Texas to challenge court decision

State plans to take case of invalidated congressional districts to Supreme Court

AUSTIN, Texas—Texas will appeal a federal district court’s ruling that invalidated two of its congressional districts to the U.S. Supreme Court, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office said Friday.

In a legal filing on the deadline the court had given Texas to give notice on whether its Legislature would take up redistricting in a special session, Paxton’s office told the court it would instead challenge the ruling to the highest court in the land.

“Judges should get out of the business of drawing maps,” Paxton said in a news release. “We firmly believe that the maps Texas used in the last three election cycles are lawful, and we will aggressively defend the maps on all fronts.”

The release also said Gov. Greg Abbott would not call the Legislature back to take up redistricting but reserved his right to do so if the Supreme Court agreed that the state’s maps violate the law.

Texas’ decision follows a ruling earlier this week in which a threejudge federal panel in San Antonio unanimously ruled that the state’s 2013 congressional district map was drawn with intent to discriminate minorities. The court found that in two districts—Congressional District 27 in Corpus Christi and Congressional District 35 in Austin— the state had intentionally drawn the maps to dilute the voting strength of Latinos.

It invalidated those maps and ordered them redrawn for future elections.

But instead of allowing the Legislature to take up the redrawing of the map, Paxton’s office will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The federal district court had already scheduled a Sept. 5 hearing to take up the redrawing of the maps. Texas on Friday moved to delay those hearings and any move to block the use of those maps, arguing that the federal district court’s decision “will likely be reversed on appeal because it holds that the state of Texas committed intentional racial discrimination” by implementing a congressional map that the court ordered the state to use during the 2012 elections, and which the court refused to modify despite efforts by the plaintiffs in subsequent years.

The state said the delay should be granted to allow its right to appeal and preserve the primary election calendar. Plaintiffs have pushed for changes to the map in time for the 2018 elections, which would result in more districts where Latinos are the majority and could result in Democratic victories.

“The risk of disrupting the 2018 election cycle qualifies as an irreparable injury to Texas,” Patrick Sweeteen, the lead attorney for the state, wrote in his motion. “There is no corresponding injury to the plaintiffs.”

The Mexican American Legislative Caucus, which is one of the plaintiffs in the case, tweeted its disapproval of Paxton’s move.

“As expected, Ken Paxton decides to waste more taxpayer dollars on defending unconstitutional maps,” the group tweeted Friday afternoon.

In March, the three-judge panel in San Antonio invalidated three of the state’s congressional districts drawn in 2011 because they intentionally discriminate against minorities. But the court did not order those districts redrawn because it still needed to rule on whether they had been fixed after a court-ordered remedial map-drawing process in 2013.

In a 107-page order released Tuesday, the court unanimously ruled that District 27 and District 35 were again drawn with discriminatory intent in 2013. It also ruled that District 23 in southwest Texas, represented by Republican Will Hurd, had been fixed during the 2013 redrawing and showed “no evidence of intentional discrimination/dilution.”