Legal rulings could force Texas back into federal oversight

[OKIsItJustMe]

Source: AP

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A run of legal defeats over its voting laws means Texas could risk becoming the first state forced back into federal oversight since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Act four years ago.

The justices' 2013 ruling struck down a provision in the 1965 law that required Texas and other states with troubled histories of racial discrimination to "pre-clear" any voting law changes with the federal government before enacting them. However, it left standing a scarcely used provision in the act that minority groups are now embracing as an emergency brake.

Under the provision, the preclearance mandate can be restored if a state is found to intentionally discriminate against minorities. On Thursday, a federal court reached that conclusion about Texas for the third time in roughly a month — decisions dealing with its voter ID law and Republican-drawn electoral maps.

The possibility of Texas returning to federal oversight is likely still down the road, since more pressing for Democrats now is getting a federal court to order new Texas voting maps for 2018 after racial gerrymandering and voter dilution were found in the ones originally drafted by Republicans in 2011. The latest 2-1 decision by a federal panel in San Antonio this week found race was used in statehouse redistricting to intentionally "undermine Latino voting opportunity."

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Read more: https://www.apnews.com/df9eea2653954d4ba67fad418a4ff755/Legal-rulings-could-force-Texas-back-into-federal-oversight

[Gothmog]

1. The state of Texas is arguing that Section 3(c) if void in the appeal of the Pasadena case

The City of Pasadena was bailed in by a very conservative republican federal judge and the State of Texas is arguing that the bail in provisions are void in that appeal http://electionlawblog.org/?p=92107 and http://lyldenlawnews.com/2017/04/13/new-threat-rising-voting-rights-act/

Earlier this year, however, a federal trial judge in Houston, District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal, became the first since the demise of Section 5 pre-clearance to impose Section 3 pre-clearance as a remedy for a discriminatory voting practice. That case involves a shift of the way voters in Pasadena, Texas, elect the members of the city council. Judge Rosenthal, after finding that the change discriminated intentionally against the city’s Hispanic voters, adopted a six-year period of pre-clearance for any future change in voting laws in that locality.

That case has now moved on up to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. And that is where one major threat to Section 3 remedies has arisen. It came in a legal brief filed by the state of Texas last month, supporting an appeal by the city of Pasadena as far as the city is challenging the remedy of Section 3 pre-clearance. That remedy, the state brief asserted, “must be sparingly and cautiously applied.”

The state’s filing argued that “misuse” of that mode of pre-clearance “threatens to re-impose the same unwarranted federal intrusion that Shelby County found could not be justified under the Constitution.” The brief contended that Judge Rosenthal had engaged in such a “misuse” of this provision by imposing it for only a single incident of discrimination – the one-time change in the method of electing the Pasadena city council.

The only circumstance in which a Section 3 pre-clearance remedy is valid, under either the specific language of Section 3, the reasoning of the Supreme Court in 2013, or the Constitution, the Texas brief contended, is when a judge can conclude that the discrimination was “pervasive, flagrant, widespread, and rampant.”

[Thinkingabout]

2. It would be good to see the gerrymandering turned around. Tom Delay

Went out of his way to really screw up the lines, he has a line drawn from Houston to Austin in an attempt to get enough Republican votes. Harris county has gone Democratic in recent years but with enough of other voters the setup to keep Republicans elected.