The stormy tale of the 2003 redrawing of Texas’ congressional districts will continue for at least a few more months as the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hearings on the matter.
In a move that could redefine the limits of partisan politics, the U.S. Supreme Court said Monday that it will hear four Texas cases challenging a controversial remapping of the state’s congressional districts two years ago by the Republican dominated Legislature.
The court also agreed to expedite the four cases – filed by minorities, Democratic officeholders and others who claim to have been disenfranchised by the GOP plan.
The court gave no reason for accepting the appeals, which involve a wide range of highly charged claims: from “excessive partisan gerrymandering” and “mid-decade” redistricting to the dilution of minority votes. Just last year, the court ruled in a split vote that a Pennsylvania redistricting plan – though highly partisan – could not be resolved by the courts on a complaint that the process was simply too political.
Since then, the court is the midst of a transition in which two of its nine justices will be replaced.
At the very least, the announcement Monday promises to re-energize a bitter three-year struggle between Texas Democrats and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, who is widely credited with engineering the redistricting strategy.
“We felt all along that there was a serious voting rights violation in the way these districts were drawn, particularly involving the black voters in Fort Worth,” said former congressman Martin Frost, whose district was largely redrawn. “I hope they’ll throw the districts out.”
A special two-hour hearing is scheduled for March 1. Redistricting arguments will be heard in addition to three other unrelated cases slated that day. Texas is scheduled to hold its primary on March 7.
The current map’s boundaries resulted in a gain of six House seats for Republicans and a string of lawsuits by Democrats, who charged that the map was designed solely for that purpose. The Republicans countered that the plan added a black to the 32-member delegation.
Well, of course the map was redrawn to help the Republicans, just as the previous district lines were essentially a court-sanctioned holdover from previous lines drawn by Democrats to help Democrats. As can be seen in this Houston Chronicle graphic, for every strangely-drawn district in the Republican plan, a similar strangely-drawn district can be found in the earlier incarnation.
DeLay has blamed recent political and legal problems – including his indictment in Austin for money laundering – on Democrats angry about the redistricting. His office was philosophical Monday, saying the plan has so far passed every legal hurdle.
“The Supreme Court’s consideration represents the last step in the redistricting process,” said his spokesman, Kevin Madden. He said the map, which aimed to clear past gerrymandering by Democrats, gained preliminary Justice Department approval and the backing of a three-judge federal panel.
Yes, this indeed could be the end of the Texas redricting tale for the remainder of the decade, unless the Supremes toss out the plan. Although I hope that will not be the case, it sure would make for some interesting politics.
There is certainly much to be made of Madden’s comment about clearing earlier gerrymandering. When I first moved to Texas in 1980, the state had just gone into Ronald Reagan’s electoral column two days earlier and was in the second year of having a Republican governor for the first time since the end of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Still, Texas was considered a one-party state as Democrats dominated every other level of the state’s politics. That shifted drastically over the 1980s and 1990s though, as the conservative nature of the state remained but the national nature of the Democrats drifted left. By 2000, the Republicans held every statewide office, including the governor and both U.S. senators. The last remaining Democrat strongholds were the Texas House of Representatives, responsible by law for drawing the districts for the state’s congressional delegation, and the Texas congressional delegation.
In 2001, the state representatives essentially failed in their constitutional mandate to redraw congressional districts from 2000 census data, leaving it to the courts to only slightly modify the lines that had protected the Democrat congressional delegation. When the state house fell to the GOP in 2002, the state reps, in violation of no law, decided to take up their redistricting responsibility and apparently were successful in generating a map that more accurately reflected state party trends. Certainly, the process was successful in angering the state house Democrats, who fought the process tooth and nail (and even foot by cowardly shirking their duty and fleeing the state in mass in hopes of stopping the process). Hence, mucho bitter on the Dems part and today’s judicial struggles.
Others blogging on the matter include James Joyner at OTB, who sees no constitutional problems with the redisticting and has a link to a nice summation of the issues under judicial consideration, and PoliBlog‘s Dr. Steven Taylor, who questions whether redistricting should be taken out of the hands of state legislatures.