Supreme Court skeptical of challenge to Texas district lines
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed skeptical of changing the basis for drawing districts in a Texas redistricting case that could have far-reaching consequences for minority representation.
During the often lively hourlong oral argument in Evenwel v. Abbott, the attorney for the plaintiffs argued that the “one person-one vote” standard in drawing Texas state Senate lines should be based on the number of citizens eligible to vote and not on the entire population. Sue Evenwel is the lead plaintiff from northeastern Texas, and Greg Abbott is the governor of Texas and previously the attorney general.
Counting only voters or citizens eligible to vote would cut out anyone under 18 and noncitizens, including Latinos in the United States who are undocumented or don’t have citizenship. Critics say that including those people when calculating districts dilutes the value of voters in some districts.
“This appeal presents a fundamental question. That question is whether the one-person, one-vote rule affords eligible voters any reasonable protection,” said William Consovoy, an attorney for Evenwel.
Evenwel lives in Titus County, and lawyers for co-plaintiff Edward Pfenninger of Montgomery County and her maintain that their Senate districts have far more registered voters than other urban-dominated areas do.
On Tuesday, the justices for the most part questioned changing the population standard and worried about using possibly incomplete data to count potential voters.
“And we have had now, for half a century, population — that the population — is the legitimate standard,” said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “We have never held to the contrary.” She also brought up that by using the voter standard, women would have been excluded altogether from 1868 until 1920, when the 19th Amendment gave them the right to vote.
No justice seemed to embrace the voter standard.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that a database called the American Community Survey, which is operated by the U.S. Census Bureau, “has been, I think, almost decisively been proven as being inadequate. It only measures cities with populations or places with populations over 65,000. Just on that ground alone, there are going to be districts that can’t rely on it.”
But Justice Anthony Kennedy, a frequent swing vote on Supreme Court decisions, asked of the two metrics: “Why can’t we have both?”
Texas used the population standard in drawing the state Senate lines — a position it defended Tuesday — but it wants to retain the right to use voters as a metric, as well.
“States have been using total population in redistricting for decades, and the Supreme Court has recognized that as a valid reapportionment base. We are hopeful the court will recognize that it should ultimately be up to the states to decide how to apportion its districts,” said Cynthia Meyer, spokeswoman for the office of the Texas attorney general.
The Justice Department, which intervened on Texas’ side, took a slightly different position from the state, advocating for population as the basis and not letting the state have an option. Deputy Solicitor General Ian Heath Gershengorn made a pointed case for using population and not imposing a voter standard, especially since the Constitution apportions House districts by population.
“We think it would be a very odd interpretation to say that the Constitution forbids for state legislative redistricting what it requires for congressional redistricting,” he said.