Does Rep. Lloyd Doggett want his old district back or not?
Rep. Lloyd Doggett
The congressional and legislative districts used in this year’s elections were temporary maps drawn by panel of federal judges in San Antonio. The maps were designed to be used this year, while the courts continued to sort out various legal challenges to maps drawn by the Legislature.
Those challenges include efforts by a group of Travis County plaintiffs and a collection of civil rights groups who accused the Republican-controlled Legislature of creating racially and ethnically discriminatory maps. Republicans denied the allegations, and the case is ongoing.
The Travis County plaintiffs weren’t specific in court documents about creating a Travis County-centered district for Doggett, said Michael Li, a Democratic fundraiser and redistricting expert. “But that was the crux of their argument in the first round of redistricting, and it very well could be again,” Li said.
State Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, an Austin Democrat and one of the Travis County plaintiffs, said in an interview that he would like to see a Travis County district in which minorities would be able to elect the candidates of their choice, like they have with Doggett.
“I’d like to see as much of Travis County as possible in one congressional district,” Rodriguez said. “I would like to see us having one unified voice in D.C.”
Rodriguez said he believes Doggett feels the same way, but in a statement Doggett said: “I remain ready for whatever Republicans throw at me next. I am really not concerned with ‘what if,’ I am working on ‘what now’ is needed to serve our families.”
I don’t remember, and the story doesn’t say, if Doggett fought to have CD25 restored as a mostly-Travis County district after the 2003 re-redistricting. When it was redrawn for the 2006 election, it was a byproduct of CD23 being declared illegal. My guess is that Doggett will stay quiet, at least publicly, about this. He’s already proven he can win in a non-Travis-centric district, so it’s not clear what he’d gain from advocating for CD25 to be put back together. It won’t surprise me if he expresses an opinion behind the scenes, or if he ultimately has some influence over whatever the Travis County intervenors do, but I seriously doubt he’ll be caught talking about it out loud. On a related note, Texas Redistricting reviews the briefs submitted by the intervenors asking the Supreme Court to dismiss the State of Texas’ appeal or, alternatively, to summarily affirm the decision of the district denying preclearance of the redistricting maps drawn by the Texas Legislature. We’ll see how long it takes to get a ruling.
For at least two reasons county integrity is breached in the redistricting process: to comply with the most current theory of what the Voting Rights Act requires in terms of creating districts favorable to electing blacks, Hispanics, and in some rare instances Asians, and second to meet one-person, one-vote district equality standards.
Sure, you probably could put all of Travis in one congressional district. The trade off is the degree to which this reduces the number of minority political districts, or effective districts, or coalition districts, depending on which view of the Voting Rights Act is in vogue.
For a particularly egregious example of how the Voting Rights Act has been used to split counties along racial lines, look to the eastern North Carolina districts where a dozen cities with populations less than 100,000 have been split to fashion one white GOP district and one black Democrat district. The same could be said of the Georgia districts.