One thing that quail and gerrymandered voting districts have in common in the great state of Texas is that neither is very likely to get shot down, but there may be a few innocent human victims that suffer in the process.
“We the people, in order to form a less perfect union, dedicated to the proposition that some people are more equal that others, that to the victors go the spoils and that the pursuit of power is an end justifiable by any means. We are committed that said power be increased, consolidated and wielded for the purposed of preserving and growing the wealth of the few at the expense of the many. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness shall be available to those who can afford it and who are compliant with the will of those who wield said power.”
The foregoing is not the actual language of the Preamble to the United States Constitution, but it represents the “original intent” as construed by the conservative majority of the Supreme Court. It is remarkably similar to the political platform of the Bush administration and the GOP that controls Congress.
Justice Scalia would have completely shut the door on any suits to challenge suppression or infringement of voting rights. However, the plurality of the Court found one instance in which the Voting Rights Act may still have some force and effect. When one Texas GOP controlled voting district boundaries were redrawn to excise about 100,000 Hispanic voters, the Court ruled that the Texas legislature had gone a bit too far. The Supreme Court also ruled, however, that states can redraw voting districts as frequently as they like, rather than every ten years based upon demographic changes reflected in the census.
What the ruling effectively means, by logical extension, is that if the Democrats [or any party other than the GOP] should take control of the Texas legislature, they could immediately turn around and redraw the voting district boundaries to reinforce their majority and prevent any other party from electing representatives to challenge their incumbent majority status. Entrenchment of power will be the order of the day, absent a virtual invasion in a short space of time that upsets the majority before the legislature has time to redraft the voting districts.
The unfortunate abdication of principle by the Supreme Court demonstrates a lessening of respect for the democratic principles upon which the country was founded. Since the structure of Congress was set up based upon stated principles, population in the House of Representatives and equal representation in the Senate, it would follow that the justification for revising and redrawing voting districts should be limited. Changes driven by political party agendas should not be allowed to justify extraordinary measures designed to prop up incumbents or achieve victories for one party or another. The framers of the US Constitution anticipated that voting districts would logically reflect demographic and geographic realities and protect voting integrity. At the inception, large voting districts existed because of population dispersion or density. Obviously if a community were to grow substantially larger, the concentration of population would call for splitting the area into more than one district so that the voice of each voter would carry roughly the same weight. But that presumptive equality or weight of each person’s vote was not supposed to reflect which political party they supported.
The subsequent distortion of the founder’s principles has been the target of the Voting Rights Act. Political opportunists found that if you carved up a Black community and put parts of it in several different voting districts, no district would wind up electing a Black candidate. That trick was called “dilution.” Another tactic was to take a pencil and use freehand to draw a line around areas whose residents tended to vote for a particular party, or what was known as “consolidation.” By combining these tactics, you could effectively splinter any opposition groups and aggregate supporters into separate districts whose elections results you could virtually guarantee. The Supreme Court now seems to be saying that it is now open season on voting district revisions. No need to wait for census data to show actual shifts in population or any other traditionally recognized limitation. Just carve those districts up to consolidate power in the majority party of the legislature. And you had better hurry, there is a mid term election coming up and the incumbents are facing serious trouble.
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