Posted on 06/28/2006 4:25:46 PM PDT by neverdem
WASHINGTON, June 28 — The Supreme Court today upheld the basic outlines of a Republican Congressional redistricting plan in Texas, refusing to toss out a sharply contested political map engineered by the former House majority leader, Tom DeLay.
The court handed a smaller victory to the Democratic plaintiffs in the case, ruling that one Congressional district in southwestern Texas had been drawn in a way that violated the rights of Hispanic voters there.
But the court rejected the larger premise — that Texas Republicans had unconstitutionally reorganized the political map to solidify their majority in Congress. The decision means that Texas will be required to adjust some boundaries.
The court upheld the state's ability to break with the tradition of redrawing Congressional districts only right after the official federal census every 10 years, potentially opening the door for legislatures in other states to rewrite their own Congressional maps at will throughout the decade, or when a new party takes over a state capital.
The outcome was something of a vindication for Mr. DeLay, who had been attacked by Democrats for organizing what they called an illegal power grab in his home state at the height of his service as majority leader. Republicans won five new Congressional seats in Texas in 2004 after the lines were redrawn, helping them retain control of the House.
"We reject the statewide challenge to Texas redistricting as an unconstitutional political gerrymander," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.
The Democrats claimed unpersuasively, Justice Kennedy wrote, that because the Republican redistricting had been driven entirely by political motivations and was not tied to new Census results, it violated equal protection laws. The plaintiffs, he wrote, "had not given shape to a reliable standard for identifying unconstitutional political gerrymanders."
Still, the court found that the 23rd...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This has been played off all day as DeLay getting a slapdown. Only districts with a total of around 100,000 inhabitants total, were rejected. That leaves a whole lot of districts with millions of inhabitants collectively, that were just fine.
You expressed an interest in reading the opinions on another thread. It's in comment# 1. The Terrorist Tip Sheet linked this URL:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=05-204&friend=nytimes
Oh, poor Martin Frost, you really lost.
No doubt the Democrats will appeal.
If you understood this fiasco of a decision, more power to you. 100+ pages of interlocking concurring and dissenting opinions, none of which make it any easier for the state legislatures or district courts to review Voting Rights Act claims.
The Roberts Court, it seems, is continuing the Rehnquist Court's inability to pen a decision that will make Americans less likely to foot the bill for lawyers. Instead, it continues the O'Connorish enumeration of factors and tests, which inevitably result in eternal suits and infernal unsettlement, with the legislators damned if they do or don't. Justice Kennedy, as usual, is there to solomonically split the difference, no matter how nonsensical doing so is.
Small wonder nobody respects lawyers, with this kind of gobbledygook emanating from the nominally Supreme Court. 99% of our state court judges could produce better than this bull.
I didn't read it. I was hoping some lawyers on this forum might interpret for us. IIRC, congressional redistricting by the state governments is still limited to one time per each decade's census, not counting any interim judicial settlement.
Scientific literature is bad enough. When lawyers get verbose, fagget about it. BTW, that's a NYC dialect.
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