As the results of the 2002 election flashed across their television screens, Texas’s congressional Republicans could be forgiven for feeling a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the redistricting process in the United States. Their party had seen its share of the statewide vote in U.S. House elections increase from 49.8 percent in 1992 to 54.9 percent in 2002. Yet, even with this latest ten-point victory over the Democrats in the popular vote, they had once again failed to convert their increasingly dominant electoral support into a Republican majority in the state’s congressional delegation. A partisan gerrymander, passed in the wake of the 1990 Census and left largely intact by the district boundaries implemented by the federal courts following the 2000 Census, had allowed the Democratic Party to maintain its overall majority in the Texas delegation for more than a decade. The Democrats won twenty-one of Texas’s thirty seats in Congress in 1992, and managed to retain control of nineteen in 1994 and seventeen from 1996 to 2000, despite averaging just 45.8 percent of the two-party vote in these elections. In 2003, the Texas Republicans, armed for the first time with control of both houses of the state legislature and the governorship, undertook an unprecedented mid-decade redrawing of the state’s congressional boundaries. Though many Republicans in the state government were opposed to the idea of redrawing the district boundaries mid-decade, the effort was initiated under considerable pressure from Republicans in Congress, most notably House majority leader Tom DeLay (...