Suit asks if maps discriminatory or partisan
When it comes to redistricting, Texas is on a five-decade losing streak.
On Monday, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the state over the Legislature’s newly enacted redistricting plan, alleging that Texas lawmakers deliberately diluted the voting power of Latino and African American voters.
If any of the state’s redistricting maps get thrown out, it will mark the sixth decade in a row in which the courts have found evidence of unlawful gerrymandering in Texas and ordered the redrawing of our electoral maps.
For most of that time (38 years to be exact), Texas was required under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to get federal approval for any proposed changes to the state’s maps. That changed in June 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder threw out the existing formula by which covered jurisdictions were subject to preclearance requirements.
Pre-shelby, the burden was on Texas to convince either the Justice Department or the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that the state’s maps were legal.
Post-shelby, the burden is on the Justice Department to sue the state and prove discrimination occurred.
What we’re seeing now is an eerie echo of the summer of 2013, when the Shelby decision upended the Voting Rights Act.
That summer, in a special session, the Texas Legislature officially adopted redistricting maps created by a federal court in San Antonio as a stop-gap measure to get the state through the 2012 election.
GOP lawmakers adopted the court-drawn maps at the urging of then-texas Attorney General (and current Governor) Greg Abbott, who said such a move would “insulate the State’s redistricting plans from further legal challenge.”
In August 2013, two months after Texas approved its maps, the Justice Department joined an existing lawsuit against the state over its redistricting plan.
The legal challenge ultimately failed.
On Monday, less than two months after Abbott signed the state’s new redistricting plan into law, the Justice Department again stepped forward to block the state’s maps.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the new Texas plan violates the Voting Rights Act through its use of “vote dilution,” which he defined as a practice that “minimizes or cancels out the voting strength of members of a racial group or language minority group.”
Texas’ population grew by 4 million over the past decade and 95 percent of that growth came from people of color. But both of the state’s new congressional districts have Anglo voting majorities.
In its complaint, the Justice Department cited the examples of two districts based in San Antonio.
U.S. District 23, a perennial congressional swing district that extends across 29 counties from San Antonio to the edge of El Paso, got some serious surgical work from Republicans this year.
During the redistricting process, Republicans lowered the district’s Latino voting-age population from 62.1 percent to 56.3 percent.
In its lawsuit, the DOJ argues that “Texas intentionally reconfigured the 2021 version of District 23 to eliminate a Latino electoral opportunity.”
What complicates all this is the fact that the candidate who will benefit most from the new District 23 configuration is a Latino incumbent, first-term Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales.
The Justice Department lawsuit also points to 11th-hour tinkering with Texas House District 118, a reliably Democratic district anchored in the South Side of San Antonio.
The complaint notes that the new map stripped the district of “much of its territory inside Loop 410” and adds voters in the area surrounding Joint Base-san Antonio Randolph.
The net effect is that the Latino voting-age population has dropped from 68.1 percent to 57.5 percent.
Republicans are aiming to protect John Lujan, a Latino Republican who recently won a special election in District 118 but would have been a long-shot to hold the seat under the old district map.
The presence of Gonzales and Lujan helps Texas Republicans make the argument that the party’s aim with redistricting is not discrimination, but partisanship; that the goal is not to disenfranchise minorities, but simply to boost Republican electoral hopes.
Abbott made this case in a September 2013 op-ed published by the Austin American-statesman.
“Far from discriminating against Latinos,” Abbott wrote, “the Texas redistricting process advances Latino involvement in the Texas legislative process. The sin? It advances Latino Republicans rather than Latino Democrats.”
It says a lot about how twisted our redistricting process is that politicians plead brazen partisanship as a way to get them out of potential legal trouble.
The question in this case, however, is whether it’s even possible for Texas Republicans to exercise partisanship in the redistricting process without also committing discrimination.