Category: 9th & Congress

Democrats and the progressive left continue to lambast the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais to strike down the Bayou State’s second majority-Black congressional district as a racial gerrymander. Democrat leaders have used vicious and ugly attacks to pronounce the decision as racist and insist that it guts the Voting Rights Act (VRA). In a heinous allegation, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said “the ghosts of the Confederacy have afflicted the United States Supreme Court majority and are invading and haunting the nation right now,” while Alabama State Rep. Juandalyn Givan called Justice Clarence Thomas an Uncle Tom, saying “his ancestors had to be the ones that sold us out in Africa.”

But packing congressional districts by race was not an explicit part of the Voting Rights Act President Lyndon Johnson signed in 1965. The practice of racial engineering emerged through later judicial interpretation, particularly in the Thornburg v Gingles ruling in 1986, and it is clear now that, whatever the segregated districts were supposed to achieve, it didn’t work.

Majority-minority districts have distorted the promise of the Voting Rights Act from eliminating heinous Jim Crow laws and ensuring everyone has equal access to the polls to demanding that Congressional districts be established with deliberate race consciousness to ensure that African Americans and Hispanics would be elected.

That has resulted in the creation of political ghettos over the past several decades, that segregate black and Hispanic candidates and limit both coalition building and broader electoral competition. Racially gerrymandered districts stifle minority voices instead of expanding them.

Currently 55 of the 59 African American members of Congress represent majority-minority districts. They are elected in districts that have been set aside for them so they don’t have to compete for the votes of others in the community who are not black.  Conversely, other candidates can ignore black voters because they only vote in segregated Congressional districts.

As Supreme Court Justice Thomas noted in his opinion, getting rid of racially gerrymandered districts is critical to reduce polarization and force political candidates of all races and ethnicities to compete for voters with colorblind platforms and policies.

America’s democracy was not designed to thrive with set-aside representation and closed systems. It is structured for openness and debate – certainly not the “racial sorting” that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito described in his majority opinion.

Even in a majority-minority state like Texas, African American and Hispanic leaders who represent racially gerrymandered districts have not been able to expand their base beyond those districts.

The truth about racially gerrymandered districts was pointed out to me when I was a reporter decades ago by the late Charlie Rangel, the flashy New York City Congressman, who explained, off the record, that New York’s Democrat machine would never back him for a statewide run because he had no track record getting white votes.

Rangel represented Harlem, a court-ordered majority-minority district, and by the year 2000, he’d already served 30 years in Congress. He was the first African American to Chair the House Ways and Means Committee and was a force in D.C. But when a U.S. Senate seat opened up, Rangel was essentially told to stay in his place and Empire State Democrats rallied behind Hillary Clinton, who didn’t even live in New York.

The push for racially gerrymandered districts by the left is not unlike their demand for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs that erased the principle of equality and replaced it with equity – insisting all outcomes must be the same.

Both are condescending to African Americans and other minorities – insisting they cannot compete – and both have failed to bring about significant positive improvements for Blacks and Hispanics in electoral politics. In the 40 years since they have been in place, there is no clear indication they have meaningfully increased minority voter participation.

Increases in the number of Black and Hispanic congressional representatives have come almost exclusively from increasing the number of racially gerrymandered districts.  There are some exceptions in Texas where U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt was elected from a white majority district and Tony Gonzales was elected in a district where voters were mixed Hispanic, Black and white.

America elected Barack Obama president twice almost 20 years ago. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, who ran for Vice President in 2024, was elected to serve in the U.S. Senate from the largest state in the country. Neither of them ever were elected from a majority-minority district.

A political system that sorts voters by race in order to guarantee outcomes is not making progress – it is a retreating to the days of segregation. The Supreme Court has finally made it clear that racially gerrymandered districts should never have been allowed. Democrats – and all Americans – should take the win and celebrate this decision.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the former Senior Advisor to Texas. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

When you watch the news about the latest left-wing protests in America, it’s striking how the protestors seem to be majority female. Is it because women are more passionate about current events… or are we just better at organizing?

I was recently a guest on The Sweet Tea Series, hosted by my TPPF colleague, Ariana Guajardo. In the episode, we explore women’s pivotal role in grassroots political movements across the ideological spectrum.

So much of this can be traced back to the feminization of academia. Nearly 60% of students on college campuses are now women. They are being taught that they are oppressed by the patriarchy, and shunning family formation at historic rates as a result.

Watch this episode to learn more about how these things are trending, and what it could mean for the future of the country.

 P.S. Don’t miss a special live, in-person edition of Winners & Losers with Talk 1370 AM’s Jim Cardle and Lynn Wooley. It’s tomorrow (Thursday) evening at TPPF HQ in downtown Austin. RSVP here.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

You can also listen to the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple or Spotify.

Some professors at Texas A&M have issued a letter expressing outrage over the recent decision to eliminate the women’s and gender studies degree programs. Revving up the dramatics, faculty who run the program warn that the university is dismantling this degree track at a “moment of incendiary dispute across cultural, social, and political difference on the issues of gender.”

A moment of incendiary dispute? Let’s take a closer look.

In 1971, I helped found the first chapter of the National Organization for Women in the Southwest. Back then, rape was close to a free crime — prosecution depended almost entirely on whether a woman could prove she had done nothing to invite the attack. Jobs were openly segregated by sex — into men’s work and women’s work. Women often couldn’t get loans or credit cards without the signature of a father or husband. Discrimination against women in hiring and college admissions was illegal — but still widespread. Men outnumbered women on campus by roughly 56 percent to 42 percent, and most of women in college were training to become public school teachers because the doors to many other professions were limited.

There were 19 women in Congress.

Like most boomer women, I have a million stories about the real barriers women faced in those relatively recent times — but enough about me. I raise my personal story only to make one thing clear: I would never support ignoring a truly incendiary moment for women. I’ve got the battle scars—and a few medals—to prove it.

But that is not where we are.

Today, 57 percent of university students are women, while 42 percent are men—a reversal that some of us actually think deserves serious attention. That imbalance holds in elite professional schools as well: About 55 percent of law and medical students are female, compared to roughly 44 percent male. Among Gen Z, the wage gap between men and women is almost nonexistent. And there are now about 150 women in Congress—still not proportional to the population, but frankly that may say more about the job than about women’s ambition.

Rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence are universally recognized as serious crimes and they are prosecuted.

The fights that got us here were real and they mattered. But pretending we’re still living in the seventies is political theater, not scholarship. Which brings us to women’s and gender studies.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) claims that women’s and gender studies at Texas A&M has “advanced the core values of the institution.”

Seriously? Exactly how does a women and gender studies program, which places ideology over empirical data, identity over merit, and activism over scholarship advance the values of a serious university like Texas A&M?

At their foundation, all women’s and gender studies programs rest on the claim that gender is entirely “socially constructed.” Give girls trucks instead of dolls and—presto—they’ll all want to play football. Or something like that.

Layered on top of that socially constructed mishmash is Marxist-feminist theory, which insists the United States is a functioning patriarchy where it’s the boys who rule — everything, while girls drool. Trying to challenge that theory is dismissed — in the true Marxist manner — as false consciousness.

Then there’s queer theory and contemporary gender ideology, built on the deeply unscientific claim that gender is arbitrary — something you can select, reject, remix, or reinvent at will. In this framework, nothing is objective or innate: not sex, not meaning, not norms, not reality itself. Everything is negotiable.

And then come the intersectionality’s. Entire courses are devoted to ranking oppression based on sex, sexual identity, race, ethnicity, religion, body type — whatever category happens to be in fashion. Students are taught not to see themselves as individuals, but as political identities nested inside grievance hierarchies.

Is it any wonder this entire enterprise is widely known on campuses across the country as “grievance studies”?

One Texas A&M sociology professor who has been teaching women and gender studies for years responded to the program cut with this rallying cry: “We have to keep fighting and standing up for our students’ right to have an education that is critical for the times they live in.”

As someone who actually did my share of fighting for women’s rights, I don’t believe this professor — or anyone teaching women’s studies, gender studies, or queer theory — has much of a clue about the times we live in now.

According to the Texas Tribune, Texas A&M offered both a BA and a BS in women’s and gender studies as well as a minor, and a graduate certificate. A total of 56 students were enrolled in the program — that’s 56 out of 74,707 students on the flagship campus at College Station.

Leaders at Texas A&M are clearly right to shut down this low-enrollment, ideologically driven program and they are also right to continue to examine and eliminate classes that are similarly built on ideology and anti-American, anti-Western activism.

Texas public universities were built by and are paid for by the people of Texas. Hysterical faculty members at Texas A&M might want to pay a bit more attention to those people and their “core values.”

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.o discuss the issue of what the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR and others are doing to destabilize Texas and dismantle Western culture next Tuesday. CLICK HERE for more information.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

You can also listen to the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple or Spotify.

It didn’t take long for Grapevine-Colleyville ISD and Cy-Fair ISD to back off their offer of the use of public school facilities to host the so-called “Islamic Games,” once it was revealed that one of the sponsors was the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has linked to foreign terrorists.

What’s harder to figure out is why anyone in those school districts considered hosting an athletic event exclusively for Muslims in the first place. The website for the Islamic Games of Dallas calls its program the “premier athletic platform” for Muslim children in America, but there is no explanation of why we need a separate athletic platform for Muslim kids. Is it because of religion?

We don’t have “Presbyterian Games,” “Baptist Games,” or “Jewish Games” set aside for athletic programs for children of those faiths, although when large Catholic high schools compete around the country—Loyola and St. Ignatius in Chicago, for example and Central Catholic and Jesuit in Portland—it is always unofficially billed as the “Holy War.” But that’s just competition, not segregation.

We also don’t set aside “athletic platforms” for racial or ethnic groups. Hispanics, Asians and African Americans don’t have special athletic competitions. There are no “White People Games.” Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have several athletic conferences that are almost exclusively HBCUs, but many of those schools also participate in other NCAA conferences. And Black athletes are certainly not limited to those venues. The NCAA estimates that based on self-reporting, about 50% of Division 1 NCAA football and basketball players are African American.

The people of Texas, speaking through the Texas Legislature, have made it clear they don’t want our education programs divided by identity—race, gender, ethnicity or religion.

They want every student to be judged on his or her own merit, their initiative and their ability to learn, progress and accomplish their goals. Nowhere is this more important than in sports, where teamwork, thinking under pressure, striving against the odds and listening to others are critical to success.

The NCAA doesn’t know how many Muslims or Jews participate in campus sports because they don’t keep records based on religion. But they estimate it’s about 1% for each group. To contrast the “Islamic Games” model, consider the great story about Jeff Retzlaff, the quarterback for Brigham Young University last season who was one of only three Jewish students on campus. BYU has a great football team and there were a number of stories about Retzlaff learning to become their leader, when many on his team had never met or talked to a Jewish person before. Retzlaff got a NIL deal from the kosher food processors, Manischewitz, raising his profile—and the profile of the Jewish community in college sports.

Retzlaff transferred to Tulane this season, a university that also has only a tiny number of Jewish students, where he played in a College Football Playoff game last month. We can be glad that Retzlaff wasn’t segregated off into some kind of “Jewish Games” athletic platform so he’d only play sports with other Jews. His non-Jewish teammates at both schools call their experience playing with him life-expanding.

The “Islamic Games,” aren’t about building any of that. They aren’t about leadership or athletic skills. Instead, they are one of many efforts by some in the Muslim community to block the assimilation of Muslim kids and the Muslim community into American culture and the larger American community.

As TPPF Board member Cody Campbell has repeatedly and clearly articulated, school sports are a big part of the glue that holds our communities together—where we all share the same values of working hard, achievement and merit. Sports are where our kids learn to think under pressure, where they learn to listen to people they may have nothing in common with other than the game, where they learn push to defy the odds, and where they make friendships that will last a lifetime.

None of that will happen at some weekend sports program at the local high school where the only kids allowed to participate are Muslim. Let’s assume the folks at Colleyville-Grapevine and Cy-Fair were just trying to be nice, and hope they look more closely before they decide to host a program that only includes one religion, or one ethnic group or one race.  Texans don’t support identity politics – or identity sports.  That’s not who we are.

My colleague, Mandy Drogin, and a stunning panel of experts are going to discuss the issue of what the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR and others are doing to destabilize Texas and dismantle Western culture next Tuesday. CLICK HERE for more information.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

You can also listen to the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple or Spotify.

An enterprising reporter at the New York Post never believed the FBI when it said that Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old young man who shot President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, didn’t have a social media footprint. She kept digging and found that Crooks was hanging out in some dark corners of the Internet and had a very weird and sometimes awful presence online.

Among other things, Crooks described himself using they/them, as gender-confused people sometimes do. His social media postings feature transgender flags, colors and themes, although it’s not clear how he viewed himself.

He posted photos of himself shooting guns and was included in chats with so-called “furries.” He also downloaded lots of photos of very muscular women.

It is clear Crooks was disconnected and deeply troubled, which raises questions about how he was treated in school. Did his teachers call him they/them and if so, do they think it helped him?

It is an important question because recently, the Texas Tribune reported that some Texas teachers believe that the worst thing you can do to a child is call him “him” or her “her” if he or she says they are a they/them.

These teachers also say it is even worse if teachers call a child by the actual name they were given at birth but which they no longer use because they have declared themselves to be the other gender. They say to refer to a child by their given name is “dead-naming.” That is why some teachers are pushing back against Senate Bill 12, passed earlier this year.

Senate Bill 12—the Parents’ Bill of Rights—prohibits public schools from assisting children who try to present themselves as the opposite sex. The legislation was necessary because too many teachers seem to believe it is their job to help students hide their gender confusion from their parents.

SB 12 is designed to prevent schools from enabling the delusion of students who say they are the opposite sex, including calling a boy Susan if his name is Bill.

According to the teachers who spoke to the Texas Tribune, gender-confused students across Texas will suffer from “dead-naming” if SB 12 is implemented.

Over the past decade, DEI infused curriculums have normalized the idea that kids can transition from one gender to the other, by teaching that the sex that is recorded on birth certificates is arbitrary. According to DEI, every individual chooses what sex they are—male, female or other—and there are lots in that third category.

My guess is that most teachers are happy that SB 12 put an end to this madness, but the ones who talked with the Texas Tribune are deeply concerned that they will no longer be able to teach kids that there are dozens of genders and they just need to pick one. These teachers say they pride themselves on openness—except when it applies to parents. They believe the Parents’ Bill of Rights is interfering with their ability to push this stuff on kids in classrooms across Texas, while keeping it from their parents. Hopefully, no one but the Texas Tribune will take them seriously.

Officials are continuing to study the clues Thomas Crooks left behind, particularly since it has become clear that President Joe Biden’s FBI blew the investigation. The feds stopped asking questions at a point in time in 2020, when Crooks was a strong Trump supporter, before he become such a violent Trump hater that he ultimately tried to shoot him.

We don’t know what went wrong, but investigators should examine what happened to him at school. Was he taught that he could simply declare himself they/them? What do his teachers say?

Finally, if you think this story is vaguely reminiscent of stories you have heard about other shooters over the last few years, that’s because it is.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

You can also listen to the Sherry Sylvester Show on Apple or Spotify.

Oklahoma State University finally fired football coach Mike Gundy this week after another embarrassing defeat by the University of Tulsa. At least they didn’t fire him for telling the truth.

Earlier this season, I attended an ugly match-up between the top-10 ranked Oregon Ducks who trounced the Cowboys by 66 points – the largest margin of defeat since before Oklahoma was a state. Gundy got the blame, but in fact, he just said the quiet part out loud.

When Gundy pointed out that Oregon had spent over $40 million on NIL, while Oklahoma State had less than $7 million to spend, his comments were widely denounced and drew a wave of national blowback. It didn’t seem sporting to just come out and say that if you lose, it’s because your opponent paid millions to get a lot of good players and you couldn’t afford to buy better ones.

Oregon Coach Dan Lanning fired back, rightly pointing back that the objective is to win football games, not to whine about the process: “If you want to be a top 10 team in college football, you better be invested in winning. We spend to win.”

I was in Eugene for the game and before the kick-off, the Ducks ran the tape of Gundy bad-mouthing Oregon’s big NIL budget on the Jumbotron. It was met by thunderous boos as Ducks fans waved signs reading “We Spend to Win.” So now school pride also apparently means, “we’ve got more money than you.”

Everybody in college football knows what Gundy said is true. What they don’t seem to know is that without billionaire backers virtually every college football program in the country is losing money and because football is the only revenue producing sport, when football goes, every sport ultimately will go.

Cody Campbell, founder of Saving College Sports, recently published an op-ed in USA Today outlining what must be done to transform the regulations governing (and not governing) Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) payments to college players as well as other reforms that will protect all college athletes – including Title IX sports and those athletes who participate in non-revenue producing sports — which is everyone but the football team. President Donald Trump has also made saving college sports a priority. The answer is revenue which is why Campbell is calling for the reform of the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act.

Some see another irony in Gundy’s leaving the stage because Oregon might be on the same path as Oklahoma State, which was once bankrolled by the legendary T. Boone Pickens. Pickens built some of the finest football facilities in the nation in Stillwater, but he died before NIL rules were adopted so it is unlikely any financial provisions were put in place from his gifts to the athletic program that would ensure Oklahoma State would remain competitive.

Oregon’s entire athletic program, including football, was built and is maintained by Nike founder Phil Knight. Knight is a very active and engaged 87-year-old, so it is unlikely that he will leave the field without a plan to keep the Ducks in the Top 10. But what should he plan for? How much money will it take?

Unless the reforms that Trump and Campbell are calling for move forward, there will be more feast or famine situation games like what I witnessed in Eugene. Schools that can wrangle billionaire benefactors will have the resources to compete, while others will be resigned to doing bake sales and selling raffle tickets.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

A Texas History Lesson on Trump’s Biological Truth Proclamation

President Donald J. Trump’s unequivocal statement on Inauguration Day—that there are just two biological sexes in America—ends the heinous practice of using laws designed to protect women from sex discrimination to promote men pretending to be women.

Trump’s Executive Order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” is monumental. The battle for “biological truth” has been going on for almost a decade.

Here’s how it went down in Texas:

In 2017, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made Senate Bill 6, the Women’s Privacy Act, a legislative priority. The bill was authored by Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, and was Texas’ emergency response to President Barack Obama’s federal edict, issued in 2016, that all public schools must allow boys who think they are girls to use the girls’ restrooms. If they didn’t, they would lose their federal funding.

Kolkhorst, an NCAA champion athlete, could see the writing on the wall. The language of the legislation was straightforward, simply stating that in Texas public schools and in state-owned buildings men and boys would not be allowed in women’s restrooms. The bill was later expanded to prohibit men and boys from participating in women’s and girls’ sports.

Although property tax reform and school choice were also legislative priorities for the lieutenant governor in 2017, the media snidely referred to the Women’s Privacy Act as “the bathroom bill” and made it the defining issue of the session. They used it to push a narrative that the Republicans who’d been elected to lead the state were actually crazed right wingers, too radical for everyday Texans. To demonstrate this point, they created a tasteless video featuring some “everyday Texans” standing up for the right to “Pee with the LGBT.”

Polling consistently showed that the public supported separate restrooms for girls and women, but pollsters and the media went all out to obscure that data, ultimately insisting it was an issue that could not be polled.

Kolkhorst rightly defined the bathroom bill as a women’s rights issue, but news reports rarely included her statements on her legislation. Instead, they distorted her message, portraying her and her fellow senators who supported the bill as bigoted and out-of-touch. Hundreds of screaming left-wing activists mobbed the Capitol to testify against it.

Many major Texas businesses weighed in against SB 6, prodded to act by a new generation of DEI officers who had infiltrated corporate board rooms and propagated the lie that Texas would lose billions in tourism dollars because gay people would boycott travel in the state. AT&T, Dell, Kimberly-Clark, Southwest Airlines and Texas Instruments joined with national firms including IBM, Facebook, Apple and American Airlines in sending a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott, Patrick and then-Speaker of the House Joe Straus insisting that SB 6 would “seriously hurt the state’s ability to attract new businesses, investment, and jobs.” They produced a serious-looking impact study that purported to show that passing SB 6—or even talking about it—would cost the state $8.5 billion and 100,000 jobs. Even left-leaning Politifact admitted the study was bogus.

The NCAA threatened to pull the Final Four out of Texas (they didn’t) and the National Football League (NFL) suggested it might not hold another Super Bowl here (it did).

Despite being ruthlessly attacked in both the state and national media, Patrick and Kolkhorst stared down Obama and stood their ground. The Texas Senate passed the Women’s Privacy Bill on a party-line vote. The bill was gutted in the Texas House.

Looking back a decade later, Texas Democrats and the media can still be heard muttering “bathroom bill” under their breath from time to time, but Texas lawmakers have passed strong legislation protecting women’s spaces and women’s sports, prohibiting puberty blockers and sex change operations in children as well as the strongest anti-DEI bill in the nation. DEI officers are being purged from corporate conference rooms and female athletes are pushing back against males participating in their sports and it looks as if the NCAA is on the path to finally institute a ban.

History should not be kind to Obama. With the help of the DEI cartel and the left-wing media, he created a country where men were not only able to go into women’s restrooms, but also women’s prisons, simply by claiming to be women. Thanks to him, we got federal documents that give a half dozen options in addition to male and female to report what sex you are, teachers can be prosecuted for refusing to refer to a boy as “her,” and a Supreme Court Justice of the United States can say that she is not qualified to define a woman because she is “not a biologist.”

Trump’s Executive Order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” restores biological reality and ends a long ugly decade of this gender insanity. Trump’s Executive Order makes it clear that a woman is defined as an “adult female.” Gender is over. Sex is back!

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.