One more plaintiff has signed on to the Abbott map deal.
The Mexican American Legislative Caucus is now joining the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in saying that the state-backed Congressional District 35, a proposed new district that runs from Austin to San Antonio, is “constitutionally permissible,” according to the caucus’s chairman, state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio.
The proposed District 35 does not have the backing of other plaintiff groups that have sued the state over its three redistricting maps, nor has it been sanctioned by the federal court in San Antonio that is hearing one of the redistricting cases. The court had asked the groups to work together to create a set of compromise maps.
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The Mexican American Legislative Caucus on Friday also agreed on the constitutionality of a proposed congressional district in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, District 33.
BOR clarifies what this means.
[I]t is not true that MALC endorsed the version of CD-35 that MALDEF supports — rather, MALC’s lawyers asserted that the MALDEF-supported version of CD-35 is not unconstitutional. They are not officially endorsing this version of the map at this time, merely stating that legally, they do not view CD-35 in the Abbott/MALDEF incarnation to be unconstitutional. That’s a big difference than what was widely reported earlier today — that MALC is endorsing this version of CD-35.
The Travis County Plaintiffs and NAACP understandably still oppose this version of CD-35 given its impact on CD-25. Their argument is that the coalition of minority voters and white voters who also choose the minority voters’ candidate form a legally protected cross-over district, and can’t be split apart. This is the the same argument that led to a settlement over SD-10, so ideally any Congressional settlement should in turn restore CD-25 to an Austin cross-over district.
I’m not sure how much difference that makes in practice, but there it is. In the meantime, there are more briefs on those contested Congressional districts, and another Congressional map proposal from the Quesada plaintiffs. CDs 23 and 27 are also still in dispute.
The State House map remains in complete disarray. MALC said that the state is no longer negotiating with them as of Wednesday. BOR has a comprehensive look at the many points of contention, along with a plaintiffs’ exhibit that lays out where minority communities were fractured and spread among Anglo-dominated districts, mostly in urban counties like Harris and Dallas but also in Fort Bend and Bell. The Perez plaintiffs have further objections as well. Harold Cook sums it all up.
Pretty much out of lame map-related puns at this time
[Wednesday] a couple of the (probably exhausted and flabbergasted) judges wondered aloud if the bulk of the courtroom squabbling regarding the map for the state House of Representatives is only about a couple of districts.
Well, no. It’s not about whether there are 50 or 52 solidly minority districts. It’s about minority Texans continuing to have a voice in the districts beyond the hard core 50. It’s about the state’s efforts to silence those voices in many more than two chunks of geography. And that, in turn, is about whether legislators who represent those minorities are able to participate in meaningful dialog on legislation, or whether those legislators, like in the most recent legislative session, merely look on as witnesses, as an artificially-inflated majority assaults their constituents by cutting public education by billions, harassing them with voter photo I.D. laws, or ignoring attempts to make health care affordable to folks in their neighborhoods.
Texas has a majority minority population. There are 150 seats in the state House. The squabbling in court should not be about whether 52(ish) of those 150 districts should be the geography in which minority voices are heard.
If you’re the “quantify it” type, in addition to those 52(ish) seats, minority citizens were also decisive in electing their candidates of choice in House districts 57, 93, 96, 101, 102, 107, and 133. Minority citizens are also naturally emerging as effective deciders of their own fate in districts 26, 105, 132, and 138.
So if the remaining argument is about “just a couple of state House districts,” it’s only because lawyers cleverly, or foolishly, narrowed the focus. It’s not because minority voters in many, many other areas of Texas evaporated, were raptured, or suddenly moved to Detroit after Clint Eastwood inspired them during the Superbowl. And while the priorities of those Texans are just as real as the priorities of those living in Wendy Davis’ district, or the proposed new metroplex Congressional district, their communities are being fragmented in the exact same way, and for the same purpose: to silence their voices.
Late Friday, the San Antonio court ordered briefings on the Abbott plan (Plan H303) for the State House, due on Tuesday.
The court’s order said that it wanted briefing on any district that was different from the plan enacted by the Texas Legislature (H283).
There’s still a lot of work to be done. The Senate map agreement felt like progress, but we’re still miles away from the finish line.