Primer on the 2011-2012 Redistricting Fight in Texas: Part 1 of a Series

Yesterday, a three-judge federal court in San Antonio rejected a redistricting deal Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott had negotiated with some of the plaintiffs suing to void the maps enacted by the Texas Legislature.  The court told the parties to keep negotiating, but it seems increasingly likely that the already rescheduled March party primaries will have to be pushed later into the spring until interim maps for Congress and the Texas Legislature get approved.  So, after nine months of fighting over what districts will be used for the 2012 elections, things remain up in air.  What’s going on here?  As a veteran of five redistricting cycles in Texas, this one is without doubt the most complicated and difficult to explain to citizens.  Let me try to provide some context for understanding what is happening and what some of the implications are for both the state and nation. 

(Disclosure:  I have been an expert witness in all the major redistricting fights in Texas since 1971, and have provided testimony for the NAACP interveners and the state’s African-American Congress members in the current litigation.  That said, let me take off my expert witness hat and try to describe the process that has gotten us to where we are today, leaving it to the courts to decide the merits of the contending parties arguments in the lawsuits) 

By way of background, it is helpful to recall the critical role Texans played in passing the national Voting Rights Act (VRA), which is the basis of the ongoing litigation.  In the spring of 1965, after black and white advocates of minority voting rights were brutally assaulted in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon Johnson of Texas addressed the nation and called for the most sweeping legislation to protect African-Americans’ access to the ballot box since Reconstruction.  A congressional coalition of Republicans and non-southern Democrats passed the VRA later that year.  The original act was authorized for five years, and applied the most stringent standards of the law only to Deep South states with a long history of discrimination against blacks.  Texas was not covered by these Special Provisions, including Section Five, which required state and local jurisdictions to get “preclearance” from either the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), or a federal court in Washington, D.C. before they could put into place any changes in electoral rules or procedures.  However, when the VRA was extended for the second time in 1975, Houston Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, and U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen successfully amended the law to bring Texas under Section Five.[1]  

Since 1975, every extension of the VRA has kept the Section Five requirement for Texas, including the version passed in 2006 and signed by President George W. Bush.   However, the requirement that Texas get preclearance for its redistricting maps after the 1980, 1990, and 2000 censuses was only moderately important.  The changes prompted by the VRA provided some limited benefits to the state’s growing minority populations and, interestingly, also helped white Republicans struggling to break out of their minority status in Texas. 

The situation in the 2011-2012 cycle is very different.  First, there has been much faster Hispanic and African-American population growth in the last decade, and a great slowing of non-Hispanic white (Anglo) growth.  In 2000, 54 percent of the state’s population was Anglo.  By 2010, the percentage was 45 percent.   Second, the party divide within Texas has become much more defined along racial and ethnic lines.  Whites have become more Republican in voting, while blacks are overwhelming supportive of Democratic and Hispanic Texans lean that way.  Third, Texas Republicans have dominated statewide elections since 1994 and swept out almost all the remaining Anglo Democrats in Congress and the Texas Legislature in the 2010 “wave” election.  That left the GOP with a huge number of Anglo-based seats to defend going into the 2011-2012 cycle.  And finally, for the first time since the VRA passed, the U.S. Justice Department is headed by a Democratic appointee in the year when the decennial census data are released.  Texas, now dominated by elected Republicans, faced the prospect of seeking preclearance in Washington D.C. from President Barack Obama’s DOJ, headed by Eric Holder.    

These factors have made for a very spicy redistricting stew this time around, as we will see in subsequent posts.    

Dr. Richard Murray

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[1] Barbara Jordan’s motives were obvious.  As a black legislative candidate in Harris County in 1962 and 1964, she had won her Fifth Ward community by a huge margin, but was defeated because state law required her to win county-wide where the white majority overwhelming rejected her candidacy.  Senator Bentsen joined the Congresswoman in supporting the Texas amendment because he was preparing to run for president in 1976 and needed to bolster his credentials with liberals and progressives in the Demcoratic Party.