I am deeply troubled

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“I am deeply troubled by recent news reports that the Department of Homeland Security wasted scarce resources to search for a Texas state legislator …” I’d been thinking for the better part of the day that Tom DeLay’s wild, wet-lipped zeal had gotten the better of him on this Texas redistricting issue, that he’d ‘overreached’ as the mushy Beltway phrase has it. Now the other shoe has dropped. Those lines are from a letter Joe Lieberman just sent to Tom Ridge. And since Lieberman’s basically the canary-in-a-coalmine for safe consensus opinion, it’s now official. It’s now safe for Broder, Russert … hell, maybe even Matthews to get into the act. Hopefully, the scary goon tactics employed by DeLay’s minions will get people to take a second look at the underlying issue: upending at least half a century of established tradition in which redistricting takes place just once a cycle — absent voting rights lawsuits. This is part of a much bigger story of which the redistricting power grab is only a part.

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