Case aims to reshape legislative power

The Voting Rights Act, which became law 50 years ago this month, is rightly celebrated for helping expand the electoral power of African-American and Latino communities across the United States.

But those gains likely would not have happened, or would have been much diminished, if another parallel revolution hadn’t taken place at the same time.

It started with the Supreme Court’s 1964 decision in Reynolds v. Sims, which required states to end discriminatory redistricting practices that over-represented rural areas and small towns in state legislatures while under-representing the booming urban centers to which African-Americans and immigrants — and Americans of all sorts — were flocking.

As a result, legislative seats moved from rural regions to more populous cities and fast-growing suburbs, helping to create districts where minority communities — newly empowered under the Voting Rights Act — could make their voices heard.

But that principle is under attack in a case that the Supreme Court will hear this fall. A group of litigants argues that districts should be drawn to contain not equal numbers of people, but equal numbers of eligible voters.

In a case known as Evenwel v. Abbott, the litigants claim that the current Texas Senate map is unconstitutional because up to half of adult Latinos in urban areas like Dallas and Houston are non-citizens, meaning that many Latino-majority state Senate districts have significantly fewer actual voters than non-Latino districts.

But changing the rule would undermine both the representation revolution and the Voting Rights Act.

Because of the concentration of children and immigrants in cities and suburbs, drawing districts on the basis of eligible voters would shift representation back to less-populated areas, recreating the representational inequalities the Supreme Court struck down in the 1960s.

Malapportionment had left urban and suburban areas underrepresented in state legislatures and put rural voters in control of important policy decisions on things like schools and infrastructure.

It is hard to argue that Latinos are over-represented in the Texas Senate today.

In 2013, Latinos made up 38.4 percent of the population in Texas and 26.9 percent of its adult citizen population.

By contrast, Latinos are currently able to elect their community’s candidate of choice in just seven of 31 (22.5 percent) of the districts in the Texas Senate.

In other words, Latinos control roughly the same percentage of Senate seats as their share of Texas’ adult citizen population.

In fact, it could be argued that Latinos are still underrepresented in the Texas Senate. Despite a large (and growing) Latino population in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, the Legislature in 2011 failed to draw a district there where a Latino-preferred candidate has a shot at winning.

Indeed, there is no Texas Senate district north of San Antonio where Latino-preferred candidates win.

The same holds true for the Texas House. Latinos are currently able to elect just 33 of 150 of the members of the Texas House, or 22 percent of the body.

And as for seats in the U.S. House, only seven of Texas’ 36 congressional seats are reliably controlled by Latino voters — less than 20 percent of the total.

In terms of legislative power, members from Latino districts chair just one of the Texas Senate’s 14 committees and nine of 38 committees in the Texas House.

Michael Li is redistricting counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

This story was originally published August 7, 2015 at 7:23 PM with the headline "Case aims to reshape legislative power."