Texas GOP Avoids Federal Oversight in Voter-Map Challenge
Texas GOP Avoids Federal Oversight in Voter Map Challenge
(Bloomberg) -- Texas won’t have to get federal approval before making changes to its voter maps after a panel of U.S. judges ruled that a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision raised the bar for declaring when a state’s discrimination against minority voters warranted ongoing court supervision.
Texas would have been the first state pushed back under federal electoral oversight, a process known as preclearance, if the judges had ruled the other way.
The panel in San Antonio Wednesday predicted the dispute is far from settled, saying it expects Texas’s future electoral maps will again be challenged. And it said practices adopted by state legislators are still a cause for concern.
“The court has grave concerns about Texas’s past conduct,” U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez wrote in a 27-page ruling, citing Texas lawmakers’ enactment of a voter ID rule, a botched recent voter-purge attempt and state mapmakers’ practice of slicing up minority communities into voting districts designed to restrict the political clout of blacks and Hispanics.
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court largely threw out preclearance, which was a part of the Voting Rights Act that protected minority voters from states and counties that routinely make it harder to vote or elect minority politicians. Texas had been under preclearance for more than 30 years until that point.
The Supreme Court ruled in June that it has no constitutional authority to throw out voting maps for being too partisan, effectively giving parties that control state legislatures license to redraw districts to cement their political advantages. The three-judge panel in San Antonio said it had to follow that ruling.
“The clear import of the Supreme Court’s opinion is that nothing further remains to be remedied,” Rodriguez wrote.
The judges said higher courts had also ruled that state lawmakers had done enough to fix identified racial biases in Texas’s election district boundaries after an almost decade-long redistricting fight. As a result, preclearance wasn’t required even though the judges had previously determined Texas’s maps diluted minority voting strength by packing blacks and Latinos into overcrowded voting districts or splintering their communities between multiple districts.
Voting rights activists who challenged the Texas maps claimed that state lawmakers, led by Republicans, intentionally drew boundaries that undermined the political clout of the state’s rapidly rising Hispanic population. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the state gained more than 4 million new residents, more than 80 percent of whom are Hispanic. Yet state lawmakers created no new voting districts that favored the election of minority politicians.
‘Ingenious Defiance’
Given the inexorable rise in the state’s minority voter population, Rodriguez said, “the likelihood increases that the Texas Legislature will continue to find ways to attempt to engage in ‘ingenious defiance of the Constitution’ that necessitated the preclearance system in the first place.”
Texas officials argued they didn’t intentionally discriminate against minority voters, who more often vote for Democrats, but instead drew districts designed to protect incumbent Republicans. State lawyers claimed such political gerrymandering is an accepted practice that doesn’t qualify for the harsh remedy of preclearance.
“This court ruling is a win for our Constitution and the right of Texans to govern themselves,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement.
In the challenge’s early days, the three-judge panel made quick fixes to the most egregiously discriminatory voting districts so Texans had maps to use for the 2012 presidential election. But the court warned that racial bias still tainted many district lines and ordered the state legislature to redraw them. Instead, Texas lawmakers adopted the interim maps as they were and claimed the slightly revised districts couldn’t be discriminatory because they were created by the court.
The minority-rights’ activists will likely appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has already reviewed portions of this redistricting case twice. In each prior instance, the high court reversed some part of the San Antonio judges’ rulings to give Texas partial victories.
Matt Angle, head of the Democratic-leaning Lone Star Project political watchdog group, said the judges went out of their way to warn Texas lawmakers they must still comply with federal election and discrimination laws, or a court could still order the state back under federal supervision.
“The court is giving Texas Republicans a chance to end their continued reliance on overt discrimination to gain and hold power,” Angle said.
Texas agreed in May to tweak some voting district boundaries that the Supreme Court found racially discriminatory in one of these previous reviews. The San Antonio judges approved that compromise May 28 after most of the activists challenging the maps signed off on the deal.
The case is Perez v. Abbott, 5:11-cv-360, U.S. District Court, Western District of Texas (San Antonio).
To contact the reporter on this story: Laurel Calkins in Houston at lcalkins@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Joe Schneider, Peter Blumberg
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