Good news for fans of representative democracy: This morning, a three judge Federal panel in DC threw out the Republican gerrymandered Congressional, State House and State Senate maps, leaving judges in San Antonio to draw new boundaries.
In their order, US Circuit Judges Thomas Griffith, Rosemary Collyer and Beryl Howell denied a request for summary judgment from the State of Texas: Attorney General Greg Abbott wanted them to say that the maps complied with the Voting Rights Act. Instead, the judges wrote:
Having carefully considered the entire record and the parties’ arguments, the Court finds and concludes that the State of Texas used an improper standard or methodology to determine which districts afford minority voters the ability to elect their preferred candidates of choice and that there are material issues of fact in dispute that prevent this Court from entering declaratory judgment that the three redistricting plans meet the requirements of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
The District Court for the Western District of Texas now has until the end of November to draw new maps, but Democrats are already reacting positively to the ruling. Texas Democratic Party Chairman Boyd Ritchie said, “Republicans drew blatantly illegal maps then tried to game the system by going through the courts rather than the Department of Justice. Yet even the courts threw their dirty maps out the window. The courts said what we’ve been saying all along. These illegal maps trample on the voting rights of Texans and don’t allow voters to elect their candidates of choice.”
The real question now is what these new maps will look like and whether the San Antonio judges will tweak around the edges to just make them legal, or they will do a wholesale re-slicing to ensure real representation. Even though no Travis County seats were originally part of the contested seat list, the Gerrymander was so intensely finessed that any redrawing could have a serious impact.
That may be truest in the Congressional and Senate seats. While much attention has been paid locally to the potential infighting for a seat in DC, the Senate maps were generally acknowledged as being redrawn to get rid of Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth. Pulling any one block out of that Jenga pile could have massive consequences all the way down I-35.
This article appears in November 4 • 2011.
