Texas' new House map challenged in state court, expanding redistricting fight
Opening a second front in widening legal wars over redistricting, a coalition of mostly Hispanic, Democratic members of the Texas House filed suit in state court Wednesday challenging the constitutionality of the new political map for the state House.
Multiple lawsuits challenging new political districts drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature will play out in federal court, but the Mexican American Legislative Caucus filed the state case citing language in the Texas Constitution requiring legislators drawing the Texas House’s 150 districts to keep intact counties with sufficient population to make up one House district.
MALC’s challenge centers on the reconfiguration of Cameron County in the Rio Grande Valley, which breaks the county line twice to create three districts — only one wholly contained within the county. The state’s “county line rule,” MALC argues, would require two districts be drawn within Cameron, with the remaining population connected to a single neighboring district, as was the case under the map the state used for the last decade.
Texas redistricting fights have typically played out in federal courts, which decade after decade have found that lawmakers, often intentionally, flouted federal protections for voters of color, and two federal lawsuits had already been filed against the new maps. The caucus simultaneously filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday, alleging the state’s new maps were drawn with discriminatory intent and violate the federal Voting Rights Act. Filed in Austin, MALC framed the suit as an effort to “redress once again Texas’s sordid pattern of racial discrimination.”
Read more: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/11/03/texas-redistricting-state-court/