Joe Barton: “as Paul Harvey says in his radio broadcasts, Let us hear the rest of the story. My good friend from the State of Texas…”

“as Paul Harvey says in his radio broadcasts, Let us hear the rest of the story. My good friend from the State of Texas (Mr. Frost) from the 24th district has been expounding on potentially how unfair that particular redistricting plan that is pending before the Texas House is so I want to talk about the rest of the story. Back in 1980, the redistricting process was controlled by the Democratic legislature in Austin as it should have been because they were in the majority in both the Texas House and the Texas Senate. We did have a Republican Governor at that time. I believe Governor Clements. But the legislative process was dominated by the Democrats. And a map that was put out had 27 congressional districts in it. And I believe, I want to say four of them, four of the 27 elected Republicans, when all the dust had settled, in at least one of those districts was an upset; Congressman Jack Fields upset long-time incumbent Democrat Bob Eckhardt down along the Houston ship channel that was really drawn to be a Democratic district. So we had a situation where Republicans were packed and the citizens of Texas voted over 50 percent for Republican candidates. We had four out of 27 seats in that particular redistricting process. We rock along to 1990. In 1990 you had again a Democratic legislature and a Democratic Governor this time, and Texas gained three more seats; it went to 30 because of population growth.”