Top court to rule on Texas redistricting

Paper: Deseret News, The ( Salt Lake City, UT)

Date: March 2, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Texas Democrats had their day in the Supreme Court on Wednesday to challenge the unusual mid-decade redistricting of the state's congressional delegation that led to the loss of five Democratic seats and helped solidify Republican control of Congress.

While the Democrats may not come away completely empty-handed, it appeared unlikely by the end of the intense two-hour argument that a majority of the court would overturn the 2003 redistricting plan, or any other plan, for that matter, as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

The new districts were drawn under a plan that was engineered by Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, then the House majority leader, after Republicans gained control of both houses of the Texas Legislature. And they are not necessarily invulnerable. Several justices, including, most significantly, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who may be in a position to cast the deciding vote, expressed concern with aspects of how particular districts were dismantled and reconfigured.

As a result, it appeared possible that the court would find a violation of the Voting Rights Act or the Constitution's equal-protection guarantee in the way the new lines were drawn in South Texas. The legislators removed 100,000 Mexican-American residents of Laredo from a district in which the Republican incumbent, Rep. Henry Bonilla, had become more vulnerable with each passing election, while creating a new Latino-majority district in a narrow strip running 300 miles from Austin to the Mexican border.

Kennedy, addressing R. Ted Cruz, the Texas solicitor general, called the new district "a serious Shaw violation," a reference to the court's landmark 1993 case, Shaw v. Reno, that opened such oddly shaped districts to challenge as racial gerrymanders. The removal of the Mexican-Americans from the Laredo district, leaving the Latino population a bare statistical majority there but not numerous enough to control electoral outcomes, was an "affront and an insult," Kennedy said.

Texas is holding its primary election on Tuesday, and the Supreme Court's disapproval of even one of the 32 congressional districts, in a decision that is not likely to come until early summer, would set off a new political scramble. But the prospect that the justices would declare the entire 2003 enterprise to be invalid appeared slight.

After Paul M. Smith, arguing for the Democrats, declared that the "whole map" was unconstitutional as "wholly lacking in any legitimate public purpose," Justice David H. Souter seemed to be having second thoughts about whether a political gerrymander could go too far.

"The difficulty I have," Souter said to Smith, "is that it is impossible, and let's even assume it's undesirable, to take partisanship out of the political process." Smith's position, Souter said, might "imply the illegitimacy of any redistricting."

Author: Linda Greenhouse New York Times News Service

Section: Wire

Page: A02