Mostly political theater, as there’s little reason to believe they actually need to cover their butts at this point.
Sen. Joan Huffman
A year and half after it was first approved, the Texas Senate on Monday voted to rubber-stamp a map setting the chamber’s political districts, which increased the Senate’s Republican majority and undercut the political power of voters of color.
The boundaries of the state’s political maps were redrawn in 2021, but the 23-7 vote was a procedural step to meet legal requirements. The state constitution requires legislative districts be redrawn in the first regular session after the results of the decennial census are published. But the delays of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the release of the 2020 census results past the end of the last regularly scheduled session in May 2021.
Lawmakers redrew the state’s political maps to incorporate a decade’s worth of explosive population growth later in the year during a specially called legislative session. The districts were then used during the 2022 elections.
State Sen. Joan Huffman, the Houston Republican who led the chamber’s redistricting process in 2021, described the vote on Senate Bill 375 as a “culmination” of the chamber’s redistricting work, including meeting constitutional obligations.
No members of the Senate submitted proposed amendments to the map. Several changes proposed by members of the public were rejected, Huffman said, because they did not align with her stated redistricting objectives, including “partisan considerations,” equalizing population across the districts and preserving communities of interest.
The Senate map is one target of broad federal litigation challenging how the Republican-controlled Legislature used the once-a-decade redistricting process to draw maps solidifying the GOP’s political dominance while weakening the influence of voters of color.
[…]
The federal three-judge panel overseeing the redistricting case previously denied a request by Tarrant County residents to block the reconfiguration of SD-10 from being used in last year’s elections while they pursued their legal challenge.
The state has argued that the reconfiguration was motivated by partisanship, not race, and that the plaintiffs were unable to prove that race was the predominant factor motivating the Legislature’s action. The changes to the district offered Republicans an easier path to pick up the seat in the Republican-controlled chamber.
Huffman, the chamber’s chief map-drawer, said throughout the 2021 redistricting process that the maps were drawn “race-blind” and were presented to legal counsel who cleared them as compliant with federal law meant to protect voters of color from discrimination.
She has repeatedly declined to disclose how they reached that conclusion, though. In a deposition for the SD-10 challenge, Huffman invoked legislative privilege to shield herself from answering questions about her considerations while redrawing the district.
The Senate reapproved its map while the challenge to the Legislature’s redistricting work remains in legal limbo. The three-judge panel in charge of the case has yet to reschedule a trial over the new political maps after delaying a September 2022 trial because of disputes over discovery that left both the state and the various plaintiff groups questioning whether they’d have enough time to prepare to make their cases in a federal court in El Paso.
The Senate map now heads for reapproval in the House, where its redistricting committee is just beginning its work to reapprove the map it adopted in 2021 for the House’s 150 districts.
See here, here, and here for some background. As noted before, I think this is solid evidence for the assertion made by Sens. Roland Gutierrez and Sarah Eckhardt that the legislative (non-Congressional) redistricting done in 2021 was unconstitutional. Not that there’s a damn thing to be done about it now, since the Supreme Court declined to do anything about it then. I expect the state lawsuits will eventually be tossed on the grounds that they’re now moot, and then we’ll play the usual multi-year game of What Excuse Will The Federal Courts Find This Time To Let Republicans Do What They Want. Situation normal, in other words.