DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS…
... or else we'll flee to Oklahoma.

Earlier this week, the Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives fled (literally) to Oklahoma to block the legislature from acting on a re-districting proposal. It was dubbed by The Daily Show as "Austin Powerless."

If Texas is anything like New York, the state re-districting process is a joke. Cynics refer to it as "the incumbent protection plan." It's nothing less than legalized gerrymandering. In NY, Democrats in the Assembly and Senate Republicans collude to draw districts that protect each chamber's members so as few competitive districts are created as possible. Assembly Democrats are more than happy to screw their fellow party members in the Senate and Senate Republicans do the same. I've heard it said that the New York state legislature has a lower turnover rate than the Chinese parliament. If Texas' process is half as bad as New York's, it's a bad joke.

What should be done everywhere is what Iowa does. They set up a statewide commission to draw fair legislative boundaries. It is not a coincidence that Iowa has more competitive Congressional races than California, despite having a fraction of the number of seats. But this takes too much sense and transforms re-districting into a process which benefits the voters rather than the politicians. Naturally, the politicians aren't keen on this.

The situation shows that the worthlessness of the Democratic Party is not limited to the federal version. Much like their comrades in Washington, Texas Democrats choose to abandon their constitutional responsibility rather doing their job. The only difference is that when Texas Democrats flee their duties, they do so literally.

The Texas Democrats have made themselves into a satire of themselves: humorous, but irrelevant. But the federal Democrats have been like that for years... except not nearly as amusing. They long ago prostituted their principles for a semblance of electoral success; now they don't even have that. They've proven they are not up to the task of being an effective opposition party. It's time to get rid of them and give others a chance to uphold the Founding Fathers' desire for checks and balances.

The Texas farce is emblematic of why we need to break the two party duopoly. One party tries to do bad stuff. The other party sits by (or runs away) rather than trying to stop them. Vote Green. Vote libertarian. But for heaven's sakes, don't waste your vote on the invisible Democrats or enable the Republicans to piss off the three countries in the world we haven't yet alienated.

Democrats will counter the pro-third party argument by saying that if they'd been in power, they wouldn't have done the bad things in the first place. This is pretty far-fetched. The Texas Democrats controlled that state's House of Representatives since after the civil war. This means that they've almost certainly gerrymandered for almost the last century and a half to the same degree as the GOP is doing now. They're just pissed off they have to cede access to the honeypot to the other party for a little while.

And even if you accept the argument that "if the Dems been in power, they wouldn't have done the bad things in the first place," it's still a big indictment of their total lack of any sense of duty. An elected official has the obligation to do his job regardless of whether his party is in the majority or minority or somewhere else. If Democrats are going to stay in the corner and pout just because they lost the election, does that really inspire your trust? It's even more contemptful since they've cravenly stood by idly while the administration arbitrarily invades strategically-placed banana republics and pursues a war against civil liberties.

Vote for the Spongebob Squarepants Party for all I care, but don't perpetuate the two parties who've choked off the once vibrant political life in this country.