A Supreme Court decision Wednesday that largely upheld Texas’ disputed congressional map is likely to provide a symbolic boost for Republicans, keep the Democratic goal of retaking the House elusive and ensure that the political legacy of former Rep. Tom DeLay will live on despite his downfall.
At the same time, the court found that one of the new districts created under the plan violated the Voting Rights Act by removing 100,000 Latinos from the district and will have to be redrawn, possibly before the November election. That small victory for Democrats could complicate congressional races in Texas, although the specific impact will remain unclear until a lower court acts.
The decision means that state legislators will have the ability to remap districts more than once every 10 years when census numbers change the allotment of House members based on population. But it was uncertain whether states would soon be altering the boundaries of congressional districts.
The Texas redistricting fight has taken on a symbolic and emotional importance, in addition to its political significance, ever since DeLay (R-Texas), the former U.S. House majority leader and a despised figure among liberals, prompted the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature to take the unprecedented step in 2003 of redrawing a post-2000 Census congressional map.
As a result of DeLay’s move, the Texas delegation to the U.S. House went from 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans to 11 Democrats and 21 Republicans, a swing of six seats whose impact still reverberates.
Democrats immediately charged that the Texas government had unconstitutionally used its authority for purely partisan purposes. States normally redistrict after each decennial census, and Democrats argued that an entirely unnecessary “mid-decade” redistricting for the sole purpose of helping one party is improper.
But the high court rejected that argument in a series of opinions by six justices. The main opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy concluded that the state’s motives were complex and not uniformly partisan.
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“The Legislature does seem to have decided to redistrict with the sole purpose of achieving a Republican congressional majority, but partisan aims did not guide every line it drew,” Kennedy wrote. He added, “The fact of mid-decade redistricting alone is no sure indication of unlawful political gerrymandering.”
Writing for a 7-2 majority on this point, Kennedy also noted that the new map more closely reflects the will of Texans, who vote Republican by a roughly 60 percent majority, than the previous map, which was more favorable to Democrats. Kennedy also said a map drawn by a state legislature should be preferred to one drawn by the courts, as was the case with the earlier map.
Most analysts had doubted the court would toss out the new map in its entirety, so the decision was not unexpected. But it was nonetheless a victory for Republicans, who wasted little time before celebrating.
`Courtroom obstruction’
“Democrats must now take their fight to the ballot box and abandon their attempts at courtroom obstruction,” said Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), who is coordinating the Republicans’ House campaigns this fall.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), who heads the Democrats’ attempt to take control of the House, focused on the finding that the plan violated Hispanic voters’ rights. “While we wish they had gone further, the victory is that the court has told Republicans it is unlawful for them to violate the Voting Rights Act to advance their partisan agenda,” he said.
Justice John Paul Stevens, in a strongly worded dissent joined by Justice Stephen Breyer, argued that however the redistricting was analyzed, Texas obviously was doing nothing but trying to help the Republican Party.
“By taking an action for the sole purpose of advantaging Republicans and disadvantaging Democrats, the State of Texas violated its constitutional obligation to govern impartially,” Stevens wrote.
The Republican victory was mitigated by the court’s finding that one district created by the DeLay plan violated the Voting Rights Act. The court found that to protect the political future of Republican Rep. Henry Bonilla, the Texas Legislature had improperly scooped 100,000 Latinos from his district and placed them in a neighboring one.
Kennedy said Hispanic voters were getting increasingly disenchanted with Bonilla and may have been about to vote him out of office. “In essence the state took away the Latinos’ opportunity because Latinos were about to exercise it,” Kennedy said.
To make up for its changes to Bonilla’s district, the Legislature then created a new Latino district by uniting two very different Hispanic communities, one in Austin and one near the Mexican border, connecting them by a sparsely populated strip of land. Kennedy also sharply criticized that move.
Nina Perales, Southwest regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who argued the case, described the decision as “historic.”
“I think it’s a message for Texas, and other states as well, that you cannot roll over minority voting strength in your quest for partisan advantage, political protection, whatever the political agenda is,” she said.
A lower court will now have to redraw Texas’ congressional map, apparently by making some move toward restoring the previous contours of Bonilla’s district. It is unclear what the outcome of that will be, and the court could order the Legislature to redraw the map rather than doing so itself.
Most experts believe Bonilla’s district must be reshaped before the November vote, because an election cannot go forward in a district that the Supreme Court has said violates the Voting Rights Act.
But how the rejiggering of Bonilla’s district ripples through other Texas districts remains to be seen.
The case’s origins go back to the 2000 Census and its aftermath, when a Legislature split between the parties could not agree on how to carve Texas into congressional districts, forcing the federal courts to do the job.
DeLay was frustrated that his largely Republican home state was sending a majority-Democratic delegation to Congress. He mounted an intense drive to elect Republicans to the Texas Legislature, and after he succeeded, the new GOP-dominated Legislature redrew Texas’ congressional map, sparking the case that was decided Wednesday.
Not an entirely happy ending
But the events did not have an entirely happy outcome for DeLay.
His fundraising efforts as he fought to elect Republicans to the Legislature resulted in his indictment, and ongoing ethical questions surrounding his actions are part of the reason he was recently forced to resign from Congress.
The court’s refusal Wednesday to forbid mid-decade redistricting is prompting fears by some that each time power changes hands in any state, the party newly in control will redraw its congressional map.
But so many factors must align–one party must suddenly come into control of state government, conclude the state’s electoral map is badly skewed, and be willing to undertake a divisive redistricting–that many experts say few if any states are likely to follow suit.
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