Writing in the Washington Post this morning about the Texas redistricting case recently argued in the Supreme Court, David Broder observed:
The impact on Latino and African American voters appeared to trouble some of the justices. Questioning showed that about 100,000 Hispanics had been moved out of a south Texas district, improving the election prospects of Republican Rep. Henry Bonilla. The state contended they were shifting Democrats — not Latinos — and Roberts, for one, appeared to buy the argument that the motivation was political, not racial.
Does the argument over whether Texas was engaged in partisan (allowed) or racial (not allowed) gerrymandering sound familiar? It should, if for no other reason (though there are several other good ones) than that you recall this post from October 2003:
Redistricting Role Reversal
October 11, 2003
In North Carolina, Democrats engaged in what looked so much like racial gerrymandering that an early version of Justice O’Connor described the result as bearing “an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.” (Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630 [1993])
The Democrats said in effect, “Who? Us? When we assigned those voters we didn’t really care that they were black. All we cared about is that they are Democrats.” By the time this case bounced back and forth and returned to a Supreme Court (see here for a good descriptive chronology) on which sat a new (though arguably not improved) version of Justice O’Connor, the Supremes agreed. Writing for the new O’Connor-included five justice majority in Hunt v. Cromartie, 532 U.S. 234, Justice Breyer agreed with the Democrats:
“The evidence . . . does not show that racial considerations predominated in the drawing of District 12’s boundaries. That is because race in this case correlates closely with political behavior.”
But now that Texas Republicans are behaving in a manner that is virtually identical to what the Supremes approved for North Carolina Democrats, the Texas Democrats are crying foul. U.S. Rep. Ruben Hinojoso (D, Tex) said that a new redistricting map just approved by the Texas House “represented one of the greatest acts of political apartheid ever visited upon Hispanic Americans and South Texans.” He said this even though the Republican plan does not reduce the number of minority representatives in Congress at all.
The Republican plan does, however, substantially reduce the number of Democratic representatives. But if the argument is that blacks can’t be represented by Republicans, that depriving them of the ability to elect Democrats is discrimination, wouldn’t one also then have to conclude that whites can’t be represented by Democrats, that depriving them of the ability to elect Republicans is discriminatory?
….
I concluded by observing:
The logic of the Democratic argument is that we should abandon representation based on geographic districts and substitute racial and ethnic representation.
But, it turns out, that’s only half true: it’s true when Democrats move blacks Democrats from one district to another to elect a Democrat; but it’s not true when Republicans move Hispanics Democrats from one district to another to elect a Republican (in the case of Rep. Bonilla, a Hispanic Republican).
[Note: Partisan Hypocrisy I was here.]
