Redistricting process is a roller coaster ride to 2012

Some Texas Republicans are trying to paint federal judges as the villains in the redistricting hullabaloo that has sent candidates scrambling to figure out who's running where in the 2012 primary elections.

But the three-judge panel in San Antonio that's produced temporary voting districts for both houses of the state Legislature and the Texas congressional delegation didn't just reach into this political maelstrom for lack of anything better to do.

The judges are overseeing a plethora of legal challenges that call foul on redistricting plans state lawmakers adopted this year. And the San Antonio panel was directed to draw maps by a federal court in Washington, D.C., because separate but related litigation won't be resolved in time for the filing period that's supposed to start today.

The convolutions are dizzying. But what caused the ruckus is no mystery: lawmakers, not the courts.

The first problem was the process. The Republican-dominated Legislature was determined to maximize GOP officeholders in Austin and Washington. They for sure wanted to squeeze U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett from Austin out of office, and they wanted to make it near impossible for state Sen. Wendy Davis of Fort Worth to win another term.

Texas gained more than 4 million residents between 2000 and 2010 -- good for an additional four seats in Congress -- and it was overwhelmingly because of growth in the Hispanic population. But because Texas Hispanics tend to vote for Democrats, Republican lawmakers opted to accommodate party interests rather than include more districts with Hispanic majorities.

The second hangup was in how state leaders tried to run with the new maps. Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Texas is among the states that must get electoral changes reviewed to make sure they don't discriminate against racial, ethnic or language minorities. Attorney General Greg Abbott's office gambled on bypassing the Justice Department, which usually is the first pre-clearance stop, and instead asked a U.S. District Court in Washington for approval.

But the D.C. court said that there are issues -- as yet, it's not clear what they are -- and that a trial would be needed to sort them out.

In the meantime, some maps must be used for the 2012 primaries, so that's where the San Antonio court's configurations come in.

The court's plans for legislative districts caused complaints from all sides, though some of the parties asked for relatively simple adjustments, such as to avoid splitting African-American communities in Houston and to put all of Mansfield and Southlake in single state Senate districts.

But AG Abbott said the court had overstepped its authority and engaged in policymaking. There might be some merit to the claim that the court went too far in unnecessarily splitting communities of interest and disregarding traditional boundaries.

It's more than a little ironic, however, for the state to claim that "the court's departure from the expressed will of the Legislature not only undermines the democratic process, it ignores the voice of the citizenry."

The Legislature's choice of partisan interests ahead of large segments of the citizenry is what led to the legal challenges.

The Republicans' congressional map, for instance, included meandering districts and calculated gerrymandering that combined disparate rural and urban areas. The court's revisions included far more compact districts, including a new one in Tarrant County with a 66 percent African-American/Hispanic population. Shortly after that map was posted online, Fort Worth City Councilwoman Kathleen Hicks and state Rep. Marc Veasey announced plans to run for the seat in the Democratic primary.

Texas Monthly's Paul Burka wrote last week that "if Republicans had been smart, they would have thrown the Democrats a few bones." Instead, they overreached, as politicians do, he said, and the resulting turmoil could have been foreseen.

Texas redistricting almost always ends up in long and disruptive litigation, no matter the party in power. Some of the court fights have lasted for years, yielded multiple realignments of districts and resulted in special elections.

Even if 2012 elections proceed under court-drawn maps, the Legislature could -- and probably will -- have another go at it in 2013. This is what winner-takes-all politics gets you. And federal judges can't be blamed for that.

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