Every redistricting cycle has a theme.
This year's big theme is the remarkable growth of the state's Hispanic population. After all, 65 percent of Texas' population growth over the last decade was Hispanic. Despite that, there's a compelling argument that Hispanic voting strength is actually diminished under the new voting maps approved by the Legislature.As powerful as that story is, there's another equally important, but less commented upon, story in this year's redistricting fights: the emergence of diverse multi-ethnic districts in the state's urban areas, where historically discriminated-against minority groups have managed to achieve gains by working together.There's no better example of this than state Senate District 10, which Wendy Davis won in 2008 based on the support of 99 percent of African-Americans and more than 80 percent of Hispanics, plus a smaller percentage of Anglos.Over time, this may, in fact, be the bigger story of the last decade.As urban Texas becomes more diverse -- and compartmentalized neighborhoods that are the exclusive preserve of one ethnic group disappear -- more and more districts like Davis' will emerge naturally. The competitive state House seats that have arisen in recent years in places like Irving and Grand Prairie are a product of the same phenomena.That may be why Texas Republicans have fought so hard to take apart Senate District 10 and shove its minority population into far-flung districts where forming winning coalitions is much harder if not impossible.The crux of Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's court argument has been that the only districts protected under the Voting Rights Act are districts where, unlike Senate District 10, a single minority group, by itself, controls outcomes in elections. In other words, in his view, Hispanic and African-American voters only get protected by the Voting Rights Act if they live in neatly defined ethnic barrios of the type that are becoming more and more rare in a multi-ethnic Texas.Abbott's argument is a one-two power grab. On the one hand, the state argues it can't draw more African-American or Hispanic seats because the populations are too spread out across the region. Then it argues that it can fracture the coalitions that minority groups manage to forge because "coalitions" aren't protected by voting rights laws.Accept his argument, and Texas would be free to do what it did to Senate District 10 when it put a strip of the district where the population is more than 78 percent African-American and Latino into an Anglo-dominated district stretching past Waco. That area has been represented by Brian Birdwell, who championed controversial sanctuary cities legislation and opposed payday lending reforms strongly supported by Tarrant County minority leaders.With the Supreme Court seemingly reluctant to recognize any claim for excessive gerrymandering, one of the few protections that minority groups have is the Voting Rights Act.A federal panel in Washington, D.C., that's overseeing part of the litigation over Texas' redistricting maps already has rejected Abbott's claim that coalition districts aren't protected from being diminished under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.The court said coalition districts are protected when minority groups act cohesively.In a hearing that ended with closing arguments Tuesday, the D.C. court heard testimony about how leaders from the African-American and Latino communities of Fort Worth came together to persuade Davis to run and then worked together to get her elected.Districts like Davis' may be relatively rare for Texas today, but they're the future of the state, at least if Abbott doesn't get his way.Michael Li is a Dallas-based election law attorney and maintains the Texas Redistricting blog, www.txredistricting.org.Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
