The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld all but one of the Texas congressional and statehouse districts that a lower court said were drawn with racially discriminatory intent.
The closely divided court ruled 5-4 along ideological lines in the case. Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Chief Justice John Roberts were in the majority, and the four liberal justices dissented.
The court largely sided with Texas Republicans on the question of a few congressional districts and several state House districts, but found that Texas House District 90, which surrounds Ft. Worth, was a racial gerrymander.
Writing for the majority, Alito said a three-judge district court panel “committed a fundamental legal error” by ruling against the other districts. He said that court erred when it asked the state legislature to prove it had “‘cured’ the unlawful intent” in prior districts drawn by the state legislature in 2011. But that burden, Alito wrote, rested with those challenging the new district.
Alito said there was nothing to suggest the state legislature “proceeded in bad faith — or even acted unreasonably” when it decided to adopt the court-approved redistricting plan, of which most of the congressional and statehouse districts at issue in the case were largely upheld by the Supreme Court.
In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the court’s ruling “comes at serious costs to our democracy” and warned minority voters in the state will “continue to be underrepresented in the political process.”
“Those voters must return to the polls in 2018 and 2020 with the knowledge that their ability to exercise meaningfully their right to vote has been burdened by the manipulation of district lines specifically designed to target their communities and maximize their political will,” Sotomayor wrote.
Monday’s ruling earned praise from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who said the decision was a victory for the Constitution and the state.
“The court rightly recognized that the Constitution protects the right of Texans to draw their own legislative districts, and rejected the misguided efforts by unelected federal judges to wrest control of Texas elections from Texas voters,” Paxton said in a statement.
The dispute out of Texas was one of three redistricting cases before the court this term. The two others, from Maryland and Wisconsin, addressed claims of partisan gerrymandering, which involves the drawing of voting boundaries to help the political party in power.
The legal battle over the congressional and legislative districts dates back to 2011, when the GOP-led Texas legislature adopted a new redistricting plan. A three-judge district court found the maps to be unconstitutional and the court ordered remedial maps to be drawn.
The court-ordered interim maps, redrawn in 2012, kept some of the same lines drawn by state lawmakers in 2011 for several congressional and statehouse districts, but redrew others.
In 2013, Texas state legislature voted to adopt the maps produced by the district court.
But last year, the same judges invalidated two congressional districts and legislative districts in four counties, saying “special portions” of the 2011 maps deemed unconstitutional “continue unchanged.”
Texas argued the legislature adopted the same maps agreed upon by the lower court judges, and said the voting boundaries should stand.
The Trump administration sided with Texas in the case and said the courts should “operate from a strong presumption” that the state acted in good faith when it adopted the interim maps.
But the challengers in the case said the maps could be traced back to 2011 and were “infected by purposely racial discrimination.”
