Hearing set in federal redistricting case (TX)

[Frodo]

AUSTIN— Federal lawsuits filed over Texas' new congressional redistricting map have been consolidated into one case.

A hearing will be held Nov. 3 in U.S. District Judge T. John Ward's courtroom in Marshall.

A three-judge panel has been assigned to the case. The judges are Ward, federal Circuit Court Judge Patrick Higginbotham and U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal, said Nina Perales, an attorney in one of the lawsuits.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared/texas/legislature/1003/1024redistrict.html

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Judge Ward is a Clinton appointee confirmed in 1999. Higginbotham is a Reagan appointee and Rosenthal is a Bush appointee (and former James Baker coworker).

Anyone taking bets on this one? looks like the deck is already stacked against us.

[Hawkeye-X]

1. My guess 2-1

throwing out the redistricting map and ordering the previous one reinstated.

Reagan appointees are usually stealth liberals, but you never know...

Hawkeye-X

[Padraig18]

2. I agree that it will be reinstated.

Judges get very prickly about people picking apart their decisions; if the Lege had done their job, the Court wouldn't have had to. I see a jackslap for Mr. DeLay and Gov. Goodhair.

[Frodo]

4. Their ruling said it was the legislature's business.

The only question left is whether they can re-draw the lines mid-stream.

[Padraig18]

5. But didn't it also say...

... that since the Lege had not acted, they (the courts) had to? isn't there also an 'equal protection' argument here, vis a vis redistricting at will, rather than after the decennial census, as is customary?

[Frodo]

6. Not "equal protection" perhaps...

...but certainly an argument.

Yes, they said they were forced to act by the lack of a legislative map. There must be SOME lines. They also said that they were drawing the lines as neutral as possible : 1) keeping the minority-majority districts 2) adding the two new seats in the area that had the largest population growth and 3) leaving the rest of them alone as much as possible.

But they also said that the legislature is perfectly allowed to draw lines for partisan political benefit AND that they could make new majority-minority districts if they wanted to (but that the court cuold not).

The problem with your argument is that the court acted at the last minute to preserve that year's elections. There is nothing to indicate that they were usurping the legislatures responsibility to draw the lines for this decade, only that it was too late for them to do it for 2002. The trump card is the the state constitution requires the legislature to do it and no federal court ruling can overcome the US Constitutional requirement that states draw their own lines how they see fit. The emergency relief the court offered in 2002 does not cancel that. If the legislature had drawn some lines and then changed hands and tried to draw them again? The argument would make perfect sense. But a court drawing a map that MUST be drawn for one election does not carry the weight to control for the next ten years. Heck, they would have been forbidden to act if the election were just a month or two later, let alone two years later.

No. Our mistake was in not cutting a deal two years ago. We thought we had a shot at the House and losing 4-5 TX seats (instead of 2 new ones) would have made that nerely impossible. Now we're stuck with 7-9 net new "R" seats (counting the two new ones).

[Frodo]

3. Interesting comment on Reagan appointees.

But I disagree. Particularly those appointees confirmed with the two year Republican Senate of his first term. I think both of these "R" judges have been roasted here a time or two.