This is potentially a very big deal.
In striking down North Carolina’s congressional district map, the Supreme Court sent Texas a firm warning Monday about how the state’s case may fare if it reaches that stage.
The 5-3 North Carolina ruling affirmed a previous district court decision, which found that Republican state legislators there had “packed” black voters into two Democratic-held districts to dilute the impact of minority votes in other congressional seats.
Written by Justice Elena Kagan, the ruling is the latest in a series of rejections from the Supreme Court in recent years toward redistricting efforts that include racial considerations. The court demanded the review of Virginia state legislature districts in March and also ruled against Alabama’s state legislature districts in 2015.
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Michael Li, a redistricting expert and senior counsel at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, said the North Carolina ruling will be an “important decision” for the other districting efforts winding through the legal system, including those in Texas.
“It makes clear that this isn’t about any sort of talismanic test or anything like that, but that you actually have to delve into the facts and circumstances about how maps are drawn,” Li said. “So even a district that looks pretty and has nice lines, and everything like that, can still be problematic. And it’s really up to the trial court to delve into that.”
Democrats in Texas celebrated the ruling as a promising indication of how their arguments will fare moving forward.
“I am happy that North Carolina voters secured another victory against the national Republican crusade to undermine the voting power of African Americans and Hispanics in local, state, and federal elections,” said Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, who has been on the front lines of another legal case against Texas’ voter ID law.
Though the North Carolina decision may be a setback for Texas’ chances, it will not necessarily be determinative of the outcome. As Kagan reiterated, the specific details of the districts matter greatly. And newly confirmed Justice Neil Gorsuch will be able to hear the Texas case, whereas the North Carolina arguments occurred before he took his seat on the court.
While Li said he was reticent to predict Paxton’s decision-making, he expects the North Carolina case will factor into how he handles Texas’ efforts moving forward.
“It should be a warning to states about how the court is going to look at these cases, but that doesn’t mean that Texas won’t appeal,” Li said. “It is fact-specific, and there’s a lot politically riding on these decisions, and sometimes taking your chance at the Supreme Court can be important.”
See these two Rick Hasen posts for all the technical details. This Trib story boils it down a bit and explains the relevance to Texas:
For years, courts have wrangled with a tough question: How to untangle the roles of race and partisanship in redistricting, the once-per-decade exercise of redrawing political maps to accommodate changing populations. It’s a crucial exercise because partisan gerrymandering is broadly viewed as constitutional, while race-based map-drawing is not.
But the legal calculus is complicated by the fact that black and Latino voters tend to favor Democrats, for instance.
Monday’s Supreme Court ruling said plaintiffs could successfully challenge the use of race in redistricting, even if lawmakers claim they were motivated by politics.
“The sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other [including political] characteristics,” said a footnote in Justice Elena Kagan’s majority decision.
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Though Texas’ court dispute isn’t precisely the same as North Carolina’s, they both feature a similar line of defense — that partisanship, not race, motivated map drawers.
In one 2013 brief, for instance, then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott wrote “plaintiffs must prove that the Texas Legislature’s redistricting decisions were motivated by unconstitutional racial animus rather than a desire to maximize the Republican Party’s electoral prospects.”
But race and partisanship are intertwined in Texas, and opponents of the maps successfully argued — in some districts, at least — that the Republican-dominated Legislature advanced the party’s interests by looking to race.
Monday’s Supreme Court decision only adds heft to that idea, lawyers challenging the state say, making it more difficult for Texas and other states to argue politics can shield racial considerations.
“It undermines entirely their protestation that this is about politics: Yes, we’re picking apart Latino voting boxes and African-American voting boxes – we’re not doing it to them, we’re doing it to the Democratic Party,” said Jose Garza, an attorney for the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, a lead plaintiff in the case. “That’s just not going to hold up.”
Gerry Hebert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center and an attorney for other plaintiffs in the case, said the Supreme Court “expressly rejected” part of Texas’ redistricting defense.
Texas’ defense now is that the 2013 map wipes away the problems with the 2011 map. The main problem with that is that some of the illegal districts are identical in the two maps, so one presumes something would need to be done about that. Thus, the court has asked the state if it might like to take a crack at drawing a new, legal map, maybe in a shudder special session. I rather doubt the state will take them up on this offer, on the grounds that the state surely figures it will win, but they have until the 26th to decide. Daily Kos and Slate have more.
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