010, but the conviction was overturned on appeal in 2013. In *League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry* (2006), the Supreme Court upheld most of the map but struck down one district (the 23rd) as a violation of the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]]. ## RWKB Significance The 2003 redistricting is the template for redistricting hardball — proof that mid-decade gerrymandering could work and that norm-breaking carried few lasting costs (DeLay's conviction was reversed; the map largely stood). It belongs alongside [[Operation Lone Star]] as a case of Texas pioneering an aggressive tactic that the national [[Republican Party]] later adopted, and it is a key episode in the state's [[Southern Strategy]] realignment engineered by figures like [[Karl Rove]]. ## See Also - [[Tom DeLay]] - [[Gerrymandering]] - [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]] - [[Republican Party]] - [[Karl Rove]] - [[Southern Strategy]] - [[Rick Perry]] - [[Texas History Hub]]