Michael Barajas for the Texas Observer:

For decades, the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to protect minority voters by forcing Texas and other states with a history of race-based voter suppression to clear changes to election laws, including new political maps, with the federal government first. That so-called preclearance requirement, under Section 5 of the law, stopped Texas’ maps from immediately taking effect the last time lawmakers redrew them in 2011, eventually forcing compromise interim maps that the state later adopted and mostly used for the rest of the decade. In 2013, however, the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled that section of the Voting Rights Act and ended preclearance, leaving Texas without federal oversight for this latest round of late and hurried mapmaking. 

“The Supreme Court put the burden on voters to have to prove discrimination before maps get used,” says Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), one of several groups that have sued to challenge the new maps. “Sure, the Supreme Court didn’t know then that we were going to have a delayed census because of the pandemic, but now there’s a perfect storm in Texas. … We have a very late set of maps that are discriminatory, and no Section 5 to block them before Texas tries to use them in the March primary.” 

MALDEF and several other voting rights groups have sued Texas over the past several weeks to try and stop the state from holding elections under the new maps, accusing GOP lawmakers of drawing new district lines with the intent to discriminate against voters of color and dilute their political influence. They point to the fact that Hispanic people made up half the state’s population growth over the last decade, and yet new state House and congressional maps reduce the number of districts in which Hispanic people are the majority of eligible voters. They also accuse Republican lawmakers of cracking and packing communities of color by spreading them out among several districts or crowding them into others in order to diminish their influence. 

In its lawsuit against the state filed earlier this month, the Mexican American Legislative Caucus tied the new maps to a larger political climate demonizing Latinx people. “The Texas Legislature is not redistricting in a vacuum, and the racial dynamics of modern political appeals villainizing Latinos, and intimidation tactics meant to discourage their participation, have proliferated in recent years,” the lawsuit reads. The filing cites numerous recent examples of anti-Hispanic hate, including the 2019 El Paso shooting that killed 23 people and injured 23 others. 

Judicial blindness to racist voting laws in Texas likely emboldened the latest round of GOP gerrymandering in the state. In a Georgetown Law Journal article last year, elections law expert Rick Hasen pointed to a series of recent Supreme Court rulings, including the case involving Texas maps passed last decade, that have paved the way for more partisan gerrymandering, racial gerrymandering, restrictive election laws and minority vote dilution. Voting rights advocates had long hoped that judges might put Texas back under federal preclearance for election changes due to the state’s long history of racist voting laws, but that also seems unlikely thanks to recent rulings.