Despite the objections of Democratic U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, the Texas House advanced a redistricting plan just like the one the Texas Senate passed last week, shattering the 18th Congressional District she represents and shuffling thousands of mostly Black residents in the Third Ward out of it.
The Houston Democrat made a personal appeal earlier in the day to the Texas House Redistricting Committee, which voted late Wednesday along partisan lines to pass the map that also takes downtown Houston, Texas Southern University and the University of Houston out of Jackson Lee’s district.
“It hurts my heart,” Jackson Lee said of losing landmarks that have been in the 18th District since the 1970s when Barbara Jordan — the first Black woman elected to Congress from Texas — represented it.
Jackson Lee, first elected in the 18th District in 1994, and other opponents of the redistricting plan are running out of chances to change the maps. The plan now goes to the full Texas House for a vote as early as this weekend, where Democrats would need Republican help to stop it from being enacted.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/That-map-hurts-Texas-House-redistricting-16531620.php