Supreme Court rules in Texas gerrymandering dispute

A divided Supreme Court said on Monday that a lower federal court erred when it tried to prevent election maps from going into effect in Texas that it felt were racially biased.

In Abbott v. Perez, Justice Samuel Alito said for a 5-4 majority that the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas “erred in requiring the State to show that the 2013 Legislature purged the ‘taint’ that the court attributed to the defunct and never-used plans enacted by a prior legislature in 2011.”

The dispute goes back to 2011, when Texas had to reconfigure its election districts after it added 4 million residents in the 2010 census. After a series of legal cases, that three-judge federal district panel found that parts of the approved maps diluted Hispanic voting and represented racial gerrymandering.

Texas appealed that decision, saying the maps that were found to be discriminatory had actually been crafted by the federal court, subsequently adopted by the legislature, and then struck them down by the same court as discriminatory.

“We now hold that the three-judge court committed a fundamental legal error. It was the challengers’ burden to show that the 2013 Legislature acted with discriminatory intent when it enacted plans that the court itself had produced. The 2013 Legislature was not obligated to show that it had “cured” the unlawful intent that the court attributed to the 2011 Legislature. Thus, the essential pillar of the three-judge court’s reasoning was critically flawed,” Alito said.

Alito said on further review that the Supreme Court found that one election district in that map was racially gerrymandered. Alito was joined by the Court’s other four usually conservative Justices in the majority decision.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the Court’s majority “guaranteed [Texas’] continued use of much of its discriminatory maps.”

“After years of litigation and undeniable proof of intentional discrimination, minority voters in Texas—despite constituting a majority of the population within the State—will continue to be underrepresented in the political process,” Sotomayor said. She was joined in the dissent by the Court’s usually liberal Justices.