Flaylo
Handsome Devil
Federal court rejects GOP-drawn Texas voting maps - Yahoo! News
Repugs never learn.
The long-awaited ruling was hailed as a sweeping victory by minority rights groups that sued the state after the Republican-controlled Legislature pushed through new redistricting maps last year. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott called the decision "flawed" and vowed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"Better late than never," said Luis Vera, attorney for the League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the groups that sued the state. "It's a hell of a victory."
The court concluded that the maps didn't comply with the federal Voting Rights Act. In a 154-page opinion handed down nearly seven months after a Washington trial, the three-judge panel ruled that state attorneys failed to prove that Texas lawmakers did not draw new congressional and state Senate districts "without discriminatory purposes."
In some cases, the court wrote, black congressional members in Texas had economic drivers such as sporting arenas freshly carved out of their districts, though "no such surgery" was performed on any belonging to white incumbents.
"Anglo district boundaries were redrawn to include particular country clubs and, in one case, the school belonging to the incumbent's grandchildren," said U.S. Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith, writing the opinion for the panel.
Repugs never learn.