The main reason that TX-18 and TX-29 were so grotesque is that they were trying to keep TX-25 as a Democratic district when they added TX-29.
TX-25 was created in 1982, and that was its closest race during the decade (60:37), and the Republicans did not even contest it in 1986 and 1990.
Ordinarily TX-25 would have moved south to make room for TX-29, but that would have made TX-25 vulnerable to flipping, just like TX-22 had flipped. TX-22 had been similar to TX-25, but had pushed southward in 1972, when TX-18 was moved from the panhandle to Houston. At that time TX-22 was extended into Fort Bend and Brazoria county. When the longtime incumbent retired in 1976, Ron Paul won the special election. He lost in the general in 1976, but came back in 1978. His wins in 1978 and 1980 were extremely narrow.
When TX-25 was created, TX-22 retained the strongest Republican areas in Harris County. Notices the finger coming into west Harris and also the swath across southeast Harris County in the 1982 maps. This not only took out Republican voters from TX-25, it took out potential bases for Republican candidates in TX-22. Paul had been re-elected in 1980 by a 51:48 margin, and in 1982 was unopposed.
The winner in TX-25 in 1982, Mike Andrews, had lost to Ron Paul in TX-22 in 1980. In 1992, TX-25 was intricately drawn to make room for TX-29, but not go too far south. Andrews who had been unopposed in 1990, won by 56-42 in 1992. IOW, it had been kept Democratic by making it cling to both TX-18 and TX-29, and carefully carving out areas in SW Houston and SE Harris County. It had enough black voters to make sure the Democrats won the general election but not enough so a Black could win the primary.
After the 1996
Bush v Vera decision the interior boundary of TX-25 was straightened out, but at least some of the intricate boundaries with TX-22 in SW Houston and SE Harris County were retained. These were legally OK because they were politically motivated (see the 1996 boundaries for TX-6 in the FWDfDwF area for a similar case while making TX-30 neat.
In the 1996 special open primary in TX-25, Democrats barely had a majority, but Ken Bentsen won in the special runoff in December.
In 2002, the court ordered version of TX-25 was more convoluted than the 1996 version (while they did clean up TX-6 in the DFW area). The district court decision specifically said that though the judges were sympathetic to Morris Overstreet's arguments for a black-majority district in SW Houston, that as a federal judiciary they did not have the power to legislate. They could only preserve the political gerrymander of the 1990s while making the district lines cleaner. In this the case, the Texas legislature listened and drew such a district in 2003.
The NAACP brief in the remedy phase of
LULAC v Perry was pretty interesting. They really didn't care what happened in the area that the trial was concerned with in south Texas; so they complained about the dismantling of former congressman Frost's district in the DFW, and if you read between the lines, the part about the Houston reads: "Happy Dance".
