GOP Senator Offers First Words
in Defense of Remap and Party
Capitol Inside
July 29, 2025
The chairman of a special Texas Senate redistricting committee came out swinging on Tuesday when he accused Democrats of attempting to rewrite history by portraying the Republicans who control the process as racists who are trying to silence minority voters with plans to redesign the U.S. House map here.
GOP State Senator Phil King of Weatherford appeared to signal an end to an awkward self-muting strategy that Texas GOP lawmakers employed for several days at hearings when he acknowledged that he'd been highly offended by repeated claims that the Republicans are racists.
King - an attorney who's a former police officer - said the Republicans had been berated as "unchristian more than one time" during the Senate's first three remap hearings that got under way on Friday. King said the GOP was referred to as "the party of pedophiles" by a witness at a hearing on Monday.
King pointed the finger back at Democrats - reminding the select committee and the audience at a virtual meeting that the southern Democrats had been the racists in the U.S. 60 years ago when they blocked civil rights bills in Congress. But King suggested that some Republicans saved the day when they gave Democrat Lyndon Johnson the majority that he needed to pass the historic legislation.
The House and Senate Republicans on Select Congressional Redistricting Committees had been content to play the part of punching bags and whipping posts who took relentless hits from witnesses without any attempts to defend their honor and dignity when it was under assault. The GOP committee members sealed lips approach appeared to be a loosely-coordinated tactic designed primarily for the sake of avoiding President Donald Trump's wrath.
But King decided that he'd had enough. "Over the last three days of hearings, witness after witness have said what I believe are very inappropriate and incorrect and frankly offensive comments specifically directed at the Republicans on the committee and just Republicans in general," the Senate panel leader said.
"I don't know how many times we've been referred to as racist - as a racist party - how many times we've been referred to as the party of Jim Crow," the Senate panel chair added. "And frankly - if you read history - it was not the Republicans passed and enacted the Jim Crow laws."
King said he'd tuned into the House counterpart panel's hearing last night in Arlington and was appalled by the treatment that two Black Republicans received when they were "viciously heckled" and booed by hundreds of people in the audience at the University of Houston when they testified in favor of a new map for Congress.
While King's remarks on the southern Democrats in the 1960s were accurate, the senator did not mention that Black Republicans and witnesses who supported the remap effort were rare. The GOP has made some inroads in recent years into the Hispanic vote in Texas. But most of the minority members in the Legislature are Democrats.
But King denied a Department of Justice official's claim that four current Texas congressional districts were the products of racial gerrymandering. "I believe the map I voted for in 2001 was a legal map," King said.
more to come ...
| 
