In their latest brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, the voting and minority rights groups challenging Texas’ political maps painted Republican state lawmakers as “opportunistically inconsistent in their treatment of appearance versus reality.”
Pointing to the lawmakers’ 2013 adoption of a court-drawn map that was meant to be temporary, the groups chronicled the actions as “a ruse,” a “shellgame strategy” and a devious “smokescreen” meant to obscure discriminatory motives behind a previous redistricting plan.
Channeling their anger toward the lower court that found lawmakers intentionally discriminated against voters of color, state attorneys used a February brief to denounce the court’s ruling as one that “defies law and logic,” suffers multiple “legal defects” and “flunks the commonsense test to boot.”
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The legal fight between the state and its legal foes, which include several voters of color, has been churning through the courts since 2011. That was when lawmakers embarked on redrawing the state’s congressional and legislative districts to account for explosive growth, particularly among Hispanic residents, following the 2010 census.
Those maps never took effect because Texas, at the time, was still required to get federal approval of changes to its political maps before using them in elections. A federal court in Washington eventually rejected the boundaries, ruling they violated federal safeguards for voters of color. But by then, a three-judge federal panel in San Antonio had ordered up interim maps for congressional and state House districts to be used for the 2012 elections.
The San Antonio court at the time warned that the interim maps were still subject to revision. But state lawmakers in 2013 adopted those maps as their own, with few tweaks.
That move, the state contends, was a “conciliatory act” in which the Legislature “embraced the court’s maps for the perfectly permissible reason that it wanted to bring the litigation to an end.”
But in their brief filed last week with the high court, attorneys for voters and legislators challenging the maps described the 2013 maneuver in much different terms:
“In the State’s telling, there was a brief, shining moment in 2013 when Texas history reversed course and the Texas Legislature fell all over itself to conform state conduct to a federal court’s provisional observations. The district court rightly saw through the 2013 masquerade.”
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As noted before, oral arguments will be on April 24, so gird your loins and make sure children and pets are in safe places. I will remind everyone that there were actually two remedial maps produced by the three-judge panel way back in 2011. The first one, which was based on the previous decade’s pre-cleared-and/or-ruled-VRA-compliant-by-SCOTUS maps, was thrown out by SCOTUS on the grounds that the panel needed to defer to the new maps as drawn by the Lege as their starting point. Which the court did, and which it did without taking into consideration the VRA Section 2 claims on which the plaintiffs subsequently prevailed. As such, claims that the interim maps solved all the problems and should have been the end of the litigation are false. The maps had problems, which the courts ultimately found, and that’s even before we get into the “intent” question.
Anyway. What happens from here is unknown. SCOTUS has had a busy term grappling with redistricting questions, but unlike the partisan-gerrymandering claims from Wisconsin and Maryland, this is old-fashioned racial discrimination/Voting Rights Act stuff. It’s also our last chance to remediate any damages before the next redistricting cycle. It would not be much of a win for the plaintiffs if we never get to have an election under non-discriminatory maps.
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