Bad redistricting maps stay with us
Four and one-half years. That’s how long plaintiffs and the state have been battling in federal court over legislative and congressional districts drawn by the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature in 2011 and tweaked in 2013.
Four and one-half years, during which one three-judge federal panel in Washington, D.C., concluded the 2011 maps intentionally discriminated against minority voters, and during which another three-judge federal panel in San Antonio relied on the flawed 2011 maps to draw temporary district boundaries so the state could hold elections in 2012.
Four and one-half years, during which the Legislature more or less embraced the court-drawn interim maps that had been used in 2012 as its own, and which were used again in 2014 while litigation continued — and during which the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the section of the Voting Rights Act that required Texas to seek federal approval before enacting election changes because of its history of voter discrimination.
Four and one-half years, during which plaintiffs challenged the state’s redistricting maps under another section of the Voting Rights Act — challenges that remain pending with the San Antonio federal court, and for which numerous orders, motions and complaints have been filed, granted, denied or withdrawn, while depositions have been taken, testimony has been given and trial exhibits have been gathered.
Four and one-half years. A saga. Long. Complicated. Detailed. But not — decidedly not — heroic. Have I mentioned this has been going on for four and one-half years?
And when it will end, no one knows. Nor does anyone know why the threejudge panel for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas in San Antonio appears unable or unwilling to decide whether Republican legislators intentionally drew Texas House and congressional districts that discriminated against minorities during the once-a-decade redistricting process that followed the 2010 census.
Last month, plaintiffs filed a motion asking the federal panel in San Antonio to block the state from using the flawed maps that were allowed in 2014 in next year’s elections. The panel rejected the motion Friday.
Instead, the court chose inaction, bemoaning how “extremely difficult” it would be “to implement new interim plans without tremendous interruption to the 2016 election schedule.” As in 2012 and 2014, members of the Texas House and Texas members of the U.S. House will be elected from districts whose boundaries are in dispute.
The three judges wanted to make clear that their order wasn’t a decision on the fairness of the maps — because by any reasonable standard, the maps are not fair. But just as clearly, the judges rejected the plaintiffs’ motion because they didn’t want to disrupt Texas’ participation in the March 1 Super Tuesday primary. Texas is by far the biggest of the dozen Super Tuesday prizes next year. For once, the state is poised to play a significant role in determining who the 2016 Republican presidential nominee will be.
The court’s ruling denies us a potentially delicious irony. Ted Cruz owes his seat in the U.S. Senate, and thus his 2016 presidential run, to the discriminatory redistricting maps produced by the Legislature in 2011. The court battle generated by the failure of Republican legislators to draw maps that reflected the state’s minority population growth pushed the state’s 2012 party primaries from March 6 to May 29, and that nearly three-month delay contributed significantly to Cruz’s victory over Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in the 2012 Senate race.
The postponement denied Texas its meaningful say in 2012’s Super Tuesday primary, yes. More important, if not for the 2011 redistricting maps, Dewhurst would be in the Senate today, not Cruz. The delay from early March to late May gave Cruz precious time to build just enough momentum to force Dewhurst into a July runoff. Dewhurst still came within four points of winning the Republican Senate primary outright that May. So Cruz just barely forced a runoff, but just barely was all he needed. By the time the July runoff came around, Dewhurst was done.
For his presidential campaign, Cruz has charted a patient path to the 2016 nomination. He’s counting on staying steady in Iowa on Feb. 1 and New Hampshire on Feb. 9, and again in South Carolina on Feb. 20 and Nevada on Feb. 23, while other candidates fall away. Then, he hopes to take advantage of his popularity among Texas conservatives to grab the majority of the state’s 155 delegates on March 1 to propel him through the rest of the month and beyond. Cruz’s strategy is a smart gamble, but a delayed primary probably would have doomed his chances for the nomination as surely as it doomed Dewhurst’s Senate chances four years earlier. The court’s decision last week spares Cruz that delay.
So here we are, with this decade’s redistricting cycle half over, and with only two more election cycles left this decade after 2016. Maybe that’s the court’s intent — to wait out the cycle, knowing that after the 2020 census and new maps in 2021, we’ll do it all over again.