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High court upholds GOP's Texas redistricting

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the basic outlines of a Republican congressional redistricting plan in Texas, ruling there was nothing unconstitutional about a disputed political map engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

In a 7-2 decision written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the high court ruled against the Democrats and minority groups that challenged the district map approved by the Republican state Legislature in 2003. Only two justices, liberals John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer, said the mid-decade redistricting showed the Texas lawmakers were guilty of excessive partisanship.

The court did hand a smaller victory to the Democratic plaintiffs in the case, ruling on a 5-4 vote 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 court upheld the state's ability to break with the tradition of redrawing congressional districts only after the official federal census every 10 years, 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 DeLay, who had been criticized by Democrats for organizing what they claimed was an illegal power grab.

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

Democrats claimed incorrectly, Kennedy wrote, that because the Republican redistricting had been driven 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."

The court did find, however, that the 23rd District, the seat held by Republican Rep. Henry Bonilla, had been improperly redrawn to exclude an increasingly active Hispanic voting population.

Kennedy wrote that the change "took away the Latinos' opportunity because Latinos were about to exercise it. This bears the mark of intentional discrimination that could give rise to an equal protection violation."

Another district in Dallas was upheld. Democrats had said African-American voters were disenfranchised by the new boundaries.

It was not immediately clear whether the district lines could be redrawn in time for the congressional elections in November.

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."

Robert Ritchie, director of the Center for Voting and Democracy, said he hoped the rulings would lead to an effort on Capitol Hill to set standards for the drawing of congressional district lines.

Richard Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School, said he doubts there will be a rush to change. "Some people are predicting a rash of mid-decade redistricting. I am skeptical," he said.

The effort by Republicans to boost their representation in Congress began in 2000, when Texas picked up two congressional seats in the new census. Republicans controlled the state Senate at the time, but Democrats had control of the House, and the Legislature deadlocked over the question of drawing new district lines.

Instead, the job was handed to a federal court, which in 2001 produced a new map that was based in large part on the one adopted by a Democratic-controlled Legislature in 1991.

But Republicans said the court's map ignored their political gains over the past decade. When they won control of the House in 2003 and announced plans for a new round of redistricting, they said they were reclaiming a legislative role that had been handed to the courts only because of the stalemate.

Information from the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Associated Press was used in this report.

OTHER ACTION

In other decisions Wednesday, the Supreme Court:

*Ruled, by a 6-3 vote, against two foreign suspects who contended that their rights under a 1969 treaty were violated when police failed to tell them they could contact their consulate after their arrests.

 * Ruled, in a 6-2 vote, that Pennsylvania prison officials had a legitimate reason for using inmates' access to secular newspapers as an incentive to get prisoners in a high-security unit to behave themselves.

 The Supreme Court finishes its term today, with two cases remaining:

 INSANITY: Whether to strike down Arizona's insanity defense law, in an appeal brought on behalf of a schizophrenic teenager who killed a police officer.

[Last modified June 29, 2006, 07:06:57]