Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I have a deep sense of foreboding about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on Friday to accept review of the federal court drawn redistricting maps from Texas. In the Court's last Voting Rights Act case, while the Court upheld the law, in dicta it suggested that it might reconsider in the future, essentially inviting future appeals. Alabama, Arizona and Texas — real stalwarts of civil rights (that's sarcasm folks) — have accepted the Court's invitation.

Texas will get the first bite at the apple. These particular cases will have to await the D.C. District Court ruling on Voting Rights Act issues for appellate procedure reasons.

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme agreed to rule on the constitutionality of three redistricting plans drawn up by a federal court for the two houses of the Texas legislature and its 36-member U.S. House of Representatives delegation, and put those court-ordered maps on hold temporarily. Texas election maps blocked, for now : SCOTUSblog:

The Court called for expedited briefing [briefs from both sides due on December 21, reply briefs on January 3], and set [oral argument] hearing on the cases for Jan. 9 at 1 p.m.  The Justices’ action gave Texas much of what its lawyers had sought in their challenge to the three-judge U.S. District Court’s interim maps, which were crafted for use in the 2012 election cycle.  The Court’s order is here. [The Court’s order makes no reference to amici filings in the cases.]

It raises the strong possibility of a major new ruling on the power of federal judges to draw up redistricting plans while a state legislature’s own maps are under challenge in court.

Although the state had initially sought only a stay of the interim redistricting plans, it suggested as an alternative that the Court take on the cases itself, and issue a prompt ruling.  That is what the Justices agreed to do, putting the cases on its docket for review as 11-713 (the Texas state house case), 11-714 (the Texas state senate case), and 11-715 (the congressional delegation case). 

What the Court did not do was order any immediate change in the way Texas candidates go about filing to run in the 2012 primary, now set for March 6. The filing deadline remains December 15 for now, though there are now no legislative or congressional districts for which to file. it appears unlikely that the primaries for state house, senate, and congressional races can occur on March 6 due to the delay of this litigation.

The three maps drawn by the state legislature earlier this year supposedly cannot be used, because their validity under federal voting rights law and the Constitution is now under review by a different U.S. District Court, in Washington.  And the interim districts crafted by the District Court in San Antonio cannot be used because they are now stayed by the Justices’ order.

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Stay applications such as the ones that put these cases before the Court are usually only for temporary remedies, and, most often, seek simply to maintain the status quo while the underlying decision at issue is reviewed.   The Court, this time, converted the applications into what it calls “jurisdictional statements,” which is the label it uses for cases that are appealed directly to the Justices from a three-judge District Court.   Federal law provides that challenges to redistricting cases are to be heard initially by three-judge District Courts, with direct appeals to the Supreme Court, bypassing the usual transit through a federal Circuit Court of Appeals.

By granting review, the Court, of course, gave no indication of how it would rule on the constitutionality of the District Court’s interim plans.   But the Court appeared to have taken seriously and heard perhaps somewhat sympathetically the Texas lawyers’ argument that a 1982 Supreme Court precedent — Upham, et al., v. Seamon, et al. — strictly limits the power of a federal court to craft its own interim redistricting plan that deviates greatly from one drafted by a state legislature.

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Because the three cases reached the Justices as stay applications, they did not spell out specifically the legal or constitutional questions being laid before the Court.  But it does appear, at least at this stage, that the Court will only be ruling on the validity of the San Antonio court’s decision to draw up interim maps of its own.  No lower court has yet ruled on the underlying question of whether any of the districts — for the legislature or for the House delegation — actually violate federal law or the Constitution.

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While Friday’s order seems to put a hold on further proceedings in the San Antonio court’s review of the Texas legislature’s three maps, there was nothing in the order that would appear to have any effect on the continuing review of the validity of those plans by the District Court sitting in Washington.   The Justice Department is taking part in the Washington case, and is making significant challenges there to the maps the legislature drew for the Texas house and for the House of Representatives delegations.   Those maps, as well as the one for the Texas state senate, are also under broad challenge in the Washington case by minority and civil rights groups.

The challengers contend that the legislature drew the maps in order to minimize the impact of population shifts since 2000 on the election prospects of Republican candidates, and to reduce the voting influence of the state’s rapidly growing Hispanic population.   Since 2000, the state’s population grew by more than one fifth — by 4.2 million — and 2.8 million of that growth came among Hispanics.   That made the state legislature districts seriously out of date, and led to an increase of four in the state’s House of Representatives delegation, to a total of 36.