WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday largely upheld an array of congressional and state legislative districts in Texas, reversing trial court rulings that said the districts violated the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against voters on the basis of race.
The vote was 5-4, with the court's more conservative members in the majority. Justice Samuel Alito Jr., writing for the majority, said the trial court had "committed a fundamental legal error" by requiring state officials to justify their use of voting maps that had been largely drawn by the trial court itself.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court in San Antonio had ruled that a congressional district including Corpus Christi denied Hispanic voters "their opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice." The court rejected a second congressional district stretching from San Antonio to Austin, saying that race had been the primary factor in drawing it. In a separate decision, the court found similar flaws in several state legislative districts.
The Supreme Court reversed almost every part of those rulings, though it did hold that a state House district in Tarrant County was an impermissible racial gerrymander.
There was a wrinkle in the case: The San Antonio court itself had for the most part endorsed the contested maps in 2012, after the Supreme Court rejected earlier ones and told the court to try again. The 2012 maps, the panel later said, had been considered in haste in advance of pending elections. In 2013, the Texas Legislature decided not to draw new maps and instead mostly adopted the one drawn by the San Antonio court.
The court concluded that Texas' adoption of the interim maps was part of "a litigation strategy designed to insulate the 2011 or 2013 plans from further challenge, regardless of their legal infirmities."
"We now hold that the three-judge court committed a fundamental legal error," Alito wrote. The lower court ignored evidence showing that the Legislature adopted districting plans in 2013 primarily to try to end the litigation over the districts, Alito said.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the majority opinion represented a dark day for voting rights.
The Constitution and the Voting Rights Act "secure for all voters in our country, regardless of race, the right to equal participation in our political processes," she wrote. "Those guarantees mean little, however, if courts do not remain vigilant in curbing states' efforts to undermine the ability of minority voters to meaningfully exercise that right."
"The court today does great damage to that right of equal opportunity," she wrote. "Not because it denies the existence of that right, but because it refuses its enforcement."
She said her colleagues had blinded themselves "to the overwhelming factual record below. It does all of this to allow Texas to use electoral maps that, in design and effect, burden the rights of minority voters."
Much of the dispute between the two sides in Monday's decision concerned whether the case was properly before the justices at all.
The San Antonio court had not issued an injunction compelling the state to do anything, Sotomayor wrote. Instead, it instructed Texas officials to promptly advise it about whether they would try to draw new maps. That meant, she said, that there was no lower-court decision for the Supreme Court to review.
But Alito wrote that the trial court's action was effectively an injunction and that the Supreme Court therefore had jurisdiction to hear the state's appeal.
"The short time given the Legislature to respond is strong evidence that the three-judge court did not intend to allow the elections to go ahead under the plans it had just condemned," he wrote. "The Legislature was not in session, so in order to take up the task of redistricting, the governor would have been required to convene a special session -- which is no small matter."
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined the majority opinion in the two consolidated cases, Abbott v. Perez, No. 17-586, and Abbott v. Perez, No. 17-626.
Thomas and Gorsuch added that they do not believe the Voting Rights Act applies to redistricting.
In dissent, Sotomayor wrote that the majority had gone badly astray.
"The court today goes out of its way to permit the State of Texas to use maps that the three-judge district court unanimously found were adopted for the purpose of preserving the racial discrimination that tainted its previous maps," she wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.
"This disregard of both precedent and fact comes at serious costs to our democracy," Sotomayor wrote. "It means that, after years of litigation and undeniable proof of intentional discrimination, minority voters in Texas -- despite constituting a majority of the population within the state -- will continue to be underrepresented in the political process."
WINS FOR TEXAS GOP
The decision comes nine months after Democrats had celebrated lower-court rulings that invalidated parts of Texas' electoral maps and a revised voter-ID law. But the voter-ID law was also restored in April, and Texas Republicans now have another key victory in long-running battles over voting rights in a state with a booming Hispanic population.
"Our legislative maps are legal. Democrats lost their redistricting & Voter ID claims," Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted.
"This is a huge win for the Constitution, Texas, and the democratic process. Once again, Texans have the power to govern themselves," Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said.
The decision also dampened Democrats' case that Texas should once again need federal approval before changing voting laws, a requirement the Supreme Court eliminated in 2013 when it gutted the heart of the federal Voting Rights Act.
Democrats are outnumbered nearly 2-1 in the Texas Legislature and have long contended that unfair maps have accelerated that imbalance. In 2009, Republicans had only a slim two-seat majority in the Texas House.
"The rules were changed today," said Democratic state Rep. Rafael Anchia, chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.
N.C. CASE SENT BACK
Also on Monday, the Supreme Court sent back to a lower court a decision that Republicans in North Carolina had gerrymandered the state's congressional districts to give their party an unfair advantage.
The lower court will need to decide whether the plaintiffs had the proper legal standing to bring the case.
North Carolina's Republican-led Legislature has implemented a map under which Republicans hold 10 of the 13 congressional seats. The GOP's domination of the congressional delegation belies North Carolina's recent history as a battleground state. It has a Democratic governor and attorney general, who have declined to defend the maps.
When a three-judge panel invalidated the map of congressional districts, it became the first to strike a congressional map on the grounds that it was rigged in favor of a political party.
North Carolina has a past at the Supreme Court, with redistricting plans struck down as racial gerrymanders. So when the state legislature adopted new plans in 2016, Republican leaders made clear they were drawing the lines to help their party, instead of basing their decisions on racial data.
"I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats," said Rep. David Lewis, a Republican member of the North Carolina General Assembly. "So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country."
He added: "I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats because I do not believe it's possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats."
When voters went to the polls that fall, the outcome was exactly as Lewis had predicted, even though Republican candidates won just 53 percent of the statewide vote.
Information for this article was contributed by Adam Liptak of The New York Times; by Mark Sherman and Paul J. Weber of The Associated Press; and by Robert Barnes of The Washington Post.
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