The Supreme Court has largely rejected a challenge to state and Federal redistricting maps in the State of Texas.<\/b>
\nThe Supreme Court has largely upheld the redistricting map drawn by the State of Texas, overturning the decision of a three-judge panel of the U. S. District Court that had held that a trio of districts in Texas had been drawn in a way that was racially discriminatory:
The Supreme Court on Monday largely upheld Texas congressional and legislative maps that a lower court said discriminated against black and Hispanic voters.
The lower court was wrong in how it considered the challenges, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in the 5 to 4 decision. The majority sided with the challengers over one legislative district.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent that was longer than Alito\u2019s majority decision. She said the decision \u201cdoes great damage to the right of equal opportunity. Not because it denies the existence of that right, but because it refuses its enforcement.\u201d
Alito was joined in the outcome by the court\u2019s most consistent conservatives \u2014 Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.
Thomas and Gorsuch added they do not believe the Voting Rights Act applies to redistricting.
Sotomayor was joined by the court\u2019s liberals: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan.
(\u2026)
After the 2010 census, Texas was awarded four new congressional districts because of the state\u2019s population growth. Almost all of the growth came from an increase in black and Hispanic residents, but the new maps produced by the legislature fulfilled its goal of protecting Anglo Republicans, the challengers charged.
The maps were found by the district court to probably be unconstitutional, and the judges drew interim maps to be used in the 2012 elections.
The outcomes, though, were much the same. In 2013, the Republican legislature voted to permanently adopt those judicially drawn maps.
Texas argued it could not be a racial gerrymander when using the lines drawn by the neutral judges.
More from The New York Times
WASHINGTON \u2014 The Supreme Court on Monday largely upheld an array of congressional and state legislative districts in Texas, reversing trial court rulings that said the districts violated the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against voters on the basis of race.
The vote was 5 to 4, with the court\u2019s more conservative members in the majority. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority, said the trial court had \u201ccommitted a fundamental legal error\u201d by requiring state officials to justify their use of voting maps that had been largely drawn by the trial court itself.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the majority opinion represented a dark day for voting rights.
The Constitution and the Voting Rights Act \u201csecure for all voters in our country, regardless of race, the right to equal participation in our political processes,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThose guarantees mean little, however, if courts do not remain vigilant in curbing states\u2019 efforts to undermine the ability of minority voters to meaningfully exercise that right.\u201d
(\u2026)
There was an odd wrinkle in the case: The San Antonio court itself had for the most part endorsed the contested maps in 2012, after the Supreme Court rejected earlier ones and told the court to try again. The 2012 maps, the panel later said, had been considered in haste in advance of pending elections. In 2013, the Texas Legislature decided not to draw new maps and instead mostly adopted the one drawn by the San Antonio court.
After three election cycles using the interim maps, the court ruled that they were flawed. \u201cAlthough this court had \u2018approved\u2019 the maps for use as interim maps, given the severe time constraints it was operating under at the time of their adoption,\u201d the court said, that approval was \u201cnot based on a full examination of the record or the governing law\u201d and was \u201csubject to revision.\u201d
The court concluded that Texas\u2019 adoption of the interim maps was part of \u201ca litigation strategy designed to insulate the 2011 or 2013 plans from further challenge, regardless of their legal infirmities.\u201d
Justice Alito disagreed. \u201cThere is nothing to suggest that the Legislature proceeded in bad faith \u2014 or even that it acted unreasonably \u2014 in pursuing this strategy,\u201d he wrote.
Much of the dispute between the two sides in Monday\u2019s decision concerned whether the case was properly before the justices at all.
The San Antonio court had not issued an injunction compelling the state to do anything, Justice Sotomayor wrote. Instead, it instructed Texas officials to promptly advise it about whether they would try to draw new maps. That meant, she said, that there was no lower-court decision for the Supreme Court to review.
But Justice Alito wrote that the trial court\u2019s action was effectively an injunction and that the Supreme Court therefore had jurisdiction to hear the state\u2019s appeal.
\u201cThe short time given the Legislature to respond is strong evidence that the three-judge court did not intend to allow the elections to go ahead under the plans it had just condemned,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe Legislature was not in session, so in order to take up the task of redistricting, the governor would have been required to convene a special session \u2014 which is no small matter.\u201d
Amy Howe summarizes the opinion:
Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority, in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Alito began by rejecting the challengers\u2019 contention that the Supreme Court lacked the authority to review the case at all because federal law only gives the court the power to hear appeals from a three-judge district court that either grants or denies an injunction \u2013 which, the challengers argued, the district court\u2019s orders were not. Even if the district court had not specifically labeled the orders at issue in this case as \u201cinjunctions,\u201d Alito explained, the real question is whether the orders had the \u201cpractical effect\u201d of an injunction. And these did, he reasoned, because the orders not only found violations of federal law and the U. S. Constitution but also required the state to quickly notify the court whether the state legislature would meet to fix the violations. \u201cThe short time given the Legislature to respond,\u201d Alito posited, \u201cis strong evidence that the three-judge court did not intend to allow the elections to go ahead under the plans it had just condemned\u201d \u2013 which, \u201cfor all intents and purposes, constituted\u201d injunctions against the state.
Alito then turned to what he characterized as the main question on the merits of the state\u2019s appeal: whether the district court was wrong \u201cwhen it required the State to show that the 2013 Legislature somehow purged the \u2018taint\u2019 that the court attributed to the defunct and never-used plans enacted by a prior legislature in 2011.\u201d According to Alito, the district court\u2019s analysis was exactly backward: Even if a state has been found to have discriminated in the past, he observed, there is still a presumption that it acted properly in drafting later redistricting plans. This means that the plaintiffs challenging a redistricting plan still have to show that the legislature intended to discriminate when it enacted the current plan.
Alito acknowledged that the intent of the Texas legislature when it enacted the 2011 plan was something that a court could consider, and he added that the mere fact that the 2013 plans largely mirrored the 2012 interim plans adopted by the court did not immunize the 2013 plans from a challenge. But when all of the evidence is considered together, Alito concluded, it does not show that the legislature intended to discriminate against minority voters. If anything, Alito stressed, the available evidence suggests that the legislature did not intend to discriminate, but instead adopted the 2013 plans because it had been advised that doing so was the best way to end the \u201cexpensive and time consuming\u201d litigation over the redistricting plans.
In response to the majority\u2019s opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent that was joined by the Court\u2019s three other Democratic-appointed Justices that argued, interestingly enough, that the Court should not have reached the merits of the case. As Sotomayor notes in her dissent, this was because the three-judge panel did not grant or deny an injunction and warned that the majority\u2019s decision to rule on the merits of the case would lead to a flood of litigants in similar cases requesting Supreme Court review in cases that are not appropriate for Supreme Court review. Despite that position, Sotomayor did not hold back her criticism of the Court\u2019s ruling or Justice Alito\u2019s reasoning in the majority opinion, as Howe goes on to note:
Although the majority should not have discussed the merits at all, Sotomayor continued, there too it went astray. First, Sotomayor complained, the district court did not (contrary to Texas\u2019 assertion and the majority\u2019s conclusion) get the legal test wrong: The district court did focus on the legislature\u2019s intent when it adopted the 2013 plans, \u201crather than simply presuming invidious intent from the failure to remove the taint, as the majority claims.\u201d And when all of the evidence is considered together, Sotomayor contended, the district court properly concluded that the legislature did intend to discriminate.
In a blistering final paragraph that closed with the phrase \u201cI dissent,\u201d rather than the \u201cI respectfully dissent\u201d often used by the justices, Sotomayor protested that today\u2019s ruling \u201cdoes great damage to\u201d the right \u201cto equal participation in our political processes.\u201d \u201cNot because it denies the existence of that right, but because it refuses its enforcement. The Court intervenes when no intervention is authorized and blinds itself to the overwhelming factual record below. It does all of this to allow Texas to use electoral maps that, in design and effect, burden the rights of minority voters.\u201d
As noted, the Court did not completely absolve the State of Texas in this case. It held that one state legislative district was an improper racial gerrymander and that it must be redrawn pursuant to the Court\u2019s ruling and the ruling of the three-Judge panel. That will likely require the redrawing of lines for several adjoining state legislative districts, but it will have at best a limited impact on the makeup of the Texas Legislature and no impact at all on the Congressional District map, which will remain in effect until redistricting takes place in the wake of the 2020 Census. Overall, then, the political impact of all of this is likely to be minimal at best, and it\u2019s likely to mean that Texas will follow largely the same strategy in drawing the district lines after the 2020 Census that it did after the 2013 Census, with largely similar results.
This case, of course, follows on the heels of the Court\u2019s ruling in the two political gerrymandering cases out of Wisconsin and Maryland, which it essentially punted back to the lower courts on procedural grounds. Unlike those cases, though, this case was a ruling on the merits, and one that largely rejected the formula that the lower Court used to find that there was improper considering to race given when the Court drew the current Congressional map and that at least two of the state\u2019s Districts, the 27th Congressional District and the 35th Congressional District, were improperly drawn on racial grounds. Unlike the political gerrymandering cases, this essentially means the end of the challenges to the post-2010 Census map in Texas except with respect to that single state legislature district, although it\u2019s likely to be some time before that issue is fully resolved.
Here\u2019s the opinion:
Abbot Et Al v. Perez Et Al Opinion by Doug Mataconis on Scribd<\/p>\n

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