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Yesterday we gave you the heads-up: Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has brought in former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement to try to throw out what they claim are the federal court’s “unlawful redistricting maps.” And, right on cue, they’ve filed their emergency stays with the U.S. Supreme Court: All four docs filed with the court are now posted to the A.G.’s website, along with Abbott’s insistence that it’s “judicial activism at its worst for judges to draw redistricting maps of their own choosing despite no finding of wrongdoing by the State of Texas.”
The biggest issue they appear to have is with U.S. District Judges Orlando Garcia and Xavier Rodriguez’s interim House map, which Clement claims “is entirely a judicial creation with no
regard for the lines drawn through the political process.” Which is interesting, because even Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith — the third federal judge tasked with reviewing the maps — noted in his dissent last week that “the Legislature created substantial population disparities in
Dallas and Harris Counties in a manner that may raise concerns of racial or
partisan gerrymandering in violation of Larios v. Cox.” Smith, incidentally, was also critical of Garcia and Rodriguez’s newly created District 107, a “a new coalition minority opportunity
district” in Dallas County:
Even leaving aside the question whether
courts can ever mandate minority “coalition” districts, the majority seems to
draw this district merely because it can be drawn. But no such district is
required under section 2, and the State’s plan creates no retrogression under
section 5. Thus, the majority’s meddlings in Dallas County stem solely from the
majority’s policy preferences, which are not an appropriate justification for
judicial action.
In his Senate stay, Clement writes that “the three-judge court’s interim order as to the Senate map is less sweeping
than the court’s wholesale redrawing of the House map, but it suffers from the same
fatal flaw: a willingness to redraw an election map without a finding of any
substantial likelihood of a statutory or constitutional violation.”
