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Texas This Week: SCOTUS hears arguments on Texas voting maps

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Texas' voting maps. In Texas This Week, Ashley Goudeau sits down with Ross Ramsey, executive editor of The Texas Tribune, to discuss the case.

AUSTIN -- This Week, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Texas' voting maps, this after a lower federal court ruled Texas intentionally discriminated against Black and Hispanic voters. Ashley Goudeau sat down with Ross Ramsey, executive editor of The Texas Tribune, to discuss the case.

GOUDEAU: "Ross, this case actually dates back to 2011. Tell us the history of all of this."

RAMSEY: "Well you know every 10 years we do a census. After we count everybody we apportion congressional districts to states, the states then redistrict and cut themselves into districts and that's really the start of a fight. And it's a perpetual motion legal machine. So in 2011, the legislature drew districts for Congress, for the State Senate, for the State House, for the State Board of Education and immediately the litigation started. There's a three-judge federal panel in San Antonio that's heard this, re-drawn pieces of it, ruled on pieces of it. There's something like 200,000 pages of evidence and testimony. And it's finally gone up to the U.S. Supreme Court for what might be a procedural ruling instead of a final ruling. This could go on some more."

GOUDEAU: "2011 you mentioned that the proceedings started, the judges ruled that they needed some temporary maps for the 2012 election. And then what happened with those maps?"

RAMSEY: "Well the Texas Legislature looked at those, it's a republican legislature, looked at the maps that the court had ordered as temporary maps and said, 'You know. this isn't bad, let's just enact the court's maps and make those our maps because the court's already signed off on them.' But the court said in the ruling when they were making those maps, some of what was wrong with your original maps is still wrong with these maps. And that's really where the source of this litigation comes from. Did the state intentionally discriminate in these maps, was it fair to all of the voters in the state or do the maps need to be re-drawn, are they unconstitutional?"

GOUDEAU: "Right, so after they adopted those maps we fast forward to 2014, we have another lawsuit that's filed, three years later we finally get the ruling that says yes, Texas did in fact intentionally discriminate."

RAMSEY: "Right. At various pieces of this litigation and in other voter litigation, Texas has been found by various courts to have intentionally discriminated ten different times. Which really at play here is a thing called pre-clearance, which says if a state passes a piece of election legislation or voting legislation, it doesn't take effect immediately without the approval of the courts or the Department of Justice if that state has intentionally discriminated or has a history of discrimination. Texas used to be under that, it got out of that. So, at the moment, we're out of that. If the legislature passes a law, it takes effect. Then you sue or whatever. But their law stays in place until you win the suit. So really what we're fighting over is who gets to be in place while all this litigation goes on. It's almost over for this decade. We're going to do a new census in 2020. We'll start the whole clock over again. All the lawyers will be back. I've covered this three or four times. You know, I've been seeing these lawyers for a long time. I don't think they're going anywhere."

GOUDEAU: "Tuesday, the justices heard the oral arguments in the case. Tell us what each side is arguing."

RAMSEY: "Well, you know, this is, there's a procedural thing here. This you know sort of off the subject of whether the maps are legit or not, there's that argument. But then there's an argument over whether the court has jurisdiction in this case where we are in the chain of this court is supposed to do this before that court can do that. It's really become a Dickensian, sort of you remember Jarndyce versus Jarndyce from Bleak House, you know. This is a piece of litigation that goes on and on. In the meantime, in a decade you have five election cycles. And the Republicans, you know, drew maps for these things and they've already had three big elections, they're about to have a fourth one in November. By the time the courts are through with this, the decade's gone. The Republicans won."

GOUDEAU: "So is it even worth fighting then?"

RAMSEY: "Well, it is. I mean you know, they'll get a precedent perhaps that will take them into the next fight and, you know, the court's rulings will serve as part of the rules set in 2021 when we're drawing new maps."

GOUDEAU: "When we take a look at these maps that we're talking about I think anyone would look at these maps and say, 'hmm, these districts are drawn quite oddly.' They're not exactly, you know certain shapes or the areas don't seem to make sense. So then we think about gerrymandering. So is this gerrymandering?"

RAMSEY: "Sure it is, sure it is. They drew these maps for a particular reason. And the question is what's the particular reason? The Republicans say, and you know on its face this is probably right as far as it goes, we did it for political reasons. We looked at the rule, we looked at the maps, we drew maps to maximize the number of seats for our side, to minimize the number of seats for the other side, and that's just politics. You can't take the politics out of politics. The Democrats and a bunch of the groups that are suing the state say, 'In doing that, you discriminated against minority populations and communities of interest in places all over the state.' You might have done this for partisan reasons but you went so far that you discriminated against these voters and you need to correct that."

GOUDEAU: "If we look back in history, was there a time when the maps were drawn to the Democrats' advantage?"

RAMSEY: "Sure, sure. You know, in fact there are two cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court aside from the Texas case -- one's from Wisconsin, one is from Marylan. A Maryland map that was drawn to favor the Democrats and to hose the Republicans. And a Wisconsin map that was drawn the other way, favor the Republicans, hose the Democrats. And the question before the court in those cases, broadly speaking, is, can you draw a map that is so partisan that it actually cheats some voters out of their voting rights? We'll find out when the court rules."

GOUDEAU: "It would seem that if we wanted to get rid of all of this, we would just have a non-political entity draw up the maps. Why is that not an option or why has that not been done?"

RAMSEY: "It's really hard, you know, this is the cliche around this, it's really hard to take the politics out of politics. When you get down to it, you know, to actually drawing a line, that's going to be Ashley's District, that's going to be Ross' District, you've got to make some decisions. You've got to make value judgments and it's got to be based on something. And it's ultimately a political map for political purposes to get people representation and, you know, it's hard to take all the biases out of that."

GOUDEAU: "This particular case is just the latest case in a long list of cases that we have building about Texas and the way it handles voting. Talk to us about some of those other cases, voter ID."

RAMSEY: "Well yeah, it's, the voter ID case is another one. I mentioned that there were ten instances where the courts at various have said, 'Well yeah, it looks like the state intentionally discriminated in these laws.' You know, whether it was voter ID, whether it's setting election rules for this or that. The courts are broadly saying that the state is on the verge or over the verge of shutting some voters out based on race. And doing it intentionally. And if that becomes the case, then we go back into this pre-clearance thing where when Texas passes a law, kind of have a mother-may-I rule, they have to go to the Department of Justice or they go to the D.C. circuit court and say, 'We've passed this law, is it OKfor us to put it into effect?' As it stands now, they pass a law, it goes into effect and you have to sue to change it. There's a broad argument, you know, that the Democrats make that the state should be in the business of making it easier to vote and that the state has been making it harder to vote and that the laws that the state has enacted have a greater effect on minority voters and Democrats than they do on Republicans. And that's really sort of the heart of that litigation. The courts are still deciding that. But in several little instances along the way, they've said, 'Yeah, looks like the state's doing that.'"

The Supreme Court is expected to issue its opinion in the redistricting case this summer.

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