Supreme Court to Review Texas Districting Dispute
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
December 12, 2005
WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - The United States Supreme Court agreed today to review the constitutionality of the Texas redistricting plan that was engineered by Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader until recently, and helped Republicans add to their majority from the Lone Star State.
The justices will consider several lawsuits by Democrats and minority groups challenging the redrawn maps of voting districts pushed through in 2003. The redistricting has been credited with helping Republicans gain five more seats in the Texas delegation to the House of Representatives in 2004, increasing the Republican ranks to 21, compared with 11 Texas Democrats.
Today's announcement by the Supreme Court comes 10 days after the Justice Department acknowledged that some of its top officials had overruled a determination by the agency's civil rights division staff in 2003 that the redistricting plan would dilute the voting strength of minorities in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
The justices are likely to hear arguments in the spring and issue a decision before they adjourn for the summer, just before the 2006 Congressional election campaigns begin in earnest. How the court's decision will affect the Texas races is likely to be a subject of conjecture for many months.
Mr. DeLay had to step down from his majority post, at least temporarily, after he was indicted in September in Texas on state money-laundering charges linked to fund-raising for political campaigns. The lawmaker has proclaimed his innocence and has described the charges as the handiwork of a publicity-happy Democratic prosecutor.
Mr. DeLay has asserted that his only "crime" has been helping Republicans get elected. As Nathan Carlile of LegalTimes.com put it recently: "It is widely agreed that Republican Representative Tom DeLay plays politics the way Ty Cobb ran the base paths - spikes up. How lawful that style is depends on who is answering the question."
The Texas redistricting at issue has been accompanied by unusual procedures, hard-ball politics and traces of comedy.
Following the 2000 census, a three-judge federal court redrew the state's Congressional district boundaries after the State Legislature could not agree on a map. But when Republicans won big majorities in both houses of the State Legislature in 2002, Mr. DeLay pushed for a new map, even though state legislatures normally create new maps only once a decade, based on the preceding census.
In the spring of 2003, on the eve of a debate over the new map, dozens of Democrats in the State Legislature fled the state so there could not be a quorum for a vote. They were tracked down by the Texas State Police, but refused to return to the Capitol in Austin.
Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, convened a special session in which the new redistricting plan finally cleared the House. But then several Democrats in the Senate went into hiding. Despite the stalling tactics, the State Legislature finally adopted the plan, in part because Mr. DeLay brokered an agreement that satisfied enough lawmakers. (Mr. DeLay was later rebuked by the House Ethics Committee for using the Federal Aviation Administration to trace a private plane that carried some of the Democrats out of Texas.)
The bitterness has only increased since the battle in Austin. Some Democrats who had served in Congress for years were swept out in 2004 after being forced to run in new, much less politically friendly districts. And the recent disclosure that the civil rights staff of the Justice Department had considered the Republican plan to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act added a new ingredient to the political stew.
"In sum, the proposed plan reduces the level of minority voting strength," a memo by the civil rights staff concluded. "The state failed to follow its traditional redistricting principles preserving communities of interest and forbidding fragmentation or packing of minority voters."
The Justice Department, which under the Voting Rights Act oversees redistricting plans in Texas and other states with histories of racial discrimination, approved the plan despite the memo. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, defended the decision of his predecessor, John Ashcroft, to approve the plan and said the conflicting views within the department indicated a healthy deliberative process.
In October 2004, the Supreme Court looked at the Texas redistricting and sent it back to a lower federal court. That court rejected challenges to the redistricting. But since then, the existence of the Justice Department memo has become known.
As is its custom, the Supreme Court accepted the redistricting suits today without comment. Former Representative Charles W. Stenholm, a Democrat from West Texas whose 26-year career in Congress ended when he was defeated after the redistricting, recently called the memo by the Justice Department's civil rights staff "a smoking gun" that should persuade the justices to review the case.
Now, the United States Supreme Court - led by a new Chief Justice, John G. Roberts Jr., and with Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. nominated to succeed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor - will take up the case again. The suits to be consolidated for an unusually long two hours of argument are: League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 05-204; Travis County v. Perry, 0f-254; Jackson v. Perry, 05-276, and GI Forum of Texas v. Perry, 05-439. |
