Texas Legislature passes congressional maps favoring GOP
AUSTIN — Texas Republicans on Saturday approved redrawn U.S. House maps that would shore up their eroding dominance as voters peel away from the GOP in the state’s booming suburbs.
After passage in the Texas House, the maps will go to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign them into law.
The redrawn congressional districts map make it easier for incumbents to hold their seats and may blunt Black and Hispanic communities’ political influence, even as those voters drive Texas’ growth. The new lines, the product of a once-in-a-decade redistricting process, create two new districts and make several less competitive for Republican lawmakers. The proposal does not create any additional districts where Black or Hispanic voters make up a majority, even as people of color accounted for more than 9 of 10 new residents in Texas over the past decade.
Democrats and voting rights advocates are preparing to challenge the maps in court in what would be yet another highprofile, high-stakes legal battle over Texas politics — already the center of disputes over abortion and voting rights.
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat from San Antonio, said the maps were drawn to keep incumbent GOP lawmakers in power and “isolate communities of color” — who lean Democratic — in a way that limits their ability to determine the outcome of elections. Gutierrez said he expects to see legal challenges alleging both racial discrimination and procedural missteps by the map’s authors.
Texas was the only state to gain two congressional seats after the 2020 census.
Republicans, who control both chambers of the Legislature, have nearly complete control of the mapmaking process. They are working from maps that experts and courts have already declared as gerrymandered in their favor, and the state has had to defend their maps in court after every redistricting process since the Voting Rights Act took effect in 1965.
But legal challenges face new hurdles this round — the first since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that Texas and other states with a history of racial discrimination no longer need to have the Justice Department scrutinize the maps before they are approved.
Plaintiffs must now wait to file claims and must show that maps were intentionally meant to discriminate by race. Drawing maps to engineer a political advantage is not unconstitutional.
Gutierrez contends that a map drawn without taking race into account could yield as many as three new majority Hispanic districts and one new majority Black district.
“There you have clear evidence that what they have done is racially gerrymandered, so that they can dilute the vote, so that they can stay in power,” Gutierrez said.