Court tosses remap of 2 House districts
Decision sets up scramble to redraw the lines in time for 2018 elections
By Guillermo Contreras
Republican U.S. Rep. Blake Farenthold, left, and Democratic U.S. Rep Lloyd Doggett represent the districts in question.
SAN ANTONIO — A federal judicial panel has invalidated the 2013 map for two of Texas’ 36 congressional districts, setting up a scramble to redraw the boundaries in time for the 2018 elections.
In a unanimous decision late Tuesday afternoon, the three-judge panel found that districts 35 and 27 violate the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Voting Rights Act because the GOP-controlled Legislature drew the map with discriminatory intent.
District 35, represented by Democrat Lloyd Doggett, straddles Interstate 35 and includes portions of San Antonio and Austin. District 27, represented by Republican Blake Farenthold, includes Corpus Christi and Bay City on the Gulf Coast, and reaches north to Highway 71 east of Austin.
The panel sided with the state on District 23 — represented by Republican Will Hurd —which stretches from San Antonio to West Texas and was hotly debated at a redistricting trial in July before the panel in San Antonio. The judges also found the plaintiffs, which consist of minority lawmakers and civil rights groups, failed to make their case on similar voting rights allegations in other congressional districts in the Dallas and Houston areas.
The panel found that the plaintiffs failed to prove that black and Hispanic voters vote cohesively for purposes of creating a coalition district in Dallas-Fort Worth and that the plaintiffs failed to prove that black and Hispanic voters vote cohesively for purposes of creating a coalition district in Houston.
The 107-page ruling orders the state to tell the court within three business days whether the Texas Legislature will take up redistricting to fix the violations. Otherwise, the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the plaintiffs will head back to court on Sept. 5 with a number of options to begin redrawing the congressional map, according to the ruling.
The judges found that Latino voters in District 27 were “intentionally deprived of their opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.”
The judges also said the map drawers created “an impermissible racial gerrymander” in District 35. The ruling said the Republican-controlled Legislature illegally used race as the predominant factor in drawing the district “without a compelling state interest.”
In a statement, Doggett said: “What Republicans did was not just wrong, it was unconstitutional. Since the U.S. Supreme Court will have the final say, this extended struggle is not yet over. Unless the Supreme Court rules otherwise, I plan to seek re-election in the district that I currently represent. I will continue to remain fully accessible and accountable to my constituents in Bexar, Travis, Hays, Caldwell and the portions of the other counties that I serve.”
The ruling is the latest round in a six-year court battle over how the state’s lawmakers drew political boundaries.
“Intentional discrimination is a bad habit for the Texas Legislature,” said state Rep. Rafael Anchía, D-Dallas, chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, one of the lead plaintiffs. “With the 7th ruling of intentional discrimination since 2011, a federal court confirmed today that Texas congressional maps remain unconstitutional.
“The court even went so far as to explicitly state that (then-Attorney General Greg) Abbott’s legal advice to the Legislature was ‘discriminatory at its heart.’ Texas failed to act for too long. Thousands of Texans have cast their vote under unconstitutional maps. Partisan politics compromised our electoral maps, and as a result, every Texan lost,” he said.
The judges said MALC and two other groups of plaintiffs shall take the lead for their side in offering remedial maps, and other plaintiffs or plaintiff-intervenors, can offer advice in an advisory role.
Nina Perales, vice president of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and lead counsel for the Texas Latino Redistricting Task Force, said, “The court’s ruling on intentional discrimination is an important safeguard of Latino voting rights.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in a statement, applauded pieces of the ruling that sided with the state. He also said that he was disappointed with a portion of the decision, noting that the judges themselves adopted interim maps in 2012 and those have been in effect for the last three election cycles.
Paxton said the state plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
A decision on the Texas House maps is pending, and is expected in the coming weeks.