Racial Gerrymanders Rebuked The Supreme Court calls foul on a voting-rights gambit in Texas.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/racial-gerrymanders-rebuked-1529968160
Liberals have weaponized the Voting Rights Act and sometimes found support from a conflicted Supreme Court. But a 5-4 majority on Monday pushed back hard against the left’s gambit in Texas to use the law to racially gerrymander legislative districts.
At issue in Abbott v. Perez were the state legislature’s 2013 Congressional and state House maps. After liberal groups sued to block the legislature’s 2011 redistricting plans, the Supreme Court ordered a lower court to redraw the maps for the 2012 election. The legislature then adopted the lower court’s maps with a few nips and tucks.
But lo, liberal plaintiffs contended the new maps were still “tainted” by bias, and a three-judge panel last summer gave the state what amounted to an ultimatum: Redo the maps or we will. Texas sought relief from the High Court, which showed sympathy to most of the state’s claims.
Writing for the majority, Samuel Alito explains that the Court has held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act commands states to provide minorities equal opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice. But the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment also “forbids ‘racial gerrymandering,’” and prohibits “intentional ‘vote dilution.’” In other words, legislatures must consider race, but not too much.
Texas hoped to satisfy this difficult balance by approving the lower court’s maps, which had substantially altered eight of Texas’s 36 Congressional districts and 21 state House districts. At that point, Justice Alito notes, the plaintiffs bore the burden of proof to demonstrate the legislature acted with discriminatory intent, which they could not.
Plaintiffs instead relied on a paint-by-numbers analysis to show that the maps packed in too many Latinos in some districts while diluting their votes in others. But redrawing the districts to comply with the plaintiffs’ demands could violate the Equal Protection Clause and Texas Constitution’s redistricting rules.
Case in point was House District 90. The legislature at first tried to increase its Latino population by moving the predominantly black city Como out of the district. But after Como residents objected, the legislature reversed course, only to move more Latinos into the district after Latinos howled. While rejecting the plaintiffs’ other arguments, the majority invalidated this district because the legislature had used race as the predominant factor in its design.
“A group that wants a State to create a district with a particular design may come to have an overly expansive understanding of what [Section 2] demands,” Justice Alito notes. But as the Court held last year in Cooper v. Harris, a “State may not use race as the predominant factor in drawing district lines unless it has a compelling reason.”
Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch would have gone further by holding that Section 2 does not apply to redistricting. The four liberals who rejected North Carolina’s maps in Cooper dissented. Their opinion in effect is that racial gerrymandering is constitutional as long as liberals are doing it.
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