Legal experts say that other recent court decisions, including the case involving maps that Texas passed a decade ago, have paved the way for more racist gerrymandering and restrictive election laws.
involving maps that Texas passed a decade ago, have paved the way for more racist gerrymandering and restrictive election laws.
“This is a bad horror movie that you’ve seen before, but now there’s a plot twist,” said Michael Li, an elections law expert at the Brennan Center for Justice who focuses on redistricting. “Texas has tested the bounds of protections for minority voters since the dawn of the Voting Rights Act, but in recent years the courts have eliminated or weakened a lot of those protections.”
Li said the fight over redistricting in Texas underscores the need for Congress to pass new federal voting rights legislation, which has stalled in the U.S. Senate. “It’s great to have the DOJ in the fight because everything is such a hard fight, but it’s also much harder than it was the last decade,” Li said. “No one should discount how much harder it is this decade than last decade.”
The window for action by the courts is quickly shrinking. The DOJ lawsuit was filed just a week ahead of the December 13 filing deadline for candidates running in 2022 primary elections, which are currently scheduled for March 1. Even if plaintiffs obtain a favorable ruling, the state would likely appeal to the ultra-conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and to a U.S. Supreme Court that’s veered even further right in the years since it nixed preclearance in Texas.
to Washington D.C., where they urged Congress and the Biden administration to pass federal voting rights legislation.
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