WASHINGTON, D.C. (MCT) — The fates of dozens of Texas politicians and a landmark federal voting law could be at stake Monday when the Supreme Court hears arguments over how the state should redraw its districts for Congress and the state legislature.
It’s the fourth Texas redistricting case to reach the high court in three decades. But it could be the most important yet, because it shines the spotlight on the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was created to protect minority voters but has come under fire recently.
Democrats and minority groups attacked the Texas legislature’s maps because they decrease the number of districts in which black or Hispanic voters can control the outcome of elections, despite the fact that those groups accounted for 89 percent of Texas’ population increase in the last decade. Blacks and Hispanics vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
The basic question the justices have agreed to answer is what map Texas will use for the 2012 elections. The deeper question the justices could choose to answer in this case or another one soon is whether the Voting Rights Act has seen its day.
During the last couple of years, several Republican-controlled state houses have taken it on through a barrage of litigation.
Most of the cases target a part of the law, Section 5, that requires states and local jurisdictions with histories of racial disenfranchisement to get approval from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington, D.C., when changing electoral procedure. Officials in some of those states and localities say it’s become an unnecessary burden on states in an era where racial discrimination at the ballot box is no longer common.
Although the Supreme Court has considered several redistricting cases, “you didn’t see a major challenge to the existence of Section 5 itself,” said Tim Storey, a redistricting analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures. The justices “could potentially do something very broad, because they asked the plaintiffs to brief on somewhat broad questions.”
