Don Cowart: Bee clearly partisan in supporting court decision on Texas districts

Re “Court keeps democracy intact, for now” (Our View, April 6): It is nonsense to claim that districts formed according to population of actual citizens in that district would be undemocratic. And the Supreme Court rightly refused to declare that so. Your editorial is clearly partisan driven, not by a love of democracy.

The partisanship of the paper is visible in other ways as well. I am annoyed by how the Kochs are always portrayed as monsters buying elections while there is absolute silence about how money flowing to Democrats from unions and environmentalists (as well as from celebrities and business people like Tom Steyer) is also the buying of elections. There is silence on how that has resulted, here in California, for example, in higher costs for everything but no higher quality, under-performing schools because of beholdeness to unions, putting people on the hook for the expensive retirement benefits of teachers and government workers when they have no benefits of their own, and the impending “regulatory drought.” These are Democratic created and Democratic sustained problems because Democrats are themselves beholden to money and no more “democratic” than Republicans.

And The Modesto Bee is often little different from the talk show hosts on the network it often criticizes.

Editor’s note: The plaintiffs in Evenwel v. Abbott wanted to base Texas legislative district on the number of registered voters, not “actual citizens” or total population. The court held all residents must be counted.

This story was originally published April 7, 2016 at 11:48 AM with the headline "Don Cowart: Bee clearly partisan in supporting court decision on Texas districts."