The 2011 maps are officially dead

Rick Perry has signed the redistricting bills, thus making the 2012 interim maps the official state-sanctioned maps and thus dropping any further pursuit of the maps drawn by the 2011 Lege.

On Wednesday, Gov. Rick Perry signed all three redistricting bills that lawmakers sent to him.

With his signature, Perry set the district boundaries for the U.S. House of Representatives, the state Senate and the Texas House, his office confirmed.

Capitol gossipers had been whispering that the governor might try to find a way to shove state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, into a Republican district as punishment for her filibuster that led to the death of a strict abortion measure in the Senate early Wednesday.

But by signing off on the redistricting maps, Perry silenced the rumors that he might veto the new state Senate map and seek to put into place the more Republican-friendly maps passed by the Legislature in 2011.

Texas Redistricting had the early call on that. Speculation had been about more than just the Senate map, and Lord only knows what kind of chaos could have been caused by Perry vetoing the only bills that came out of the special session that had originally been called just to pass those specific bills, but that is now consigned to an alternate universe.

Not wanting to take any chances, the Texas Latino Redistricting Task Force had filed a motion asking the court to modify and extend the injunction that had been in place barring the use of the 2011 maps. That’s moot now, so the battle shifts back to the formerly-interim maps and the argument over what if anything the San Antonio court needs to do with them given the DC court ruling from 2012 – you know, the one that found evidence of discriminatory intent in the maps – and the SCOTUS ruling on the Voting Rights Act. The last San Antonio court hearing was on May 29, and there’s a status conference on Monday, July 1, but it’s not clear when the next hearing will be. So stay patient, there’s still a lot of this game left to be played.

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