Attorneys for several civil rights groups dug into the districts drawn for Texas Congressional and State House of Representatives members in a federal courtroom here today, as they try to convince a three judge panel that the Republicans who dominate the state government intentionally drew the lines to discriminate against minority voters, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
The state doesn't deny that many Texas political districts are serpentine to the extreme, but state lawyers claim that the districts were drawn for Republican partisan advantage, which is legal, and not for racial or ethnic disadvantage, which is not.
But the question confronting the three federal judges who are considering the case will be; at a time when Texas, like many states, is increasingly dividing politically along racial lines, with more Anglo residents leaning Republican and most minorities, including Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians, leaning Democrat, how can you tell the two apart.
"Look at the districts we have right now," said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Laredo), who's district winds more than 150 miles through remote south Texas to connect parts of San Antonio with the City of Laredo. "Every district is very Republican or very Democrat. Does that really help the system?"
Lawyers for the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, one of the groups challenging the redistricting efforts, today grilled the state's map makers on districts which wind through swamps, leap over rivers and bays, and, in many cases, bunch African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians from separate communities and, sometimes, separate counties into the same district to 'pack,' in the words of demographers, them together to free up several other districts to create a majority for the largely Anglo Republican vote.
Cuellar says this is precisely the reason why such extreme political polarization exists in America, because many politicians are more likely to fear a primary challenge from an opponent in their own party who feels that are 'not Democrat enough' or a 'Republican in name only,' than they are to face an opponent from the other party.
"So there are people who are not willing to cross the aisle," he said. "They want to play to their party base." These judicial panels earlier this year ruled that both sets of district lines are illegal, because they were drawn with an 'intentional goal' of diminishing minority votes.
It's a charge that baffles prominent Republican consultant and Travis County Republican Chairman Matt Mackowiak.
"Why would we want to reject Hispanic voters," he said. "We want to get their votes. Hispanics are soon going to be a larger number of Texas voters than Whites are. We see them as future Republicans and we have to go get their votes."
Several observers say the Democrats' goal in this fight, which has been underway non stop since Republicans took control of the Texas Legislature in the 2003 session and immediately redrew the state's political boundaries, is to get the court to order oversight of some sort, by either the three judge panel itself or the U.S. Department of Justice, so the Republicans who are likely to still control the state Legislature after the 2020 Census, will have somebody 'looking over their shoulder' when they redraw the maps again.
And behind all this looms a U.S. Supreme Court case out of Wisconsin, which is set to be heard next term, which will examine whether redrawing district boundaries for political advantage is legal.
Mackowiak says, welcome to American politics.
"The party that is in power always tries to use redistricting to their advantatge, we see that in Texas on the Republican side, we see that in California on the Democratic side. How can it be that 98% of members of Congress get re-elected every year, when Congress as a 15% approval rating?"