Prometheus 6

The problem:

The question of whether the Texas redistricting violated either the Voting Rights Act or the Constitution has ramifications well beyond the boundaries of that state. The mid-decade redistricting was so successful for the Texas Republicans that if it is upheld, it could well become the norm any time a single party gains control of a state legislature and wants to entrench its power in the state's Congressional delegation.

Supreme Court to Hear Dispute on Texas Redistricting
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would decide the validity of the much-disputed Congressional map that Texas Republicans pushed through the State Legislature two years ago in a highly unusual mid-decade redistricting that led to the loss of five Democratic Congressional seats.

The court agreed to hear appeals brought by four groups of plaintiffs representing Democratic, Hispanic and black voters as well as the city of Austin and its surrounding county. The justices will hear the cases on an expedited basis on March 1, in time to issue a decision by the end of the current term in late June, but not in time to avoid the prospect of turmoil in Texas politics should any aspect of the 2003 plan be overturned. The state's Congressional primaries are March 7.

Not since Bush v. Gore, the decision that resolved the 2000 presidential election, has the Supreme Court ventured so deeply into a legal dispute at the core of partisan politics.

In the 2004 Congressional election, with the new plan in place, the Texas delegation went from an even division of 16 Republicans and 16 Democrats to 21 Republicans and 11 Democrats. The plan was engineered by Representative Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican and former House majority leader.

"Tom DeLay and his corrupt cronies were willing to sacrifice the voting rights of millions of Texans to carry out a corrupt, partisan, mid-decade redistricting scheme," said Charles Soechting, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party in a statement expressing his hope that the court would overturn the plan.

...The outcome of that case, Vieth v. Jubelirer, was determined by the equivocal opinion of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who voted with the Scalia group to reject the Pennsylvania Democrats' case but said that he "would not foreclose all possibility of judicial relief if some limited and precise rationale were found to correct an established violation of the Constitution."

So the most obvious question now is whether any of the Texas plaintiffs have articulated a sufficiently precise and manageable standard to attract Justice Kennedy. The plaintiffs in the Jackson v. Perry appeal describe what happened in Texas in 2003 in just such terms. A redistricting plan should be found unconstitutional, they say, "when it is enacted solely to skew future election results in favor of one political party and against another, at a time when a perfectly lawful map is already in place and there is no other legitimate justification for changing the district lines."