The funny thing about the ruling is that if Texas had just been upfront and said “yup, political gerrymander” rather than trying to make it about the DOJ’s threats re: coalition districts they would have been fine. SCOTUS has already said that political-targeted districting is fine, even in states covered by the VRA.
But since Texas apparently cited the extremely messed-up DOJ memo as their reason for doing the redistricting, there is now “significant factual evidence” that the reason for doing the new maps was to dilute racial minorities voting rights. And that’s a pretty clear violation of the VRA (for now, at least).
I guess the question is whether SCOTUS will stay this ruling prior to the 2026 election or keep it in place until they rule on the merits. With the Dec deadline for candidates registering and the lack of any harm to the state that I can think of if the ruling isn’t stayed, I would imagine it will likely stay in place. Much easier to argue that proceeding with the new maps could cause irreparable harm than that using the old ones will, while the litigation is playing out. But with this SCOTUS, who knows.
Yes, but they will not hear the case until after it is far too late to affect the 2026 elections. So while SCOTUS may throw out these maps (unlikely) Texas has plenty of time to fix them for 2028. And they get to use these for 2026 either way.
And this is why the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act was so important (and hence why the Court threw it out at the first chance they get).
Courts are slow, and can delaydelaydelay up until the point that the election has to happen with the facts on the ground. The election doesn’t get rerun, and even the court decides that what was done was illegal, the legislature can create a new set of facts the next time around.
Preclearance kept that from happening, by forcing the legislature to get approval for whatever stunt they were wanting to pull from Justice’s civil rights division (and keeping the courts in the loop if DoJ was asleep at the switch). Now that it’s gone the Republicans know how to run this little setup over and over.
That’s not impossible, given that Texas had to lower some of their margins in some districts to create majority situations in others. They also drew lines based on the assumption that the Latino shift towards Republicans was (or will be) long-lasting rather than temporary - and there were some encouraging signs from last month’s elections that that may not be the case.
I hope this sweeps away any remaining vestiges of doubt that the current Supreme Court entirely lacks honor and legal integrity, and now wholly and unapologetically functions as an instrument of partisan influence and interest.
Yeah, this banger of a dissent from Kagan definitely agrees with you (full quote is from the relevant NYT article):
In a 17-page dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by the court’s two other liberals, argued that the majority had wrongly overturned a careful, 160-page lower court ruling, “based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record.”
“We are a higher court than the district court, but we are not a better one when it comes to making such a fact-based decision,” she wrote.
The lower court ruling was written by a Trump appointee.