Former University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal, an advocate of a strong running game, used to say that there are three things that can happen when you throw a forward pass and two of them are bad (interception or incompletion).
When the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the Texas congressional redistricting case on Jan. 9, a multitude of things could happen, some of them not good from the standpoint of racial minorities seeking expanded representation in Washington. Minority groups are gearing up for this case, and they have an enormous amount riding on the outcome.
Continue ReadingLet?s set the scene and then discuss the possible outcomes.
Texas gained four congressional seats as a result of the 2010 census, taking its delegation from 32 members to 36 members ? the largest gain by any state.
The Texas Legislature convened in January 2011 but did not complete its congressional redistricting process until a special session in June. Gov. Rick Perry waited almost a month to sign the new plan into law. The state of Texas then chose the slower of the two statutory approaches to achieving preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act by filing suit in federal court in the District of Columbia rather than seeking preclearance from the Justice Department.
All this was time sensitive because Texas has one of the earliest primaries in the country (originally scheduled for March 6, but since delayed until April 3) and a very early candidate filing deadline (extended by the courts until Dec. 19, and pending again). Meanwhile, minority plaintiffs filed suit in federal court in San Antonio, under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, claiming that the new districts discriminated against black and Hispanic voters.
The state of Texas dragged its feet in D.C. federal court, which ultimately ruled preliminarily against the state by denying the state?s motion for summary judgment. A trial on the merits of preclearance has been scheduled to start Jan. 17 in D.C. federal court. Because of a fast-approaching December candidate filing deadline, the D.C. court then told the San Antonio federal court to draw up an interim plan for use in the 2012 elections.
This is where the matter got interesting. Texas currently has nine majority-minority districts represented by Democrats, and 23 districts represented by Republicans. Prior to the 2010 elections, Texas had 11 districts in which minorities had a legitimate chance of electing the candidate of their choice, but Republicans won two of these in an electoral sweep.
Under the plan adopted by the Legislature, Texas would have 10 minority opportunity districts (one less than during the past decade) and 26 GOP-friendly districts. This is in spite of the fact that 85 percent of the Texas population growth in the past decade has been minority, something that the Republican Legislature chose to ignore.
The San Antonio federal court (two Republicans and one Democrat) drew an interim redistricting plan that provided for 13 Democratic districts (11 black or Hispanic districts and two coalition districts controlled by a combination of black and Hispanic voters). One of these new coalition districts was in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area ? a portion of the state with 2.1 million minority voters and only one minority district under the Legislature?s plan.
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