WASHINGTON — The nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court will take their seats Tuesday morning to hear a case that could remake the political map of Texas.

Hidden in the legalese of “interlocutory injunctions” and “statutory defects” is this simple question for the justices to dissect: Did the Republican-led state Legislature purposely draw its last legislative and congressional boundaries to subvert the voting power of Latino and African-American voters?

The answer, expected by June, could influence the racial and partisan makeup of the state’s political districts, culminating a long, high-stakes legal battle that has the potential to turn Texas a little more blue.

A possible finding of voting rights violations also could force the Lone Star State back under federal supervision for future election disputes, a civil rights remedy associated with the state’s segregationist past. Texas only got removed from federal preclearance requirements in 2013. Restrictions requiring strict federal scrutiny of all elections had been in place since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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“The Texas case thus could be in a position to break new ground and will be closely watched for that reason,” said legal court analyst Michael Li, writing for the New York University Law School Brennan School of Justice.

Since the state’s political boundaries came under challenge after the 2010 census, the case has involved at least 10 different plaintiff groups, the Justice Department, two Texas governors and several alliances of African-American and Hispanic voters.

“They silenced the voices of minorities at the ballot box,” said Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa, accusing Republicans of “stacking the deck” by drawing lines to both pack together and separate people of color to dilute their voting strength.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in a recent statement welcoming the Supreme Court review, called a lower court’s decision invalidating parts of the current district maps “inexplicable and indefensible.”

State Republican Party Chairman James Dickey argued that Texas’ political boundaries were fairly drawn and that it would take “some serious overreach” to redraw them.

Questions of legislative gerrymandering — drawing oddly configured district lines for partisan advantage — have been around since the dawn of the Republic. But the issue has reached a political crescendo this year as the electoral maps of at least eight states have been involved in redistricting litigation.

This week, Texas will move to center stage as the Supreme Court takes up Abbott v. Perez, a gerrymandering case that adds a racial overlay to the usual partisan redistricting narrative.

The Supreme Court also has taken up closely-watched cases from Wisconsin and Maryland — both allege partisan gerrymandering, by Republicans in Wisconsin, and by Democrats in Maryland.

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Nobody knows where the high court is headed with this cluster of redistricting cases, though some analysts suggest that alleged racial discrimination might be easier to remedy than discrimination based on party affiliation alone.

The Supreme Court threw out a GOP-drawn congressional map in North Carolina last year on racial grounds. But in past court rulings, the justices have expressed deep reservations about wading into the battles between Democrats and Republicans.

When it comes to raw partisanship, few legislative exercises match the smash-mouth brinksmanship drawing political boundaries after each decade’s national census. Texas might have set a new standard in 2003 when then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Sugar Land led an unusual mid-census redistricting push. That battle saw outnumbered Democrats in Austin flee the state to deny their Republican counterparts a quorum in the Texas House.

DeLay’s gambit ultimately worked. The number of Republicans in the state’s congressional delegation went from 16 to 21, helping cement DeLay’s position in the House leadership. Since the 2010 census, new redistricting maps have helped the GOP win 25 of the state’s 36 current congressional seats.

The new maps, first drawn in 2011 — and then again in 2013 under court order — are the starting point of the case now going before the Supreme Court.

Minority groups say both violate federal law.

Deja vu all over again

If there’s a sense of déjà vu in this case, it’s because the 2003 maps also wound up before the high court, along with questions about diluting the voting strength of minorities. But the 2003 redistricting largely held up, with adjustments being ordered only to the majority-Hispanic Texas’ 23rd congressional district, now represented by Republican Will Hurd.

The new Texas challenge reflects a continuing search for what Justice Anthony Kennedy once called a “workable” standard for curbing aggressive gerrymandering. The standard remains elusive. And it is Kennedy who, once again, may be a pivotal vote in the latest Texas challenge.

No matter what the court decides, legislative veterans say it’s hard to keep the politics out. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, who chaired Texas’ legislative redistricting board in 2000, called it an “inherently a political process,” adding, “It’s just hard to know what alternative might be available.”

One defense that might be used by the state is that it was pure partisan politics, not racial discrimination, that drove the configuration of the state’s current boundaries.

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The justices will be picking up the pieces from a pair of lower court rulings, including the decision of a three-judge panel in San Antonio which invalidated the boundaries of a pair of congressional districts and nine Texas House districts.

The congressional districts in question are District 27, centered on Corpus Christi, and District 35, a narrow stretch running from Austin to San Antonio - derisively called the “fajita strip” for its large concentration of Hispanics.

In addition to the two congressional districts, the case involves nine Texas House seats where a federal court ruled lawmakers diluted the strength of minority voters. Five of those districts are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.. Bell County, south of Waco, and Corpus Christi’s Nueces County each have two districts that could be redrawn pending the outcome of the case.

If the U.S. Supreme Court rules against Texas, it could mean the creation of three Latino state House districts, said Jose Garza, a voting rights attorney for the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, one of the parties to the suit.

The number of districts that could be redrawn represents a small fraction of the 150 state house districts, although boundaries for nearby districts could be affected. However, the changes would not alter the balance of power in the Texas House where Republicans outnumber Democrats nearly 2 to 1.

But even if the case doesn’t alter Texas’ overall GOP partisan advantage, it could set the stage for reform in how lines are drawn.

“People are really frustrated about politicians choosing their constituents, whether they’re Republicans, Independents or Democrats,” said Rep. Rafael Anchia, Dallas Democrat who represents one of the districts subject in the lawsuit.

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In Congress, Democrats believe that a more representative distribution of minority voters could help them win two or three more House seats. But that is a distant hope.

U.S. Rep. Republican Blake Farenthold, a Republican facing a congressional ethics investigation for sexual harassment, recently resigned the District 27 seat, though as currently drawn it is still considered a safe GOP district. Democrat Lloyd Doggett now represents the 35th congressional district, a safe Democratic seat.

Also contested was Hurd’s 23rd congressional district, though the lower courts said that one can stand.

Ripple effect

While the battleground may be limited, any changes to the districts under challenge also could have ripple effects in their surrounding districts if the courts require them to be redrawn.

The high court in September blocked the lower court rulings requiring that the challenged districts be redrawn for the 2018 elections, a temporary victory for Republicans who have defended the maps.

The challengers — including the NAACP and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus — hinge their case heavily on the state’s rapid population growth between 2000 and 2010, the bulk of which was Latinos and African-Americans. Texas gained four congressional seats from the 2010 census, but Democrats contend that the Legislature’s newly-drawn districts intentionally diluted the voting strength of the state’s minority population.

“It’s important for the political process in Texas that ultimately they draw fair districts, which means that as the population changes and grows, the political jurisdictions reflect the people in those districts,” said U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who represents a majority-minority district in central Houston.

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The state’s GOP leaders have questioned in their court filings how the current interim maps can be construed as an unconstitutional when they were redrawn under court order. “The plaintiffs have not come close to satisfying their burden of proving that the Legislature enacted the district court’s own maps in a sinister effort to discriminate against minority voters,” the state wrote in a brief submitted by Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller, former chief counsel to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

Cruz was the state’s solicitor general in 2006 and made the arguments for Texas that year’s redistricting case before the Supreme Court.

Lawyers for the groups alleging discrimination have sided with the lower court rulings that in revising their district boundaries, Texas lawmakers failed to remove the purported “discriminatory taint” from the provisional court-imposed plans. For example, they noted that that two congressional districts under challenge remained identical from 2011 maps to the 2013 court-ordered revisions.

“In the State’s telling, there was a brief, shining moment in 2013 when Texas history reversed course and the Texas Legislature fell all over itself to conform state conduct to a federal court’s provisional observations,” the challengers said. “The district court rightly saw through the 2013 masquerade.”

Whichever way the court rules, the redistricting saga is unlikely to end soon.

The 2020 census is now less than two years away, which will begin the next redistricting battle.

Andrea Zelinski contributed to this report.

kevin.diaz@chron.com

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