Centerfield

At least Texas had the somewhat legitimate excuse of never having had a legislative redistricting after the last census to justify redrawing their district lines. Sounds like this is being done absolutely purely partisan purposes, with no excuse offered at all except "because we can".

C'mon, Pat...that's been the real reason for redistricting forever! But you left off the second part. "Because we can...and because it will benefit us!"

Why does a dog lick his.... :-)

Exactly! And I'd like to note that with a few minor alterations in lyrics, one could quickly adapt the spoof song "Hotel Oklahoma" for NM Republicans. Just in case, ya know.

Some folks are trying to drag Richardson into the 2008 run. I wonder how hard he'll resist.

Nope, we'll never get more moderates elected to the House until we have districts drawn by non-partisan committees rather than the politicians themselves, but I've sung that song many times before.

That said, NM Dems should take a long, hard look at the Texas case before they start redrawing lines. After all, that was supposed to be DeLay's signiture deal, and what did it get him and the Texas GOP? Tons of bad publicity, huge amounts of time and money wasted, and a Supreme Court case...all for a net gain of two more seats. To top it off, now the Dems are in charge of the House, (thanks in no small part to said bad publicity) Texas has lost all the seniority clout they gained with DeLay. Nice going, Hammer. ;-)

If Richardson really wants the nomination, I think he needs to pour oil on troubled waters here. What price Heather's seat if he loses his shot at the Presidency?

Jean, the part that cracked me up the most about the runaway Texas legislators was that they stayed at a Holiday Inn Express! It just seemed as if they were aiming for a commercial residuals....

The original Texas districting WAS way out of line. The subsequent GOP redistricting, of course, attempted to put it as far out of line in the other direction as they could. And the court put parts of it back out of line back in the original direction. Since they're not allowed to explicitly redistrict by party percentages, almost all redistricting of the gerrymandering type produces de facto ethnic gerrymandering.

And the end result was that in an attempt to somehow preserve "Hispanic voting power," an Hispanic congresscritter was districted out of his job in favor of another Hispanic candidate who couldn't win otherwise.

The less-than-charismatic Ciro Rodriguez ended up running three races for Congress this year to finally win one. He managed to lose a party primary in his own district, lose a general election in another district, and finally won when the courts moved the district lines to accomodate him and forced a third election in the second district. The net change in Hispanic legislators from Texas? ZERO. All that changed was the party.

Richardson is rumored to have some extra-marital baggage in the background that could spike a run, but that could be sheer rumor on the order of Obama's Muslimitude. He has a solid background for it, but he's also never gone through a tough election. But given the current field, I think he'd be a good candidate. But his veto of eminent domain reform last spring will be used to beat on him, painting him as a government uber alles liberal.