Supreme Court to hear Texas redistricting case

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider the legality of Texas' 2003 congressional-redistricting plan, which was engineered by then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and helped cement GOP control of the House.

The court will hear challenges from Democrats and minority groups who say the redistricting unlawfully diluted the strength of minority voters, injected undue partisanship into the congressional map and violated the concept of one person, one vote by drawing district lines with outdated census data.

Justice Department lawyers initially recommended rejecting Texas' plan, saying it would harm black and Hispanic voters, but they were overruled by senior Justice officials. A special three-judge panel has twice upheld the redistricting map.

Election-law experts said the justices' acceptance of the case suggests they may be prepared to craft clearer guidelines for politicians to follow when redrawing congressional maps. The court said it will hear oral arguments March 1.

The Texas plan, which allowed the GOP to pick up six congressional seats, has been at the heart of legal and ethical troubles facing DeLay. His actions concerning the plan resulted in his being admonished by the House ethics committee and indicted on charges of illegally diverting money to the campaigns of state legislators who drew the new map.

A federal court had redrawn the state's congressional map after the 2000 census, but DeLay said it was too Democratic for a majority Republican state. In 2002, Texans sent 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans to Congress.

DeLay and his political-action committees pumped tens of thousands of dollars into state elections in 2002 to win Republican control of the Texas Legislature. That fundraising led to his indictment in September and his resignation from the House leadership.

In 2003, at DeLay's urging, the Legislature and Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, redrew the congressional map in three special sessions. Democratic legislators tried to thwart the effort, at one point fleeing to Oklahoma to deny the Legislature a quorum. The House ethics committee rebuked DeLay for using the Federal Aviation Administration to track down a plane that was shuttling Democrats out of the state.

Critics say the new map was drawn in violation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court will hear one lawsuit, by Travis County and the city of Austin, that contends the redistricting violated the concept of one person, one vote by using three-year-old census data and making no effort to update that data to reflect more than 1 million new people — predominantly Latinos — who had entered the state from 2000 to 2003.

Typically, states redraw their electoral districts once each decade when new census data are released. Because populations shift, districts must be redrawn so they are roughly equal in population.

Redistricting for partisan reasons is a practice as old as the nation itself, a divided Supreme Court said last year when it upheld a Pennsylvania plan that gave the GOP control of 12 of its 19 congressional districts, despite the fact that the state's voters were evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.

Material from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.