The U. S. Supreme Court announced this week that it will review the congressional redistricting plan that Rep. Tom DeLay (R) pushed through the Texas legislature in mid-decade to replace an established plan drawn by a federal court. On behalf of congressional Democrats, I testified against the DeLay plan, before the U. S. Department of Justice, the Texas legislature, and the federal trial court.
The Texas case provides the new Roberts Court an historic opportunity to curb the partisan gerrymandering that has extinguished political competition in states where one party draws district lines – a practice that in effect lets legislators choose their voters. The Court could also reaffirm the power of the Voting Right Act to prohibit the dilution of minority voting strength.
The DeLay plan created 20 districts with a super-Republican majority greater than 60 percent, 11 strongly Democratic districts, and one swing district (with a Republican incumbent), based on voting in the 2002 statewide Texas elections. Even if Democrats had achieved a 55 percent statewide majority, 20 of 32 districts would still have included a majority of Republican voters. Thus, the plan forestalled any realistic ability of Democrats to compete for more than a small minority of congressional seats in Texas.
This extreme political bias cannot be explained by what Justice Anthony Kennedy, the likely swing vote in the case, called “legitimate legislative objectives.” To the contrary, as compared to court plan, the DeLay plan weakened adherence to such traditional redistricting criteria as preservation of whole counties or cities, retention of senior incumbents, and unification of communities of interest.
The court plan, moreover, was hardly unfair to Republicans. It included 20 districts with better than 50 percent Republican majorities. However, with usual Republican voters splitting their tickets, Democrats had prevailed in five of these districts. DeLay and his associates drew their plan to avoid such an outcome by consigning incumbents to unfamiliar territory and hiking the Republican percentage of their districts.
The DeLay plan also used minority voters as pawns in their partisan gerrymandering scheme. It dismantled districts in the Dallas/Tarrant County region and southwest Texas that provided minority voters the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice to Congress. His plan also ripped apart seven other congressional districts across in which African-American and Hispanic voters influenced election outcomes, submerging these voters into heavily Republican districts in which they have no influence.
The DeLay plan maximized racial polarization in Texas by dividing the state into Anglo-dominated Republican districts and a relatively few heavily minority Democratic districts. The Texas congressional delegation now consists of 21 Anglo Republicans, 9 Hispanic or black Democrats, and only 2 remaining Anglo Democrats. The plan terminated both political competition and coalition-building between Anglos and minorities.
The Supreme Court could consign the nation to this grim fate by sanctioning the DeLay plan. Or it could seize the opportunity to define clear standards for upholding political fairness and minority voting opportunities in Texas and across America.
The Court, however, could decide the case narrowly, ruling only that the legislature illegally redrew a legally established plan in mid-decade without new Census data to ensure that the new district lines conformed to the principle of one-person, one-vote. If this ruling reinstated the court-drawn plan, it might produce a just result for Texas, but would leave hanging the big issues posed in what could be America’s most important case on legislative politics since the reapportionment decisions of the 1960’s.
I am currently running as a Democrat in Maryland for the U. S. Senate. Maryland and America need a voice for fairness and democracy, not just another member of the club. Check out my ideas: Allan Lichtman for Senate.