Justices will consider Texas redistricting plan

Experts said the court may be prepared to craft clearer guidelines.
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider the legality of Texas' 2003 congressional redistricting plan, which was engineered by then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and helped cement GOP control of the House.
The court will hear challenges from Democrats and minority groups who say that the mid-decade redistricting unlawfully diluted the strength of minority voters, injected undue partisanship into the congressional map and violated the concept of one person, one vote by drawing district lines with outdated census data.
Justice Department lawyers initially recommended rejecting Texas' plan, saying it would harm black and Hispanic voters, but were overruled by senior Justice officials. A special three-judge panel has upheld the redistricting map in two rulings.
Election law experts said the justices' acceptance of the case suggests that they may be prepared to craft clearer guidelines for politicians to follow when redrawing congressional maps. "It could be that a majority is ready to impose new standards," said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola University Law School in Los Angeles who teaches election law.
Expedited schedule
The court said it will consider the case on an expedited schedule, hearing oral arguments March 1, just one week before congressional candidates are to square off in primary races.
The Texas plan has been at the heart of legal and ethical troubles facing DeLay. Though it allowed the GOP to pick up six congressional seats, DeLay's efforts on behalf of the plan resulted in his being admonished by the House Ethics Committee and indicted on charges of illegally diverting money to the campaigns of state legislators who drew the new map.
Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who saw his compact Austin and Travis County district dismantled in 2003, welcomed the court's decision.
"With all this time talk of spreading democracy abroad, I'm hopeful there might be some spreading of democracy at home now," he said.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said: "Given the importance of the issues at stake, it is not surprising for the court to choose to allow oral argument before deciding the merits of the case. After hearing the case, we expect the court will agree ... that the Texas redistricting plan is wholly constitutional."
A federal court had redrawn a congressional map after the 2000 census, but DeLay said it was too Democratic for a majority Republican state. In 2002, Texans sent 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans to Congress.
DeLay and his political action committees pumped tens of thousands of dollars into state elections in 2002 to win Republican control of the Texas Legislature. That fund raising led to his indictment in September and his resignation from the House leadership.
Redrawn districts
In 2003, at DeLay's urging, the Legislature and Republican Gov. Rick Perry redrew the congressional map in three special sessions. Democratic legislators tried to thwart the effort, at one point fleeing to Oklahoma to deny the Legislature a quorum. The Ethics Committee rebuked DeLay for using the Federal Aviation Administration to track down a private plane that was shuttling Democrats out of the state.
Critics say the new map was drawn in violation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court will hear one lawsuit, by Travis County and the city of Austin, that contends the redistricting violated the concept of one person, one vote by using three-year-old census data, and making no effort to update that data to reflect more than 1 million new people -- predominantly Latinos -- who had entered the state from 2000 to 2003.
Two other suits, brought by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the League of United Latin American Citizens, say that the plan itself violated the Voting Rights Act by consciously diluting the voting strength of minorities.
"When you set out to hammer the Democrats, it's going to be difficult to do that without hammering minorities' rights as well," said Rolando L. Rios, lead attorney for the Latin American citizens league.