Lines in the sand

Paper: Fort Worth Star-Telegram (TX)

Date: March 1, 2006

" Texas's current congressional map is the natural result of four decades of Texas political history," the state's brief tells the Supreme Court in defending a congressional redistricting map that resulted from brute-force manipulation masterminded by Rep. Tom DeLay before he was deposed as House majority leader.

Well, perhaps natural in a Darwinian sense of power feeding itself in order to dominate, regardless of the consequences.

The process that begat the map about which the justices will hear two hours of arguments today was anything but a natural evolution.

In an extraordinary move pushed not-so-covertly by DeLay, Republican state leaders overhauled districts in 2003 even though a 2001 map — drawn by federal judges when the Legislature couldn't agree on one — was in place reflecting the 2000 Census.

When no plan passed the Legislature during its 2003 regular session, Gov. Rick Perry called one special session to force the issue, then another and yet a third (costing the state a total of about $5 million) — all while reforming school finance loomed as Texas' real emergency.

In an era when very few U.S. House seats truly are up for grabs, the new map resulted in a shift from a 17-15 Democratic advantage in Texas' congressional delegation to a 21-11 Republican tilt after the 2004 elections.

But the redistricting wasn't done to stir competitiveness as much as to draw more safe Republican districts with little real opposition. In other words, the process was less about democracy than it was about pure partisan politics designed to fortify a single political party, both in Texas and nationally in Congress.

Even if that's as unfair as it is unattractive, does it warrant the Supreme Court's striking it down — in whole or in part — either under the federal Voting Rights Act or the Constitution?

The challenges to the 2003 map argue that it illegally dilutes minority voting strength, both in fracturing a district that included predominantly African-American areas of southeast Fort Worth and in realigning largely Hispanic areas in South Texas and parceling Austin into three districts. These arguments could run into difficulty, though, because as the three-judge panel that upheld the plan concluded, the remap wasn't guided by bad racial motives but by partisan politics.

But those partisan motives feed into the question of how much partisanship is too much.

The court has been reluctant to wade into areas such as redistricting because they traditionally fall under powers delegated to the elected branches. But the justices have left the door open with decisions in 1986 and 2004 suggesting that excessively partisan gerrymandering might warrant federal court intervention — if the court could set a standard for what's excessive.

In Texas' case, a pure power grab to benefit one party — conducted in between census counts, when a valid map already is in place — could well set that standard.

Legislatures are constitutionally required to draw electoral districts that are fair and as nearly equal in population as possible. But this is extremely difficult to do mid-decade using data that by then could be outdated.

Even the federal judges who upheld Texas's plan recognized that "a rule that the game is played only once per decade could matter a great deal in the real world of politics," though the panel envisioned Congress adopting that requirement.

In a friend-of-the-court brief, a trio of law professors told the Supreme Court that "mid-decade redistricting, absent judicial order or extraordinary circumstance, should be unconstitutional" because, by allowing parties and incumbents to engage in self-dealing and protectionism, it undermines the fundamental principle of representative self-government through competitive elections.

It's understandable that, with Texas' voting population turning predominantly Republican, GOP leaders wanted to reconstitute a map that they thought perpetuated old Democratic gerrymanders. But the bullying way in which they accomplished it only invites instability. It encourages whichever party is in control — in Texas or in other states — to redistrict whenever and however, even at the end of a decade, in order to consolidate power.

Voters, whatever their political loyalty, are entitled to have their interests, not just those of a party organization or its incumbents, served. Surely that's what the Constitution guarantees.

Author: Star-Telegram

Section: Opinion

Page: B10