Reply #7: Nation: Supreme Court to hear Texas redistricting case.

[autorank]

If they’ve agreed to this you know it’s really bad, I mean bad beyond words.

Monday, December 12, 2005

Court to hear Texas redistricting cases

http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/2005/12/court_to_hear_t_1.html
Posted by Lyle Denniston at 10:02 AM

The Supreme Court on Monday -- in a surprise order -- agreed to rule on the validity of Texas' 2003 congressional redistricting plan, a measure that resulted in the ouster of five Democratic incumbents, and helped solidify Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Court allotted two hours for oral argument, probably in April. (UPDATE: Hearing likely on March 1, see post above.)

Of the seven pending cases challenging the plan, the Court agreed to hear four. Those four raise all of the key issues at stake, including whether the Court can fashion a standard for judging when partisan gerrymandering is excessive, and whether it is unconstitutional for a state to undertake a new round of congressional redistricting within the same decade when a valid plan is already in place. In addition, the cases raise issues about race and ethnic bias in some of the new district boundary line-drawing. The three cases the Court did not grant raised overlapping issues.

Basically, the questions posed by the four cases break down broadly into four general areas of inquiry: validity of partisan gerrymanders, treatment of minorities under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, constitutionality of drawing bizarre districts in dealing with minority voters, and number limits on creation of minority-controlled districts. The Court did not rewrite the questions, thus leaving some confusion in defining what it will decide. A decisive negative ruling on any of the four general areas, though, presumably could invalidate the entire 2003 Texas plan, because all of its parts are interacting.

When the new cases are heard, the focus will be on Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who provided the decisive fifth vote on April 28, 2004, to keep alive the possibility that a judicial standard could be developed to judge political gerrymanders' constitutionality. He did so in the case of Vieth v. Jubelirer, a Pennsylvania congressional redistricting case. After that, in October 2004, the Court sent the Texas redistricting challenges back to the U.S. District Court that had rejected those claims, with instructions to reconsider the plan in the light of the Vieth decision. The three-judge District Court on June 9 of this year again rejected the challenges, putting new emphasis this time on the claim of a one-person, one-vote violation in the partisan gerrymandering.