AUSTIN – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is challenging a U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ruling that declared Texas district maps were drawn with the intent to discriminate against minorities.
The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear Paxton’s appeal Tuesday, April 24, which argues that allowing the maps to be redrawn this close to an election would throw Texas into chaos for the second time this decade.
“...There is no plausible basis from which a court could conclude on this record that the Legislature engaged in racial gerrymandering or intentional vote dilution when it embraced court-imposed districts as its own,” Paxton states in the appeal.
Paxton filed his appeal of the decision in February, stating that Texas has used the same maps for the last three election cycles.
In the brief, Paxton criticizes the district court’s decision that the state acted in a discriminatory manner by using the court-ordered maps, saying its process shows “the incoherence that results from the district court’s approach. Any legal test that leads to the bizarre result that a legislature engaged in intentional discrimination by enacting court-imposed maps designed to remedy discrimination cannot possibly be right.”
In 2017, a three-judge panel in San Antonio found Texas’ state congressional map was discriminatory against minorities. Specifically, the panel found that Congressional Districts 27 and 35 violate the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act in the redrawing of the congressional maps in 2011.
Minority rights groups sued over the maps, claiming that the court-ordered maps of 2012 are still discriminatory in nature. The maps drawn by a Republican majority in 2011 were thrown out and replaced with what were supposed to be temporary maps in 2012, which have been used since then. With a large Republican majority, Texas has been accused of “partisan gerrymandering,” but a press release from Paxton's office states "the Legislature had good reason to believe the court-ordered congressional and House maps were lawful when it adopted them in 2013."
In his brief, Paxton states, “Because the Texas Legislature did not engage in intentional discrimination on the basis of race when it adopted the district court’s remedial maps as its own in 2013, the question whether the 2011 Legislature engaged in intentional discrimination when it enacted the long-ago-repealed 2011 maps is both moot and legally irrelevant.”
Paxton and the other plaintiffs in the appeal say that the district court erred in its findings. In the brief, Paxton argues, “The record is devoid of any evidence of intent to dilute minority voting strength.”
The Supreme Court for now has stopped orders by the lower court to redraw the two congressional districts and nine state House districts for the 2018 elections until they hear the appeal case in April.