http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2128758

Well, when you have a partisan, politically motivated court, a ruthless, unchecked Congress of the same party, as well as a corrupt administration of the same party, you no longer have any checks and balances. I'm disappointed, but not surprised, by this pathetic ruling.

Note that there were actually two separate rulings in this case. The more important one was the 7-2 ruling that allows redistricting at any time a state legislature wishes to do so. Democrats, you'd better have at it, or you will never be in charge of the House again. You can bet the GOP *WILL* take advantage of this.




By GINA HOLLAND
Associated Press Writer


WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld most of the Republican-boosting Texas congressional map engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay but threw out part, saying some of the new boundaries failed to protect minority voting rights.

The fractured decision was a small victory for Democratic and minority groups who accused Republicans of an unconstitutional power grab in drawing boundaries that booted four Democratic incumbents from office.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said Hispanics do not have a chance to elect a candidate of their choosing under the plan. The vote was 5-4 on that issue.

Republicans picked up six Texas congressional seats two years ago, and the court's ruling does not seriously threaten those gains. Lawmakers, however, will have to adjust boundary lines to address the court's concerns.

At issue was the shifting of 100,000 Hispanics out of a district represented by a Republican incumbent and into a new, oddly shaped district. Foes of the plan had argued that that was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voting rights.

On a different matter, the court ruled 7-2 that state legislators may draw new maps as often as they like — not just once a decade as Texas Democrats claimed. That means Democratic and Republican state lawmakers can push through new maps anytime there is a power shift at a state capital.

The Constitution says states must adjust their congressional district lines every 10 years to account for population shifts. In Texas the boundaries were redrawn twice after the 2000 census, first by a court, then by state lawmakers in a second round promoted by DeLay after Republicans took control.

That was acceptable, the justices said.

"We reject the statewide challenge to Texas redistricting as an unconstitutional political gerrymander," Kennedy wrote.

However, he said the state's redrawing of District 23 violated the Voting Rights Act.

The 2003 boundaries were approved by the state Legislature and its Republican majority newly elected with DeLay's help. In the next congressional elections, Republicans picked up six additional seats in the House. The contentious map drawing also contributed to the downfall of DeLay.

He was charged in state court with money laundering in connection with fundraising for legislative candidates. Although he is fighting the charges and maintains he is innocent, DeLay gave up his leadership post and then resigned from Congress.

After Texas decided to redraw its congressional district boundaries, two other states — Colorado and Georgia — also undertook a second round of redistricting.

"Some people are predicting a rash of mid-decade redistricting. I am skeptical," said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School. "It would be seen as a power grab in a lot of places."

The justices have struggled in the past to define how much politics is acceptable when states draw new boundaries. Two years ago, they split 5-4 in leaving a narrow opening for challenges claiming party politics overly influenced election maps.

The court was also fractured Wednesday with six separate opinions, covering more than 120 pages, on the Texas boundaries.

The court's four most conservative members opposed the part of the decision that found a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

Justice Antonin Scalia complained that the court should have shut the door on claims of political gerrymandering in map drawing.

Justice John Paul Stevens took the opposite view.

"By taking an action for the sole purpose of advantaging Republicans and disadvantaging Democrats, the state of Texas violated its constitutional obligation to govern impartially," he wrote.

Kennedy's decision did not specify how quickly the lines must be redrawn, but he said that more than one district would be affected.

"The districts in south and west Texas will have to be redrawn to remedy the violation in District 23, and we have no cause to pass on the legitimacy of a district that must be changed," he wrote.

He also said that the Texas plan's "troubling blend of politics and race — and the resulting vote dilution of a group that was beginning to achieve (the law's) goal of overcoming prior electoral discrimination — cannot be sustained."

"We see this as a very major victory for the Latino community, which is the main reason we were in this case," said attorney Rolando Rios, who represented the League of United Latin American Citizens. "Latinos are responsible for the fastest growth in Texas and the state of Texas refused to give us another district."

Court Nixes Part of Texas Political Map

By GINA HOLLAND

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld most of the Republican-boosting Texas congressional map engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay but threw out part, saying some of the new boundaries failed to protect minority voting rights.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/natio...cket_05-204.pdf

League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, Gov. of Texas

Apparently this SCOTUS, like the Bush administration, doesn't believe in the edicts of the Constitution.

It doesn't say once every ten years

It says it must change it when the new census comes out every 10 years, but that doesn't say only once

While the ruling is technically correct (the Constitution says at least every 10 years), it is bad law. But does anyone think Congress and state legislatures will be as gungho to fix this as they were the eminent domain ruling?

What this ruling means is that district lines are now fluid. They can be changed at any time at the whim of a legislature. So, just to use one example: In Texas one of the targeted white Democrats was Chet Edwards, who beat the odds and won re-election. If they so chose, the legislature could redraw his district again next year and make it even more difficult for him. Or say Party A controlled the legislature, and a longtime member of Party A was upset by a newcomer from Party B. Party A could redraw the district to ensure a win by their buddy the next time.

What this ruling does is to invite mischief, instability and political chaos. The court acted to prevent chaos in Bush vs. Gore, but it declined to do so this time. Hmmmmmm, wonder why ....

At any rate, Democrats must act in accordance with this ruling in states in which it applies. To fail to do so would be foolish.

dgg, Martin Frost was my congressman and he got the ax because of redistricting. I liked Martin and miss him being my representative, he did a lot for the Veterans in North Central Texas.

The democrats had about 140 years of gerrymandering and Frost's district ran from Navarro county, through Ellis county, through Dallas county and ended in Tarrant county carefully skirting any area which might be a republican stronghold. For all I know Martin Frost was your congressman too.

The democrats are getting what they did to the republicans for years.

Untying the timing of redistricting to the census dates and numbers indeed asks for more political warfare. How could there be enough population shift from year to year to warrant redistricting, the answer is not improving representation but endorsing the hanky-panky usages of this technique creating greater polarizations

The point is the number of represenatives per thirty thousand of population, not the number of any particular party.


lenal

Actually Martin was my congressman as well and a damned good one. Now my urban district is tagged onto a suburban Denton district with which we have nothing in common. My district's case was argued before the Supreme Court, too, and they chose to ignore it, though it was a gross case of racial disenfranchisement. But it is a Republican court, so what do you expect?

However, I disagree with you on the last point. The GOP certainly would have gotten those districts eventually. But they chose to conduct political warfare to get them ASAP, rather than waiting until the next census and the appointed, civil time.

What the GOP did was a brazen act of political barbarity.

It is now time for tit for tat, and I hope Democratic legislatures in other states act accordingly. The court has ill-advisedly declared this tactic legal, and the Dems had best take advantage of it. If not, they will be further victimized by it.

Pelosi is absolutely correct. The Supreme Court failed to fix this injustice, so Congress should act in the interest of political stability and civility. I wouldn't hold my breath though. But the Dems do have a hand to play. They should move forward with redistricting in states whose legislatures they control (and that aren't like CA, already completely gerrymandered), unless the GOP will play ball.



WASHINGTON, June 28 /U.S. Newswire/ -- House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi released the following statement today in response to the United States Supreme Court’s decision that the 2004 redistricting in Texas violated the Voting Rights Act:

“Today’s ruling by the Supreme Court striking down portions of the gerrymandered Texas congressional map supports what Democrats have long said: Republicans are willing to curtail the rights of minorities for partisan gain.

“Congress must take immediate action to correct this redistricting scheme that illegally denied minority voters their rights. We should pass Democratic legislation to conduct non-partisan redistricting and to bar mid-decade redistricting.

“The Republican Leadership also must end the delay and allow Congress to vote on the bipartisan, bicameral legislation reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act. This legislation is more important than ever given today’s Supreme Court ruling.”

Interesting ... there was also a third part of this decision, 5-4 upholding my district in Fort Worth. Kennedy switched sides on it. He is quickly emerging as the "Sandra Day O'Connor" of the new court -- the centrist who decides the outcome of closely divided cases.


By DAVID ESPO
AP Special Correspondent

WASHINGTON (AP) — Chief Justice John Roberts knows a dirty, rotten job when he sees one.

“It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” he wrote Wednesday in the first major voting rights case of his tenure, a controversy that revolved around the rights of Hispanic and black voters in Texas.

Roberts’ pungent comment punctuated a splintered ruling.

The court held that states are free to redraw congressional district lines at a time of their choosing, largely blessing Tom DeLay’s bitterly contested handiwork in Texas and the gains it gave national Republicans.

With Justice Anthony M. Kennedy playing the role of majority maker, the court ruled the 2003 Texas plan violated the rights of Hispanics in the area around Laredo and ordered a lower court to review that part of the case.

But the justices imposed no timetable, and it was not clear whether Democrats would be able to win any changes in the Republican-drafted plan before the November elections.

Additionally, the justices rejected a claim that Texas Republicans had violated the rights of black voters by breaking up a congressional district in the area around Fort Worth.

And they ruled more broadly that the Constitution does not bar states from redrawing political lines when one party or the other senses an advantage.

“With respect to a mid-decade redistricting to change districts drawn earlier in conformance with a decennial census, the Constitution and Congress state no explicit prohibition,” Kennedy wrote.

The case prompted six of the court’s nine justices to issue opinions. Kennedy’s was the pivotal one, though.

Only two justices, John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer, said the mid-decade redistricting showed that the Texas lawmakers were guilty of excessive partisanship.

“By taking an action for the sole purpose of advantaging Republicans and disadvantaging Democrats, the state of Texas violated its constitutional obligation to govern impartially,” Stevens wrote in dissent.

The rulings on the challenges to the rights of Hispanics and blacks were narrower, 5-4, Kennedy in the majority on each.

Angela Hale, a spokeswoman for the Texas attorney general, said, “The timeline and the procedure for redrawing the only district requiring further action will be addressed by the three-judge federal district court at a hearing in the near future.”

Hector Flores, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said the organization was prepared to go to court next week to press its claim that the Texas redistricting violated the voting rights of Hispanics.

If the ruling’s impact on the 2006 elections was unclear, so, too, were the longer-term consequences.

Under the Constitution, states are required to adjust their congressional district lines to account for population shifts following the national census, held every decade.

The ruling freed states to readjust the lines more frequently — potentially whenever political power shifts — so long as they do not run afoul of the Voting Rights Act or other laws designed to protect the right to vote.

Even so, Richard Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School, said he doubted there would be a rush to change. “Some people are predicting a rash of mid-decade redistricting. I am skeptical,” he said.

With the House narrowly divided, both parties have shown interest in following the lead set by the GOP in Texas.

Republicans pushed through a redistricting in Georgia after the 2004 election. The result was a new set of political boundaries designed to protect Rep. Phil Gingrey from a Democratic challenge while increasing the chances for GOP opponents to Democratic Reps. John Barrow and Jim Marshall.

Democratic strategists in Congress pressed for new district lines in three states after the last election. None of the efforts came to fruition, though. Officials said Wednesday that Democratic governors balked in all three states.

The result is that the congressional boundaries in those states are unchanged, a disappointment for Democrats hoping to increase the number of competitive seats this fall as they try to overthrow the Republican majority.

The court’s ruling came in a case in which Texas Republicans embraced controversy at the prodding of DeLay. When they gained control of the state House of Representatives in 2002, he drafted a plan that the GOP eventually pushed through the Legislature.

The result was a gain of several seats for Republicans in 2004. The GOP now has 21 seats in Texas to 11 for the Democrats. Democrats had a 17-15 majority before the shift.

DeLay paid an enormous price. He was indicted on state charges in connection with alleged money-laundering during the 2002 campaign for legislative seats, stepped down as majority leader in the House of Representatives, and eventually resigned this month from Congress.

The ruling that the rights of Hispanic voters had been violated revolved around a newly created district near Laredo, drawn to protect the political future of Republican Rep. Henry Bonilla.

Kennedy ruled that the impact was to deny Hispanic voters the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choosing in south and west Texas.

The plan’s “troubling blend of politics and race — and the resulting vote dilution of a group that was beginning to achieve (a) goal of overcoming prior electoral discrimination — cannot be sustained,” he wrote.

Kennedy reached the opposite conclusion with respect to black voters in an area around Fort Worth. Rep. Martin Frost, the area’s former Democratic congressman, is white, and Kennedy wrote that since there had been no competitive primary for 20 years, “no obvious benchmark exists for deciding whether African-Americans could elect their candidate of choice.”

“The fact that African-Americans voted for Frost — in the primary and general elections — could signify he is their candidate of choice,” Kennedy wrote.

Another interesting note from this story: *Democratic* governors killed efforts to redistrict in three states. OK, I can see waiting until this Supreme Court ruling. But if Dems can't see that it's time to take the gloves off, they will become a permanent minority.

By Jonathan Weisman
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Tom DeLay’s dogged quest for a new congressional map for Texas led to a disciplinary slap from the House ethics committee, his indictment on money-laundering charges, his fall from House leadership ranks and, this month, his resignation from Congress.

But the former House majority leader proclaimed Wednesday that the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold most of his legislative map affirmed his contention that partisan power is reason enough to muscle through new congressional district lines.

“This is a victory for the Constitution and a victory for the people of Texas,” DeLay said in an interview. “It shows if you follow the Constitution and the state legislatures do their job as dictated by the Constitution, you’ll have the right political representation in the Congress.”

DeLay’s philosophical arguments may have prevailed, but as a practical matter, the high court ruling will have no bearing on his criminal case and his redistricting effort will not survive unscathed. The Supreme Court’s two-pronged decision will mean that the map DeLay secured in 2003 will have to be changed, and lawyers in Texas argue it could be changed significantly.

The justices ruled that the redrawing of Rep. Henry Bonilla’s 23rd Texas district strengthened the Republican’s grasp on his seat by diluting Latino voters’ power and violating the Voting Rights Act. Remedying that infraction will impact at least three districts and possibly many more, said Nina Perales, Southwestern counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which argued the case.

A three-judge panel in Texas will have to decide in the coming weeks how to redraw those lines, and “there’s no way you can do a little fixing of Bonilla’s district without creating big ripple effects,” sad Richard Gladden, a Denton, Texas, lawyer involved in the case. “There’s not a chance” DeLay’s map will stand intact.
But the political arguments that drove DeLay’s efforts were upheld on a 7 to 2 vote, a defeat for Democrats who argued that district lines could not be redrawn for purely partisan purposes.

“All I can say is, the Supreme Court ruled on his plan and held it to be constitutional except for in one district out of 32,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, whose district abuts Bonilla’s. “I guess that speaks for itself.”

In 2002, after a federal court had redrawn a congressional map based on the 2000 census, the Lone Star State sent 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans to Congress. Statewide, Texas had been trending heavily Republican, and DeLay decided the House delegation should reflect that trend. He and his political action committees pumped tens of thousands of dollars into state elections in 2002 to win Republican control of the Texas legislature. That fund-raising led to DeLay’s indictment in September on corporate money laundering charges and his resignation from the House leadership.

In 2003, at DeLay’s urging, the legislature and Gov. Rick Perry, R, redrew the congressional map in three special sessions. Democratic legislators tried to thwart the effort, at one point fleeing to Oklahoma to deny the legislature a quorum. The Ethics Committee rebuked DeLay for using the Federal Aviation Administration to track down a private plane that was shuttling Democrats out of the state.

The following year, the redistricting had its desired effect. Texas Republicans in the House gained six seats, and a seventh when Rep. Ralph Hall switched parties rather than run as a Democrat in a far more Republican district.

But DeLay paid a huge personal price. With his Texas criminal case dragging on, he renounced his claim to his leadership post early this year. Then, with his legal jeopardy rising on the unrelated Jack Abramoff corruption probe, he resigned from the House that he had dominated for more than a decade.

Still, he said he was heartened by Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling.

“It’s always worth it to stand up for the Constitution,” DeLay said.

He's still being listened to? I thought he was gone and supposed to be in jail for violating Texas law.

Hey, Delay... be careful what you wish for... it could come back to bite you in the...

The criminal case hasn't gone to court yet.

Latest flap involving DeLay involves the race for his old district. The GOP wants to replace him on the ballot, but to do so, they have to say he moved out of state. He now claims to live in VA, despite maintaining a Houston residence. Dems are challenging that claim. I expect the GOP to prevail, as residence challenges rarely succeed.

There is a remedy to this - Congress needs to be prodded to adopt the Fairness and Independence in Redistricting Act (HR 2642).

http://www.house.gov/tanner/biography.htm

Gee, I came to read the opening post in full expectation that Delay was referring to yesterday's defeat of the flag burning amendment.





(not)

Reform DeLayed

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O.K., so can we just admit that when it comes to redistricting – the process by which politicians define the legislative branch of the federal government – there are few if any limits on partisan power grabs?

That certainly seems to be the signal from the U.S. Supreme Court, which has ruled that disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and his henchmen in the Texas legislature were fully within their rights to radically alter the maps of the state's U.S. House districts in order to solidify Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The redistricting of congressional districts – a process traditionally carried out once every ten years by state legislators, who are supposed to use fresh Census data to assure that all of state's districts have similar populations – is the single most powerful tool by which the make up of the U.S. House of Representatives is determined. By gerrymandering districts to give advantages to incumbents from one party or another, legislators have over the years made most House elections irrelevant. Even a well-funded challenger with the issues on his or her side cannot upset an incumbent who has been given a district with favorable lines. As a result, in any given election year, only a few dozen of the nation's 435 House districts see competitive contests.

As bad as the circumstance was, in 2003, DeLay made things dramatically worse. After using his national contacts to raise the money to put Republicans in charge of the state legislature in 2002, he had his allies in Austin radically redraw the state's congressional map with the express purpose of defeating Democratic incumbents and electing more Republicans.

It worked. Republicans picked up six Texas congressional seats in 2004.

Democrats challenged the redistricting, but the court's ruling has placed a stamp of approval on DeLay's map – with one minor objection – and assured that the gains Republican gains engineered by DeLay will be retained.

But the importance of the 7-2 Supreme Court decision issued Wednesday goes far beyond Texas.

Three dangerous precedents have been set:

• The court has stated that the map DeLay's produced did not represent an "unconstitutional political gerrymander" of the state's district lines. Since it would be difficult to imagine a more politically-motivated map, the court has effectively said that partisans can draw maps that suit their political purposes without fear of intervention or objection by the courts. While some analysts interpret a line from a previous court ruling as suggesting that critics of a redistricting map could come up with a "reliable standard" for challenging a map, if such a standard could not be applied to the DeLay map it is hard to say where it would ever be viable.

• The court has upheld the right of states to change their congressional district boundaries more frequently than once every ten years -- following the completion of a U.S. Census. – which is the traditional standard. What this means is that, when control of a state legislature shifts, so too could the state's congressional district lines.

• The court has held that there is "nothing inherently suspect about a legislature's decision to replace mid-decade a court-ordered plan with one of its own." Thus, court-ordered plans – which are usually the fairest to voters, in that they tend to set up more competitive districts – can be replaced by legislators who don't like them. This is a hugely significant development, in that it effectively removes the fall-back position that good government groups have used when challenging legislative gerrymandering. Foes of a particular map might get it thrown out by the courts, and they might even get a panel of judges to draw a new map, but there is no longer any certainty that the new map will stand.

The court did rule that the lines of one Texas district will need to be redrawn because DeLay and his minions moved 100,000 Hispanic voters out of the southwest Texas 23rd District in order to protect a Republican incumbent, Henry Bonilla, politically. The court determined that move to undercut the influence of Hispanic voters was a violation of the Voting Rights Act. But, notably, the four most conservative justices on the court opposed even that determination.

Anyone who was looking to the Supreme Court to clean up the redistricting process and to provide for competitive elections is making a mistake. As Rob Richie, executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy says, "If we're really concerned about fair elections, we have stop counting on the courts and start looking for political solutions."

In the short-term, Richie says, Congress should set national standards for redistricting. "Congress could establish standards for transparency -- sunshine-on-the-process standards that could be defined so that redistricting can't be done behind closed doors. A second step could be to set guidelines for when you can and cannot do redistricting. That would address some of the concerns about the court's ruling."

In the long-term, Richie says that reformers should begin pushing from a proportional representation system that might see three members of Congress elected from larger, more competitive districts using an instant-runoff voting model.

"If you are concerned about what the court ruling has done, there are immediate steps that can be taken," says Richie. "But what we need to do is dig in to really reform how elections for Congress are conducted."

#########

The above article is from online site of the Nation.



lenal

Clearly, the court ruling dramatically increases the need for Congress to address redistricting, especially the mid-decade aspect. But I would be stunned if the GOP did so, as they stand to benefit more from the current system. The Dems will have to make them pay first.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/fe...ml?id=110008582


DeLay's Revenge
The Supreme Court leaves gerrymanders to the politicians.

Thursday, June 29, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
It hasn't been the best of times for Tom DeLay, who resigned from Congress this year under ethical and political pressure. But the former House Majority Leader must take some consolation from yesterday's Supreme Court decision that largely validated the 2003 Texas redistricting he helped engineer and that so infuriated Democrats that they made him a special political target.

At the heart of Lulac v. Perry is the question of whether courts or politicians should have final say in shaping Congressional districts. A collection of liberal interest groups objected to the partisan 2003 GOP gerrymander partly on grounds that the Texas state legislature, which got a Republican majority in 2002, overturned in "mid-decade" a redistricting plan devised by a federal court following the 2000 census. They also claimed the districts created by the 2003 gerrymander was unfair to minority citizens, and thereby violated the Voting Rights Act.

The Supremes reached their verdict by a half-dozen routes, but their judgment on practical matters is reasonably clear. The Court's four conservatives rejected the notion that mid-decade redistricting is unconstitutional. Justice Anthony Kennedy concurred, but he allowed that one Texas district, belonging to Republican Henry Bonilla, would have to be redrawn to satisfy concerns that it was unfair to Hispanic voters. Seeing as Mr. Bonilla is himself Hispanic, albeit of the Republican kind, the only unfairness we can detect here is to Democrats.

Alas, the Constitutional questions weren't so clearly settled. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas argued with good cause that no Court is ever going to devise a reliable standard by which to judge whether gerrymanders are unconstitutional. Court newcomers John Roberts and Samuel Alito mostly agreed, noting that the "appellants provide no reliable standard for identifying unconstitutional political gerrymanders." But they took no view on whether a proper standard could be devised.





As for Justice Kennedy, he argued that the 2003 gerrymander "took away the Latinos' opportunity" to vote for a Hispanic candidate other than Mr. Bonilla. "This bears the mark of intentional discrimination that could give rise to an equal protection violation." How the swinging Justice achieves such political clairvoyance is anyone's guess; as Chief Justice Roberts tartly observed, "the end result [of the 2003 gerrymander] is that while Latinos make up 58% of the citizen voting age population in the area" of Southwest Texas, "they control 85% (six out of seven) of the districts under that State's plan." And black representation in Texas's Congressional delegation has actually risen since 2003. That's "intentional discrimination"?
In partisan terms, all of this is a short-term victory for Republicans, who will probably keep the six House seats the gerrymander allowed them to gain in 2004. But the larger victory here is for federalism and the elected branches, which will retain their authority to draw district lines. And with this green light from the High Court, rest assured that both Democrats and Republicans will exploit the power to gerrymander in mid-decade in the future.

As for those of us who want fewer partisan gerrymanders, and thus more competitive elections, the battle now moves to the states themselves. Letting a nonpartisan commission draw the lines has worked well in Iowa, and reformers ought to throw their energy into that idea, rather than to the windmill-tilt of trying to purge money from politics.

Dean On The Decision

http://democrats.org/a/2006/06/dean_on_supreme.php