A group of plaintiffs in a case challenging the State’s redistricting map have asked the trial court to reopen testimony in the case in response to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s decision to call a special session to consider redrawing some of the State’s congressional lines. Michael Li has good coverage of these proceedings on his X feed.
From the plaintiffs’ motion:
New evidence reveals that witnesses, including Senator Huffman, Chris Gober, and Adam Kincaid, potentially falsely testified that Texas’s congressional map was drawn without consideration of race. Specifically, the Governor has called a special session of the Legislature to take up redistricting of the congressional map, approvingly citing a letter from the United States Department of Justice asserting that evidence exists to prove that the current congressional map was drawn with race as a predominant consideration. The deposition and trial testimony of the relevant witnesses and this new evidence are flatly contradictory. One or the other is false, and Plaintiffs and the Court are entitled to probe whether key witnesses truthfully testified at deposition and at trial—on the central question in this case—given this new evidence. That testimony is not only probative to Plaintiffs’ specific claims regarding the existing congressional map but is also probative to the credibility of these witnesses in general on all of Plaintiffs’ claims.
The State has responded to oppose the plaintiff’s motion.
From the State’s response:
As established by the robust trial record, the Texas Legislature did not racially discriminate in drawing the current congressional electoral districts—full stop. Following that robust trial record, and perhaps because of it, the Brooks, Gonzales, and MALC Plaintiffs (Plaintiffs) have filed an Emergency Motion, requesting that this Court reopen the record and schedule an expedited hear-ing in response to “new evidence.” This “new evidence” contains no alleged facts about how districts were drawn back in 2021. It does not even consist of any new, contradictory statements by the witnesses whose testimony they seek to reopen. Instead, it is a legal argument by the De-partment of Justice (DOJ)—a third party with no personal knowledge—about changes to redis-tricting caselaw in 2024, as well as Governor Abbott’s call for the Legislature to consider congres-sional redistricting in an upcoming special session. Neither the DOJ letter nor the Governor’s Proclamation—both of which come nearly four years after the Legislature passed the current maps—constitute new evidence requiring the Court to reopen the record. And neither in any way impugns the truthfulness of Chairwoman Joan Huffman, Chris Gober, and Adam Kincaid.