Lisa Falkenberg says Texas lawmakers are robbing voters of their rights.
We Texans don’t suffer fools, and we’re even less fond of thieves.
Years ago, when some thieves ran across retiree Joe Horn’s Pasadena lawn with a bag of loot from his neighbor’s house, Horn fatally shot them both in the back. He not only escaped indictment; many Texans cheered him on, and a few had his name emblazoned on their bumpers. “Honk if you love Joe Horn,” the stickers read. But I’ve got a question for those Texans who believe death can be an appropriate penalty for stealing a bag of loot.
What should we do with a thieving, cheating bunch of politicians who continuously, decade after decade, rob the people of this state of their sacred voting rights?
What, pray tell, would Joe Horn do with the Texas Legislature whose members, a federal district court has found, have again used creative gerrymandering to intentionally discriminate and steal the voting power of Texas minority communities?
Lucky for the lawmakers, they won’t have to contend Tuesday with the barrel of a shotgun, only the stern-faced justices of the U.S. Supreme Court as they weigh in on the decade-old redistricting dispute.
If this isn’t a case you’d normally follow because you’re not a fan of falling asleep in your cereal bowl, think again.
Anybody rolling eyes at comparing a legislative process fraught with partisan politics with a criminal act doesn’t understand the importance of redistricting. The once-in-adecade redrawing of Texas’ political boundaries is boring and complex, yes, and that’s why it’s so easy to cheat at it.
Gerrymandering is and always has been about protecting the incumbents. Today, those incumbents are largely
Republican. But historically, Democrats engaged in the same process to protect their own.
The process of carving up communities in ways that resemble salamanders and fajitas, the process of “cracking and stacking” voters — busting them up or crowding them to dilute their overall influence — wards off qualified political challengers and limits voters’ choices. And thus, their voices.
When it comes to power in Texas, all roads lead to — or rather, originate from — redistricting. Crooked redistricting is one reason our elected representatives in Congress and in Austin don’t look like the people they represent. Crooked redistricting is the reason so few Texas congressional districts are competitive.
Mark Jones, political science professor at Rice University, says that although competitiveness is slightly up due to Donald Trump’s presidency, the number of districts in play for Republicans and Democrats are dismal.
Only three of 36 U.S. House districts. Only one of 31 Texas Senate districts. Only, at the most, 15 of 150 Texas House districts. No one should wonder why Texas has the lowest voter turnout in the nation.
So this case next week before the Supreme Court deserves attention.
The state is trying to reverse federal court decisions that found Texas’ congressional and state House maps intentionally discriminated against minorities, a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
The case has taken a long and winding road to the high court. Federal judges in San Antonio have long since found that lawmakers intended to dilute voter strength of growing populations of Latino and black voters. The judges hastily redrew the maps before the 2012 primary elections, but those maps were supposed to be temporary. Lawmakers, however, decided in 2013 to permanently adopt the judges’ redrawn maps, and they’ve been used for elections ever since.
Here’s the problem: The hastily redrawn maps were flawed, leaving many of the problems that led to litigation in the first place, and lawmakers didn’t change much in 2013.
The state, in a recent brief, argues that the maps can’t be discriminatory because they came from the federal court.
“But if the nearly inevitable litigation comes to pass, one would have thought there was one reasonably safe course available to bring it to an end — namely, enacting the threejudge court’s remedial redistricting plan as the legislature’s own,” state attorneys write. “Think again.”
Yes, think again. Or perhaps, read again.
Those San Antonio judges stressed in 2012 that the maps were preliminary and not meant to imply they would pass constitutional muster during trial: “Nothing in this opinion reflects this Court’s final determination of any legal or factual matters in this case or the case pending in the D.C. Court.”
Yes, as the state attorneys write, redistricting lawsuits may be inevitable. But for good reason. Texas has a long history of suppressing voter rights that continues today. It was just a year ago that a federal judge in Corpus Christi ruled that Texas lawmakers had intentionally discriminated against Hispanic and black voters in hurriedly passing a “draconian” voter identification law, an effort, the judge wrote, “unexplainable on grounds other than race.”
The record is such that the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals pointed out in the voter ID case that in “every redistricting cycle since 1970, Texas has been found to have violated” the Voting Rights Act, “with racially gerrymandered districts.”
It added: Texas “is the only state with this consistent record of objections to such statewide plans.”
For this reason, Texas’ redistricting plans were long subject to a process called “pre-clearance” in the Voting Rights Act whereby they were vetted for constitutional violations. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court struck down the list of states subject to that provision, arguing they shouldn’t be punished for the sins of the past.
They left one exception: states that continue to sin in the present. Texas lawmakers of the ruling party are like thieves, grabbing as much as they can get while nobody’s looking.
The Supreme Court and the Justice Department need to start looking. The outcome of the pending case on elections is uncertain. Even a ruling favorable to the civil rights groups isn’t likely to drastically alter the political landscape.
But one outcome should be clear: Texas should be subject to pre-clearance again. State lawmakers have shown they can’t be trusted.
Pre-clearance isn’t like Horn’s shotgun. It likely won’t stop the majority white, Republican-dominated Legislature from clinging to power by any means available. But maybe, if the feds are watching, the “means available” will no longer include robbing Texas voters of their constitutional rights.