A couple years back there was a big squawk about TX trying to
redistrict between decade census results, with some Democrats 
leaving the state to deny the state legislature a quorum to
pass the redistricting.
Certainly this seems like childish behavior;
I have to guess that it represents a serious breach of wise
power management, driving some to extreme measures.

What was the result of all that?
I finally got around to lookup up the numbers
(as of 2005.Mar.22).


Of TX's 32 U.S. Representatives, 11 are Democrats.

2004 presidential election year:
      #reps   %reps   %pres-vote-2004
Dem     11     34.4       38.2
Rep     21     65.6       61.0

So are things off-kilter after redistricting?
If each person voted for the same party-affiliation
for as their representative, the average # of Republican
seats would be 19.5; in fact it is 21, skewed 1 seat towards 
Republicans (but not much, and of course there are 
other ways of measuring -- registered party affiliation
vs actual voters, third party candidates can skew the numbers,
and of course the party one votes for president doesn't
actually dictate the party one votes for for the 
district US Representative.
For instance in the 2000 TX,
the presidential-party breakdown was 59.3/38.0
yet the Senate vote for that year was  65.0/32.3.)
(Both TX Senators are Republican, unsurprisingly.)

Compare to before the redistricting:

2000 presidential election year:
      #reps   %reps   %pres-vote-2004
Dem    17      56.7         38.0
Rep    13      43.3         59.3

Yowza!  The balanced was way out of whack in 2000, and is now 
numerically close (slightly overcorrected perhaps).
There is still room for dirty play (e.g. when redistricting, you
can gut the district of leading, experienced Democratic Representatives;
drawing districts so that projected neighborhood growth patterns maximize
your future edge, etc.)  I'm sure that people jockeying for plans
certainly considered such tactics, but overall the redistricting seems
to have corrected a gross mis-representation of the TX population.

I guess the moral is, there are lots of Republicans in Texas.
Sigh .. I need to move to CA 
(California or Canada, take your pick)...





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Source:

election results, 2000 and 2004:
http://elections.sos.state.tx.us/elchist.exe