A similar guest post by Russ Tidwell on the Congressional redistricting trial may be found here.
Editor’s note: while the Texas redistricting wars have, sadly, been largely out of public view lately, they currently rage on. The trial before a 3 judge federal court in San Antonio on the state House of Representatives map recently concluded, and a similar trial before the same court on the Congressional map is about to begin. The issues are not without importance – there’s a very good reason Republicans put so much effort into over-reaching on redistricting maps: the more they minimize minority representation, the more they institutionalize Republican majorities. The heavier the Republican dominance, the more Tea Party activists hijack the legislative process and its resulting policy. That said, the details of what Republican map-drawers have done, and why it should offend those who support minority voting rights and the Voting Rights Act, are difficult for a standard-issue Texan interested in politics to understand, if only because media doesn’t often delve into the level of detail necessary. So I asked longtime friend and redistricting expert Russ Tidwell, who has worked on the issue for 32 years and who was in the courtroom for the House map trial recently, to break it down and explain core problems in the Republican House map, why it should matter, and what difference it makes to the rest of us:
Voting Rights Gutted in Texas State House
By Russ Tidwell
The protections in the Voting Rights Act and the 14th and 15th amendments to the US Constitution are defined by the opportunity of minority voters to elect the candidate of their choice, even in cases where that candidate does not look like them.
Hundreds of thousands of minority citizens in urban and suburban Texas have been denied a voice in the Texas Legislature because their voting strength, in naturally occurring concentrations, has been diluted by systematically fragmenting or packing their votes.
This intentional fragmentation can be easily seen and understood when it happens in places like Bell County, where a naturally occurring minority population in the city of Killeen is surrounded by a sea of rural Anglos. The legislature split the city of Killeen for the first time ever, removing 32,000 (2/3 of them people of color) from district 54 and moving them to district 55. Then they took more than 40,000 people (2/3 of them Anglo) from a rural area of district 55 and added them back to district 54. The intent is clear. Continued Anglo domination of the district is secured.
However, it is harder for the eye to grasp this systematic process in the urban and suburban jumble of numerous districts. But this is where minority voting rights took the big hit in the 2011 redistricting.
What happened can best be explained by taking a look at Dallas County as a whole:
- The 2003 redistricting had left six widely recognized minority opportunity districts in the south and central part of the county. The same number as the decade before. (Four were African-American and two were Hispanic controlled).
- North Dallas had ten districts under Anglo control in 2003, with minority populations fairly evenly diffused among them in the beginning. Over a decade of rapid demographic change, however, naturally occurring concentrations of minority voters elected their candidates of choice in four of these districts (HDs 101, 102, 106 and 107) and came within 19 votes of electing their candidate in another, HD 105.
- Just as minority citizens had come together to elect their candidate of choice, Wendy Davis, in a senate district in neighboring Tarrant County; minority voters were able to have an effective voice in almost half the districts in North Dallas by 2008. (Similar gains were made in other urban counties by 2008.)
- North Dallas voters had made a difference for minority interests in the Texas Legislature. During the 2009 legislative session (after the historic 2008 election) the House was closely divided, 74-76. A radical Republican Speaker was deposed and replaced by a more moderate one. Legislators representing minority voters made the difference in this equation. They had meaningful participation and significant influence on the issues of the day.
- This did not last. The 2010 national tsunami election swept nineteen minority candidates-of-choice from the Texas House and left Anglos firmly in control of the 2011 redistricting process.
The intentional fragmentation that followed resulted in the loss, for minority voters, of a controlling voice in four districts in North Dallas. This cannot be fairly remedied by cramming many of those voters in one or two elongated districts, as some will propose. That would be illegal packing. The state may try to “settle” for this later. That would play into their hands and continue the pattern Anglos have used for decades to minimize minority voting strength in the legislature. If they can’t diffuse them into many districts, they will pack them into as few districts as possible.
There were at least four naturally occurring concentrations of minority voters who were engaging in coalitions to elect their candidates of choice: The City of Mesquite (HD 101); North Dallas to Garland (HD102); Irving and Grand Prairie (HDs 105 & 106) and South Garland to Lower East Dallas (HD 107). Minority voting strength would have rapidly increased in these districts over the decade, making them legally performing and protected minority opportunity districts in the future. Minority voting rights should be restored in all four districts.
Dallas is just the best example. This diffusion of naturally occurring concentrations of minority voters happened in Tarrant, Harris, McLennan, Collin, and Denton Counties. Voting rights lawyers have made formal claims in Tarrant (HDs 93 and 96); McLennan (HDs 56 and 57) and in the far western part of Harris County (HDs 132 and 135).
Most minority population growth now occurs in the metropolitan areas of the state; and will in the future. But the citizen voting age populations are not moving to concentrated inner-city neighborhoods to be with people who look like themselves. They are moving to the aging and close-in suburbs of these big counties. There is better housing there. Such mixed ethnicity neighborhoods of Hispanics, Asians, Blacks and others are our future.
If those many hundreds of thousands of minority citizens living in these mixed neighborhoods are allowed to be deprived of their rightful voice in the legislature; then minority legislators collectively may never again gain a critical mass of leverage in the legislature sufficient to be “at the table” and effectively representing their communities.
In 2009, with a State House closely divided, minority legislators were part of an informal governing coalition.
In 2011, with Anglo Republicans controlling 100 seats out of 150, minority legislators were isolated and effectively out of power. They remain so.
This voting rights litigation will not be a success if only a small hand full of single-minority-majority seats are created here and there. This litigation is about the voting rights of the New Texas in the major metropolitan areas of the state.
