An Odd Map, A Big Flap:Texas redistricting comes before the Supreme Court

[Judi Lynn]

An Odd Map, A Big Flap
Texas redistricting comes before the Supreme Court
By Liz Halloran

3/6/06

Texas has always prided itself on doing things big. And it more than lived up to that reputation in 2003, when its lawmakers adopted an audacious gerrymandering plan, conceived by Texas Republicans and former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, that helped the GOP pick up six congressional seats in the Lone Star State.

The plan was so bold that it vanquished targeted Democrats whose districts had been broken up; it bolstered GOP control of Congress; and it gave Texas the largest Republican delegation in Washington. But was it constitutional? The U.S. Supreme Court will consider that question this week when it hears challenges to the unusual timing of the plan and arguments that the odd recarving of districts--including one that became a 300-mile-long corridor from Austin to the Rio Grande--violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

"This is the single most important redistricting case that the court will hear this decade," says former 13-term Texas Rep. Martin Frost, the most prominent Democratic casualty of DeLay's master plan, "and it will have far-reaching effects."
(snip/...)

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060306/6redistrict.htm

[Mythsaje]

1. The Rubber Stamp Court?

Any bets on which way they'll rule? Hell, I thought they sucked BEFORE Roberts and Alito got on. Now they're gonna bite.

[Bozita]

2. A good look at the arguments (from the Austin Chronicle) ...

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2006-02-24/pols_point.html

HOME: FEBRUARY 24, 2006: NEWS: SEE YOU IN COURT


See You in Court

This week the Supremes consider the curious habits of Texas politicians
BY MICHAEL KING

No doubt you're sitting around idly, looking for something to do between this week's closing of the Olympics and the Paramount World Premiere of SXSW.

May I suggest a visit to the Web site of the D.C. law firm Jenner & Block (riveting company slogan, "When it's a Matter of Importance"), where you can find an accumulating mountain of links concerning the Texas congressional redistricting lawsuit, scheduled for argument this Wednesday, March 1, 1-3pm, before the U.S. Supreme Court. Jenner & Block partners Paul Smith and Sam Hirsch are among the lead attorneys for the plaintiffs, hoping finally to bust the state's and Tom DeLay's mad-dog re-redistricting map for Texas, and Smith (representing the "Jackson appellants," a long list of minority Texas voters, et al., among them Travis Co. Judge Sam Biscoe and Commissioner Margaret Gomez) is one of the two attorneys who will personally argue the case before the nine justices, including the two newbies, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito. (Smith gets 40 minutes, followed by Nina Perales of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, who gets all of 20, before the state, in the primary person of Solicitor General Ted Cruz, responds for its own hour.)

Two hours doesn't sound like much for the culmination of more than four years of legislative combat, a half-dozen regular and special sessions, two full-fledged flights to the border, and enough fevered political rhetoric to solve the natural gas crisis for the next decade. In fact, a Supreme Court oral argument is just the very small tip of a considerable legal iceberg, more apparent in the several dozen briefs accumulating on the Jenner & Block Web site ( www.jenner.com see "Resource Center" at lower left). (I'm told you can also find the documents at the Supreme Court site, but that one seems to be designed, like the Court itself, to prevent anyone but the legal cognoscenti from penetrating its veiled secrets.)

You could easily kill a weekend burrowing through these paper monuments. While it can be a slog at times, you can comfort yourself with the realization that what happens this Wednesday, and whenever the Court makes its decision, should determine a great deal about national politics for at least the next decade, and will inevitably weave Texas political and legal history, for good or ill, into the permanent fabric of voting rights law.

more...

[annabanana]

4. It should at least lay bare

the degree of corruption that has been put into place.

[fasttense]

3. The dancing supremes will dance for their masters. n/t