http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/12/scotus.texas.ap/index.html Supreme Court to review Texas political map Monday, December 12, 2005; Posted: 11:04 a.m. EST (16:04 GMT) WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court said Monday it would consider the constitutionality of a Texas congressional map engineered by Rep. Tom DeLay that helped Republicans gain seats in Congress. The 2003 boundaries helped Republicans win 21 of the state's 32 seats in Congress in the last election-- up from 15. They were approved amid a nasty battle between Republican leaders and Democrats and minority groups in Texas. The contentiousness also reached Washington, where the Justice Department approved the plan, although staff lawyers concluded that it diluted minority voting rights. Because of historic discrimination against minority voters, Texas is required to get Justice Department approval for any voting changes to ensure they don't undercut minority voting. Justices will consider a constitutional challenge to the boundaries filed by various opponents. The court will hear two hours of arguments, likely in April, in four separate appeals. The legal battle at the Supreme Court was over the unusual timing of the Texas redistricting, among other things. Under the Constitution, states must adjust their congressional district lines every 10 years to account for population shifts. But in Texas the boundaries were redrawn twice after the 2000 census, first by a court, then by state lawmakers in a second round promoted by DeLay. DeLay had to step down as House Majority Leader earlier this year after he was indicted in Texas on state money laundering charges. DeLay and two people who oversaw his fundraising activities are accused of funneling prohibited corporate political money through the national Republican Party to state GOP legislative candidates. Texas law prohibits spending corporate money on the election or defeat of a candidate. The alleged scheme was part of a plan DeLay helped set in motion to help Republicans win control of the Texas House in 2002 elections. The Republican Legislature then adopted a DeLay-backed congressional voting district map. The new map was used in 2004 elections, and Texas elected one additional black congressman besides the six additional GOP members. Of the 32 seats, six delegation members are Hispanic and three are black.
The one question that I haven't heard any experts raise but too me is the most critical is if the USSC finds that the redistricting plan is illegal then what happens to the Texas Congressional Representation that has been elected?
U.S. congressional districts covering Travis County, Texas (outlined in red) in 2002, left, and 2004. In 2003, Republicans in the Texas legislature redistricted the state, diluting the voting power of the heavily Democratic county by parceling its residents out to more Republican districts.
i dont think it was a mere coincidence that the most liberal county in texas was broken up like that. heck, round rock, a SUBURB of austin has its own congressman.
The most humorous part of all of this was when people asked Delay why they had to redistrict it, he was just straight up about it. He just said Texas is republican and therefore deserves more republican congressmen so we need to redistrict in order to make that happen.
Where will vote be fairer, Sugar Land or Nineveh? By CRAGG HINES Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle You don't need to know much about the representational models, however imperfect, in the Iraqi elections this week to understand that they certainly are no more egregious than U.S. House districts in Texas. What hypocrites Republicans can be: All this breast-beating about representative government in Iraq while they continually try to jigger the vote at home. Is it more than a touch ironic that as ballots began to be cast in the first post-Saddam parliamentary elections in Iraq, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision to hear multiple challenges to the mid-decade, politically inspired redrawing of the 32 U.S. House districts in Texas as demanded in 2003 by then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land? And that it became clear that, against all precedent, nonpartisan staff attorneys at the Justice Department, having urged disapproval of Republican redistricting in Texas and having been overruled by their political masters, were then effectively cut out of the federal preclearance process altogether? And that President Bush's latest Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito, has opposed the line of one-person, one-vote decisions at the heart of the fair-representation debate? And that a state court judge in Texas allowed to stand criminal money-laundering charges against DeLay and associates for political fund-raising that was central to his being able to browbeat the Legislature? Quelle confluence, non? The Supreme Court's action Monday means that at least four of the nine justices smell a rat in the 2003 redistricting — and another opportunity to deliberate the question of political gerrymandering. This is a freshly vexing question for the justices, who just last year splintered on the issue, in a case brought by Pennsylvania Democrats after a gratuitous Republican redistricting that followed the 2000 census. Four justices, in an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, said challenges to partisan line-drawing sucked the court too far into the political thicket because there was no constitutional guidance on the point. Four other justices, although not necessarily agreeing on why, would have let the case proceed. The swing vote was that of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who said there might eventually be a partisan redistricting case that rose to constitutional status but that the Pennsylvania case was not it. Kennedy said he "would not foreclose all possibility of judicial relief if some limited and precise rationale were found to correct an established violation of the Constitution." That requirement would seem to have "Texas 2003" written all over it, as spelled out in the plaintiff brief for Jackson v. Perry, one of the challenges accepted by the court. The question of redistricting "for the sole purpose of maximizing partisan advantage," at least when a state plan is already in effect, is relevant not only in a Texas controlled by Republicans but in any state in which, at any time, a district-line shift can be engineered for partisan gain. In the clearance process mandated by the Voting Rights Act, career staff attorneys at the Justice Department had recommended that the Texas redistricting plan and Georgia voter identification plan be rejected because they illegally hurt minority voters. But political appointees at Justice overruled the staff objections. Subsequently, The Washington Post reported last week, the political appointees at Justice have barred staff attorneys from even offering recommendations in major voting-rights cases. No wonder the White House and most Republican congressional leaders have been so unusually easygoing about preliminary acquiescence in extending the Voting Rights Act. They'd found another way to subvert the measure. And then we come to what Alito could do to voting rights if his nomination is confirmed. In 1985, as he was being vetted for a Reagan administration post, Alito expressed strong opposition to the reapportionment cases that set forth the one-person, one-vote principle that has been the pivot of electoral law over the last 40 years. Alito has attempted to brush the issue aside as writing what was expected of him as part of a job interview. Well, the upcoming Senate hearing on his nomination is a much more important job interview. As Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., said, it could be a showstopper of an issue. "If he really believes that reapportionment is a questionable decision ... you'll find a lot of people, including me, willing to do whatever they can to keep him off the court," Biden said last month on Fox News Sunday. Given the overall challenge to democratic electoral processes that Republicans continue to represent, it's the least Biden could do. It's time for a little of that concern at home, as well as in Iraq. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/3523013.html
That's a fair claim. Shouldn't the majority have the majority of the power? Only if the voices of a specific demographic is muted, I would see this as a problem. A true test would be to see if the ratio of demographics matches the ratio of the districts.
Hopefully some day the Bu****es will in their hearts accept the Voting Rights Act and other Civil Rights Acts and not view them as an obstacle to overcome.
