Court: Texas Can Use Existing Voting Maps in 2014

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas September 7, 2013 (AP)
By CHRIS TOMLINSON Associated Press

A federal court said Friday it will not delay Texas' primary elections and ordered the state to use political maps drawn by the Legislature — but only temporarily, while the judges sort out a complex and possibly precedent-setting lawsuit.

The three-judge panel in San Antonio gave both sides in the lawsuit over Texas' voting maps reason to claim victory. The court will not draw its own map for the 2014 elections, as civil rights groups wanted, but it also did not throw out the lawsuit completely, as Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott requested.

The court order, signed by all three judges, also allows the civil rights and minority groups to argue that all changes to Texas election law should be reviewed by federal authorities before they can be implemented. The Justice Department has sought to intervene in the case after a recent Supreme Court decision requiring Congress to make changes to the Voting Rights Act.

The fundamental issue of the lawsuit, filed in 2011, is whether the Legislature illegally drew political maps that intentionally diminish the voting power of minorities in Texas. Abbott's office has argued in court papers that Republicans who control the Legislature drew maps to boost the chances of their party — which is legal — and that if minorities who vote predominantly Democratic are hurt as a result, that does not constitute a civil rights violation.

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Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/court-texas-exiting-election-maps-2014-20184619

[cstanleytech]

1. This case is imo an excellant reason why elected officials should not be setting

up the districts in any state regardless of political party because they end up screwing the voters themselves over.

[Coyotl]

2. Why is gerrymandering legal if it violates equal protection in the Constitution?

[Igel]

3. Because the Constitution aims pretty much at individual-level rights.

You have a right to vote without undue interference.

You don't have a right for your group to be given a majority to ensure (or make much easier) having your group win to enhance group representation.

This is where both parties go vaguely schizophrenic. The (R) want individual rights--but they also in singling out groups for disparate treatment. And this changes over time. The (D) are no more consistent, flipping between the primacy of individual rights where you are an individual and must be treated as a person and not a number and the need for some issues to depend mostly on group affiliation where your status as an individual is meaningless, it's only the pigeonhole you're put into that says anything important about the "real" you.


Setting up electoral lines was a political matter and happened early on--as soon as one political group realized it could use their power to enhance their chances at the next election. This is a couple of hundred years old now, and the courts long ago ruled that since elections are political and gerrymandering is political just to leave the matter pretty much alone.

However political parties come and go, and while there is inter-party discrimination and resentment it's mostly mild and left to the extreme fringes. Moreover, it shifts and changes over time and isn't permanent, so that reinforcing it by making party a matter of privilege or penalty isn't such a big deal.

[blkmusclmachine]

4. Bad.

[Judi Lynn]

5. They're not representing the people by being criminals. This is ugly. n/t