Jasmine Crockett is a bit of an anomaly. She’s a loudmouth, radical, progressive, Black woke-ster liberal who comes from Texas, of all places. She comes from the 30th District of the Lone Star State but actually, she’s about as Texan as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).
Jasmine was born and raised in Missouri and after going to the University of Houston Law Center, stayed on in Texas. For a brief time, she ran her own small law firm which specialized in vehicular accidents and Black Lives Matter cases. Later, realizing there was more money in politics than ambulance chasing, she served as a public defender for Bowie County, which set her up to grab a seat in the Texas Legislature. She moved to the 30th District in the Dallas area when she realized it was a vote-Blue-no-matter-who kind of place. Jasmine bravely entered the big leagues, going for a seat in the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. She won.
So, who is this profanity machine with the claw-like fake nails who can’t sit still when she talks? There’s a paucity of information about Crockett online, but there is enough to know that she isn’t at all who she pretends to be. Although she talks trash with ghetto slang, outrageous Black girl wigs, and wild gestures in the hallowed halls of Congress, Crockett actually can speak clearly and articulately without the need for vulgar insults. If you check out her pre-Congress videos (some are online), she’s very well mannered and she speaks like an educated woman. She claims to be Baptist, but she grew up attending private Catholic girls’ schools in St. Louis. She was smart enough to pass the bar exam on her first try but not smart enough to know that dressing like a drag queen in Congress isn’t an inspiring look. However, if she’s playing to the Instagram crowd, she’s right on the money. She has a lot of followers. She’s the politician for people who don’t understand politics. She tries to grab headlines, and sometimes she is successful, like the time she unapologetically called Texas Governor Greg Abbott “Hot Wheels” because he is in a wheelchair. Governor Abbott was in a freak accident as a young adult that fractured his spine; he is paraplegic and has been confined to a wheelchair ever since. The Democrats often falsely accuse Trump of mocking a handicapped man (even the handicapped man in question debunked this), but Jasmine can mock Governor Abbott and the Democrats just applaud her wit and humor.
So how did a smart, well-bred, privileged Missouri woman grow up to be a hot mess from Texas? First things first: it’s an act. She is educated, informed, well mannered, and articulate, but that doesn’t generate likes. And she keeps her personal life out of the spotlight to an almost obsessive degree.
There is conflicting information about her online. For instance, is she married? I’ve found some sources say yes, some say no, but no official word and no photographs. What is her net worth? Some say $9M, some say under $1M, who knows? Actually, I kind of got bored looking up stuff on her, so maybe I quit too soon. Despite her outrageous flamboyance before the cameras, I suspect she lives a quiet life at home playing Candy Crush and watching Netflix.
It’s amazing such a super-woke joke with six-inch eyelashes could get elected anywhere, much less representing Texas, but it was all in the district. Anybody could have won the 30th District if they put a D by their name, and I guess Anybody did.
And Gerry-Mander as the Beaver
American voting in federal elections is tallied by state, and state voting, in turn, is tallied by district. When it comes time for us to vote for Congress, Texas has 38 Congressional districts. Some states have even more than that, most have fewer.
There are 435 seats in Congress (Senate and House of Representatives) so across the country, there are 435 districts. However, districts are not bounded by natural boundaries or historical precedent or anything else; they are artificially drawn, mostly by the State Legislatures or their handmaidens. There is only one hard and fast rule about districts: they have to represent an average of 761,169 people or close to it. In terms of voters, all the 435 districts in this country should have roughly the same amount of people.
Beyond that, districts can be drawn by the government officials. Since populations change, people move, there are shifts toward urbanization, and so on, districts have to be redrawn to keep them all the same size. (Size is not land area, it’s population.) And our Congress is fixed at 435 seats total, so if our nation increases in population overall, all of the districts will get a bit bigger. If we lose population all of the districts get smaller. This requirement is so that every person in the House of Representatives has roughly the same number of constituents. Jasmine doesn’t represent more people than Margery Taylor Greene, for example.
Which brings us to the census, an exercise we do every ten years (last one was 2020) to count the population and figure out where we all live. Every ten years the nation redistricts because every ten years, we find out population patterns have changed.
However, redistricting can be done at other times, too, particularly if there is a court ruling or the majority party wants to do it. Right now there is move to do an emergency census since illegal immigration has distorted population patterns of voters. Drawing district lines is in the Constitution and there are no Constitutional restrictions on doing redistricting more than once a decade.
Just as Davy Crockett once drew a line in the sand at the Alamo, the Texas Legislature (Republican controlled) has drawn some lines around Jasmine’s district that are going to make it harder for her to win her Congressional seat in November. In fact, the way the new lines are drawn, Jasmine does not even live in the 30th district anymore. (This may not be a problem for Democrats—Maxine Waters has always lived outside the line of her district in California and Adam Schiff claims to represent California in the Senate while declaring his permanent residence as a home in Maryland.)
What worries Crockett is not so much that she’s outside the 30th district and may have to move. What worries her is that the new lines are going to hurt her in the election. This is called gerrymandering, and Democrats invented it.
The History of Gerrymandering
Only they weren’t called Democrats at the time. The year was 1812 and a guy named Elbridge Gerry was the governor of Massachusetts. He was a member of the curiously named Democratic-Republican Party. The Democratic-Republican Party, founded by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, opposed the Federalist Party, founded by Alexander Hamilton. To be fair, you cannot compare these old political parties to our modern political parties, but the Federalists with their advocacy of business, industry, fiscally conservative policies, and strong national defense seem kind of Republican to me. The Federalists were big in New England and the Eastern Seaboard states. While the Federalists had no anti-slavery platform in their party, their founder Alexander Hamilton was opposed to slavery as were many individuals in the party.
The Democratic-Republican Party was stronger in the plantation south, they favored an agrarian over an industrial economy, they liked state’s rights with limited federal powers, and they encouraged Westward expansion. They had no formal policies on slavery and were more divided on the issue, since some of the Southern Democratic-Republicans were ardently in favor of slavery although the party as a whole was more mixed. So I see them as an early version of the Democrats today, except without the purple hair, nose rings, and bottle of antidepressants.
In 1812, Governor Gerry was running the state of Massachusetts, which was a known stronghold of the Federalists. When it came time to redistrict, he blatantly drew up a map that would help the Democratic-Republicans win in his state. In order to do this, he had to draw some crazy-looking districts, including one long, curving, elongated district that looked remarkably like a salamander. The political wits of the day named this monster districts a “Gerry-Mander.”
While the practice of drawing bizarrely shaped districts to gain political advantage is not done today, at least not much, it would be wrong to say that the people who draw up the districts do consider political make-up as they put pen to paper. And Texas plans are set that could add up to 5 new Republican seats in Congress. That’s speculation, of course, but the influx of people to Texas and some careful line-drawing could create lots and lots of bright red districts that translate into lots of new Texan seats in the House of Representatives.
Redistricting has to be approved by the Texas State Legislature, a rather traditional building housing a curious body of individuals. (It is legal to carry a long gun into the Texas State Capitol and walk around with it. Come and take it.) For reasons too tedious to explain, the Legislature needs to be in session to approve the redistricting map or to discuss alternatives. The lower chambers of the Texas Legislature has 150 members and needs 100 present to achieve a quorum and do business. Sadly, there are only 88 Republicans in the Lower Chamber so they need at least 12 Democrats to show up. The Legislature was set to convene at 3 o’clock Central Time on Monday, August 4, 2025, and Democrats have already announced that they are not going to show up, which could impede the process.
In case you like political slang, this kind of sleazy move is called “quorum breaking.”
Texas Attorney General (AG) Ken Paxton has already announced that he will arrest truant Democrats, and some of those runaway Democrats have already popped up their little weasel-like heads in places like Illinois, sort of like Whac-A-Mole. The largest Texas newspaper, the Houston Comical, has already called the redistricting a “Republican power grab,” which shows that they have a keen grasp of the situation and Republican motivations. Governor Abbott calls the absentee Democrats “derelicts” and even threatened to remove them from the Legislature altogether.
What do you call all of this uproar and high drama going on in Texas?
Monday. We call it Monday.
Take Note
It is suspected that other states are going to look at what Governor Abbott is doing in Texas and attempt to redistrict their own states. On the potential drawing board are California, New York, Utah, Georgia, Ohio, New Jersey, and Maryland. This is not to say they’re going to redraw, but population shifts have made it rather necessary, not to mention the fact that political tides are turning.
Ohio and Texas are red already and they’d like just get redder. But could California, New York, and New Jersey possibly pick up more of that MAGA energy? Georgia and Utah are enigmatic states politically, because they are filled to the brim with Republicans yet Democrats always seem to win their elections. Maybe some remapping would help.
On the federal level, majorities in the House or Senate are typically measured in just a few seats. Adding five or ten new Republicans to the mix (which would deduct five or ten Democrats) could have a massive impact.
This being politics, these redistricting moves are complicated and may involve having to wake up some judges and get some court rulings. But it is all possible. And AG Ken Paxton is there if anybody needs to round up a posse.
It’s All About That Base, About That Base
Historically, the first guy to be accused of “creative districting” was Patrick Henry in 1788. Bear in mind, the Constitution was first ratified in 1787. So, we can pretty much say that gerrymandering, like the poor, has always been with us.
Gerrymandering was used during the Reconstruction and later in the Jim Crow years to minimize the impact of Black voting. So you will hear some argue against redistricting because of his former ties to racist voter suppression. But redistricting is like a knife—you can use it for good or evil.
Redistricting occurs every 10 years and sometimes more frequently. And generally one party is more unhappy about it than the other, because no matter how you slice the districts, one party gets more favor than the other.
The true goal of redistricting is to make sure we have similar size districts of not too grotesque shapes and that these districts somewhat comprise communities. Urban behemoth Houston sits adjacent to semi-rural Brazoria County, which has never knowingly served avocado toast in a restaurant or held a free Palestine rally (daily occurrences in Houston). Drawing a district that would mix metropolitan Houston fringes with the pickup truck crowd in Brazoria County would distort both communities. Thus, the districting lines should be drawn to preserve the urban cesspools of high culture and street drugs, while protecting the pristine bastions of freedom of speech, bacon on every burger, and 2A rights in the cowboy county.
In all of this talk about redistricting ahead of the 2026 midterms, there is one problem that will no doubt confuse Democrats: voters hate them. Voters not only hate them, they seem to hate them more and more with each passing month. According to Politico, a left-leaning outlet if ever there was one, only 8% of voters have a “very favorable” opinion of Democrats as of July 2025. While Trump still enjoys broad personal unpopularity across the country and Trump Derangement Syndrome is still raging, Democrats are even less popular. A lot of people have realized that voting for Donald Trump is not the emotional equivalent of marrying him, so they can be irritated by his social media posts or odd remarks and still support him politically. Or they can be like Ricochet Cafe and enjoy his odd remarks and support him politically. Covfefe, anyone?
Democrats are now considered so powerless and pathetic, they can’t even challenge Trump on policy or practice any more. All that’s left for them to say is that he’s a nazi or he smells bad. Being a Democrat is socially difficult unless you live in all-white enclaves like Martha’s Vineyard or have $10B, which allows you to have any political opinion you want, no matter how aberrant. In another couple of years, being a Democrat is going to be like having herpes. Nobody is going to arrest you for it, but we just don’t want it near us.
That brings us back to Jasmine Crockett. She can still run in Texas (lots of people run in states they’re not from) and if she gets the majority, she’ll win.
To a Democrat, that seems like a grave injustice.
Democrats are supposed to be handpicked by George Soros, cultivated, selected, pampered, and installed. They’re selected, not elected. They’re championed, groomed, and given buckets of money. Elections seem vulgar to them. And like the kid who picks his nose in school, they wonder why they’re just not popular.