Category Archives: redistricting

Warning: Inside baseball post: Last night I posted a question about when we will see the DC Court in the Texas redistricting case.  I received a few responses, including one from a longtime reader (critical of section 5) who notes that DOJ has taken the position that at least aspects of the Interim maps ordered by the three-judge San Antonio court actually must be submitted for preclearance by the counties themselves. See here, here, and here. The reader adds: “I have never believed that the interim maps would need to be precleared, especially after the SA court issued them with no order compelling Texas to submit them for preclearance. I have heard nothing about  whether the counties are actually submitting their precinct boundary changes for preclearance. “

Isn’t it about time we get the opinion from the three-judge DC Court considering the merits of the Texas redistricting preclearance challenge?

I had been speculating that the three-judge court in DC might be holding its opinion until it would be too late for the court’s opinion to affect the 2012 elections.  This would be simply for administrative reasons—Texas could not handle more litigation over the district lines to be used in this election.

Michael Li says that this moment has arrived.

This means that the D.C. court could issue its ruling relatively soon.

WisPolitics: ” A federal court this morning ruled Republicans failed to create a majority-minority Assembly seat for Milwaukee’s Latino community and offered lawmakers the chance to tweak those lines.

Texas Redistricting has the three opinions.

Ross Ramsey reports for the Texas Tribune/NYT.  More links via Texas Redistricting.

Dallas Morning News: “As candidates scramble to file for the 2012 elections under new political maps ordered by a court last week, some Texas Democrats are wondering: Could they have gotten more? Districts for Congress and the Texas House adhere closely to a compromise plan negotiated by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and the Texas Latino Redistricting Task Force, one of the state’s myriad opponents. Other groups resisted compromising with the state, and Abbott, a Republican, has been credited with employing a divide-and-conquer strategy to win approval for maps that look a lot like the ones adopted by the Legislature.”

Remember that pushback when I and others said that the Supreme Court’s decision in Perry v. Perez was a big win for Republicans?

Texas Redistricting has the details.

Austin-American Statesman: “Ithe D.C. court issues an opinion saying that District 25 deserves protection, it could throw Texas’ election schedule into turmoil again. That’s because the San Antonio court adopted the Legislature’s boundaries for District 25 in drawing the congressional map to be used for this year’s elections. Assuming the D.C. court will allow enough time to produce new maps by March 31, the San Antonio court could redraw new boundaries for District 25 and the surrounding districts, said Michael Li, a redistricting expert and author of a Texas redistricting blog. But because of tight timetables, any changes would force the court to push back the primary until June 29, almost four months after the original date of March 6. But if the D.C. court does not allow for new maps to be drawn by March 31, then the primary would have to be pushed back to July with a runoff in September — a move that would be problematic because of general election deadlines, Li said.”

This is why I suggested the D.C. Court may hold its opinion until it is too late to do anything about the upcoming primaries.

Franita Tolson has posted this draft on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

The debate over whether partisan gerrymandering claims are justiciable reveals a Supreme Court that is at war with itself. The Court first found these claims to be actionable in Davis v. Bandemer on equal protection grounds, but switched gears a mere eighteen years later in Vieth v. Jubelirer. In Vieth, a plurality of the justices argued that partisan gerrymandering presented a non-justiciable political question because of the lack of manageable standards, while three of the remaining justices offered their own proposals for regulation. This impasse has led scholars to alternate between developing their own standards, premised on an individual rights conception of the harm from gerrymandering, or calling for a “structural” approach to resolving these disputes, in which courts treat gerrymanders as political lock ups and police them with easily administrable bright lines rules. Although structuralists have come to dominate the literature, both approaches fail to adequately conceptualize partisan gerrymandering because neither the Court nor these scholars have acknowledged that it has federalism benefits that must be accounted for in developing standards.

The thesis of this Article is that partisan gerrymandering is a political safeguard of federalism, but courts cannot properly value this federalism benefit and should therefore police gerrymandering indirectly. This federalism benefit emerges because states can draw legislative districts along partisan lines in order to increase the probability that its delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives will reflect the partisan composition of a majority of the electorate and the majority party of the state. A delegation that is as cohesive as practicable will ensure that the state’s preferred policy preferences are expressed at the federal level. These preferences are determined, not by reference to the wants and desires of elected officials, but by path dependent processes, or constraints imposed by the state’s institutional framework, that limit the ability of official decisionmaking to veer too far from voter preferences.

This Article illustrates that, in the context of congressional redistricting, the sole focus on manageable standards ignores the concerns about institutional legitimacy and judicially dictated political outcomes that are exacerbated because of the related federalism issues in this area. In other words, even if governing standards can be developed, the federalism implications of partisan gerrymandering demand indirect regulation through prophylactic rules like section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Court has used section 2’s prohibition on racial vote dilution to police partisan gerrymandering in the past. This approach respects its federalism potential and the institutional limitations of the judiciary while protecting democratic norms through section 2’s focus on equality of representation.

A provocative and well-done paper.

See here.  That court seems stuck in a tough spot.  If they issue an opinion soon, parties will go back to the San Antonio court and argue that the interim maps should be changed to reflect the D.C. ruling. So I expect the D.C. court to wait until those new maps are relied upon a lot and cannot be changed.

The divide between Latino and African-American voters’ rights groups.  Many Latino leaders are happy with the interim maps and many African-American leaders are not.  The issue is that Latino gains may come (at least in part) from African-American voting power.

It is one of the big unanswered questions about the VRA: how to deal with conflicting minority interests.

You can find the court’s order here (via Texas Redistricting).  May 29 primary and July 31 runoff–unless there is a further delay caused by either a Supreme Court stay request or some action from the D.C. court.

Here, at the Texas Tribune.  From one of the three, written by Rep. Dukes:

I understand that the court’s plan is based on a plan that MALDEF, the Latino Task force and U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, proposed along with the state of Texas. Undoubtedly, these plaintiffs believe that their agreed-to plan is fair to minority voters.

The Texas Legislative Black Caucus, NAACP, LULAC and I disagree. We feel that the congressional plan should protect the voting rights of all minority voters, not just a limited subset — especially when the agreed-to plan (and the court’s plan) continues to harm Hispanic and black voters in several parts of the state.

AP: “Minority groups in Texas objected Wednesday to new congressional and state House maps drawn by a San Antonio court, urging a separate court in Washington, D.C., to speed up a review that could mark the last opportunity to change the political boundaries ahead of the 2012 elections.”  (More on the filing from Texas Redistricting.)

Note no mention of a possible motion for a stay to the U.S. Supreme Court.  More at Texas Redistricting on what comes next and who won or lost.

The verdict appears to be “yes.”  Rothenberg Political Report:

 While neither party gets its ideal scenario, the proposed map is likely to result in a split of the state’s four new congressional districts by creating three new Hispanic-majority seats that should be won by Democrats. The new map strongly resembles a “compromise” map that emerged earlier this month between Attorney General Greg Abbott and a Latino interest group – but it was a map that many Democrats and other Hispanic coalitions didn’t endorse or like.

Still, the map won’t help the calculus Democrats need to take back the House. While Democrats concede privately that the map is slightly better than the one the GOP-controlled legislature produced last year, they would have liked to have seen more gains, with three of the new seats solidly in their column. While Democrats should pick up at least two seats, an Austin seat transforms into a solid GOP seat and the 23rd remains a toss-up. The map could result in a 25-11 advantage for Republicans – a two seat gain for both parties, resulting in no real net change from the current 23-9 split.

Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett’s district was decimated in this proposal (as it was in the original GOP map), turning his 25th District into a GOP-leaning seat and likely forcing him to run in one of the new Hispanic districts, most likely the 35th District that stretches from Austin to San Antonio — a solidly Democratic seat with a 58 percent Hispanic population. Doggett will still likely face a primary from a Latino candidate, but with over $3.3 million in the bank, it would take a cash-flush challenger to take him on in an abbreviated primary campaign. State Rep. Joaquin Castro is still expected to run in the open 20th District, vacated by retiring Rep. Charlie Gonzalez.

San Antonio News-Express

NY Times

AP

Texas Tribune

The Court says “an opinion” coming later.  I would think (but cannot guarantee) that the signature of the three judges and the references to “an” opinion means no dissents.  From the order:

Texas Redistricting has them.  More to come.