Posted on 12/02/2005 10:38:34 AM PST by Liberty Valance
WASHINGTON — Justice Department lawyers objected to a Texas redistricting plan orchestrated by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but top agency officials brushed aside concerns about diluting minority voting strength and approved the plan anyway, according to an agency memo released Friday.
The plan, designed to boost election chances of Republican candidates for the U.S. House, was approved by the Justice Department and the new districts were used in the 2002 elections.
Of the state's 32 House seats, Republicans held 15 before the 2002 elections. Under the DeLay-backed plan, Republicans were elected to 22 of the state's seats in the House.
The redistricting plan has been challenged in court by Democrats and minority voting groups claiming it was unconstitutional and that district boundaries had been illegally manipulated to give one party an unfair advantage. The Supreme Court is expected to announce soon whether it will consider the case.
(Excerpt) Read more at statesman.com ...
Unfortunately, the government is run by Democrats at the grass roots level. They need an affirmative action program to bring Republicans into the government.
And, someone posted to me on another thread last night...that the reason Washington IS the way it is...broken, is because these districts are drawn in such a way...
That it is almost impossible to unseat a Congresscritter, which explains why some politicians spend 20,30, 40 years in Washington, on the public dole.
Easy Solution.
TERM LIMITS!!
The problem with that idea is...you have to get people that do NOT want to give up their cushy jobs, to actually vote for them...not gonna happen.
Once again we see the dangers of Bush's failure to broom out the federal agencies. Nobody would have dared speak up like this in the clinton years. Clinton fired every federal prosecutor in the country and put in his own stooges, most of whom are presumably still there.
They have only themselves to blame.
##Full Article##
Texas Redistricting Violated Voting Rights Per DOJ Staffers
AP
Fri, Dec. 02, 2005
WASHINGTON -- Justice Department lawyers concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, violated the Voting Rights Act, according to a previously undisclosed memo obtained by The Washington Post. Senior officials overruled the lawyers, however, and approved the plan.
The memo, unanimously endorsed by six lawyers and two analysts in the department's voting section, says the redistricting plan illegally diluted black and Hispanic voting power in two congressional districts. It also says the plan eliminated several other districts in which minorities had a substantial, although not necessarily decisive, influence in congressional elections.
"The State of Texas has not met its burden in showing that the proposed congressional redistricting plan does not have a discriminatory effect," the memo concludes. The memo also says that Republican lawmakers and state officials who helped craft the proposal knew it posed a high risk of being ruled discriminatory compared with other options.
But the Texas legislature proceeded with the new map anyway because it would maximize the number of Republican federal lawmakers in the state, the memo says. The redistricting was approved in 2003, and Texas Republicans gained five seats in the U.S. House in the 2004 elections, solidifying GOP control of Congress.
Gerald Hebert, one of the lawyers representing Texas Democrats who are challenging the redistricting in court, said of the Justice Department's action: "We always felt that the process ... wouldn't be corrupt, but it was. ... The staff didn't see this as a close call or a mixed bag or anything like that. "This should have been a very clear-cut case," Hebert said.
Justice Department spokesman Eric Holland said the decision to approve the Texas plan was vindicated by a three-judge panel that rejected the Democratic challenge. The case is now being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"The court ruled that, in fact, the new congressional plan created a sufficient number of safe minority districts given the demographics of the state and the requirements of the law," Holland said. He added that Texas now has three African-Americans serving in Congress, up from two before the redistricting.
Texas Republicans have also maintained that the plan did not dilute minority votes and that the number of congressional districts with a majority of racial minorities remained unchanged at 11. The number of congressional districts, however, grew from 30 to 32.
The 73-page memo, dated Dec. 12, 2003, was provided to The Post by a person who is connected to the case and who is critical of the adopted redistricting map. Such recommendation memos, while not binding, have historically carried substantial weight within the Justice Department.
Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Texas and other states with a history of discriminatory elections are required to submit any proposed changes in their voting systems or election maps to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division for approval. DeLay and his allies participated intensively as they pushed to redraw Texas's congressional boundaries and strengthen GOP control of the U.S. House.
DeLay, the former House majority leader, is fighting state felony charges of money laundering and conspiracy, crimes he is charged with committing by unlawfully injecting corporate money into state elections. A ruling is expected next week on a defense motion to dismiss the charges.
DeLay's campaign efforts were made in preparation for the new Texas congressional map that was the focus of the Justice Department memo. Hebert said the Justice Department's approval of the redistricting plan, signed by Sheldon Bradshaw, principal deputy assistant attorney general, was valuable to Texas officials when they defended it in court.
He called the internal Justice Department memo, which did not come out during the court case, "yet another indictment of Tom DeLay, because this memo shows conclusively that the map he produced violated the law." DeLay spokesman Kevin Madden called Hebert's characterization "nonsensical political babble."
He echoed the Justice Department in pointing to court rulings that have found no discriminatory effect on minority voters. The Justice Department memo recommending rejection of the Texas plan was written by two analysts and five lawyers. The head of the voting section at the time, Joseph Rich, also wrote a concurring opinion. Rich has since left the department and declined to comment on the memo Thursday.
The complexity of the arguments surrounding the Voting Rights Act is evident in the Justice Department memo, which focuses particular attention on seats held in 2003 by a white Democrat, Martin Frost of Arlington, and a Hispanic Republican, Henry Bonilla of San Antonio. Voting data showed that Frost commanded great support from minority constituents, while Bonilla had relatively little support from Hispanics.
The question that Justice Department lawyers considered was whether the new map was "retrogressive," because it diluted the power of minority voters to elect their candidate of choice. Under the adopted Texas plan, Frost's congressional district was dismantled, while the proportion of Hispanics in Bonilla's district dropped significantly.
Those losses to black and Hispanic voters were not offset by other gains, the Justice Department memo says. "This result quite plainly indicates a reduction in minority voting strength," Rich wrote in his concurring opinion. "The state's argument that it has increased minority voting strength ... simply does not stand up under careful analysis," he wrote.
Posted by TAB
##2nd Article ##
Gonzales Defends Call on Texas Plan
By SUZANNE GAMBOA
Associated Press Writer
Dec 2, 1:35 PM EST
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales defended the Justice Department's decision to ignore staff lawyers' concerns that a Texas redistricting plan orchestrated by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay would dilute minority voting rights.
A Justice Department memo released Friday showed that agency staffers unanimously objected to the Texas plan, which DeLay pushed through the Legislature to help elect more Republicans to the U.S. House.
Senior agency officials, appointed by President Bush, brushed aside concerns about the possible impact on minority voting and approved the new districts for the 2004 elections.
Gonzales said the plan was approved by people "confirmed by the Senate to exercise their own independent judgment" and their disagreement with other agency employees doesn't mean the final decision was wrong.
The decision appears to have been correct, Gonzales said, because a three-judge federal panel upheld the plan and Texas has since elected one additional black congressman.
Of the state's 32 House seats, Republicans held 15 before the 2004 elections. Under the DeLay-backed plan, Republicans were elected to 22 of the state's seats in the House.
The redistricting plan has been challenged in court by Democrats and minority voting groups claiming it was unconstitutional and that district boundaries had been illegally manipulated to give one party an unfair advantage. The Supreme Court is expected to announce soon whether it will consider the case.
"The Supreme Court is our last hope for rectifying this gross injustice. We couldn't count on the (lower) court. We couldn't count on the state, and we obviously couldn't count on the politically corrupt Justice Department," said Gerry Hebert, an attorney representing the challengers.
The plan was approved by the Republican-controlled state Legislature in special sessions after Democratic lawmakers fled the state capital in an effort to block votes on the new congressional boundaries. An effort by DeLay to use federal resources to help track down missing Texas lawmakers led to a rebuke by the House ethics committee.
Because of historic discrimination against minority voters, Texas is required under provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to get Justice Department approval for any voting changes it makes to ensure the changes don't undercut minority voting. "The State of Texas has not met its burden in showing that the proposed congressional redistricting plan does not have a discriminatory effect," Justice Department officials said in the memo made public by the Lone Star Project, a Democratic group.
Eight department staffers, including the heads of the Voting Rights Division, objected to the redistricting map, according to the memo which was first reported in Friday editions of The Washington Post. Hebert said when a case is a close call staff lawyers usually include counterpoints to their conclusions in their memo. But he said there is nothing in the 73-page memo suggesting a plausible reason for approving the map. "So that raises a lot of suspicions about the motives" of the senior officials who are political appointees, he said.
Texas Democrats, some who had been told years ago that agency staff had objected to the plan, were outraged. "The fact that the White House has covered up this document for so long provides a smoking gun pointing out efforts, led by Bush political appointees and Tom DeLay, to systematically cripple the voting rights of minorities," said Texas Sen. Leticia Van De Putte, one of the Democratic lawmakers who fled to New Mexico to thwart passage of the redistricting plan.
DeLay is awaiting a Texas state judge's ruling on whether he must stand trial on charges of conspiracy and money laundering in connection with the 2002 elections. The charges forced DeLay to relinquish his House majority leader post in late September.
DeLay and two people who oversaw his fund-raising activities are accused of funneling prohibited corporate political money through the national Republican Party to state GOP legislative candidates. Texas law prohibits spending corporate money on the election or defeat of a candidate.
Several of the DeLay-backed candidates won election, giving Republicans a majority in the state House in 2001, when the congressional redistricting process began.
## 3rd Article ##
Political Appointees Had The Final Say on Texas Redistricting
- - Justice defends officials' decision to overrule the staff's finding that it was illegal - -
By R.G. RATCLIFFE and MICHAEL HEDGES, Houston Chronicle
Dec. 3, 2005, 12:14AM
U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Friday defended decisions by political appointees on the Justice Department staff to approve a Texas congressional redistricting plan despite objections from the agency's civil rights division.
A newly disclosed memo shows the Justice Department's long-term professional civil rights staff in December 2003 wanted to reject the Texas redistricting plan on grounds that it violated the Voting Rights Act by reducing "the level of minority voting strength."
But one of the top assistants to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft — Sheldon Bradshaw — overruled the staff and approved the plan for use in the 2004 Texas elections, Gonzales said. A lawyer representing Texas Democratic congressmen contends civil rights division political appointees made that call.
Gonzales described the dispute over whether to approve redistricting as a common difference of opinion.
"The fact that there's disagreement ... someone is charged with making that decision," Gonzales said. "And the fact that there may be disagreement somewhere within the ranks doesn't mean that the ultimate decision is the wrong decision."
Democrats riled - - J. Gerald Hebert, a lawyer who represented Texas Democratic congressmen in the legal battle surrounding redistricting, said the decision was nothing more than a partisan grab for power at the expense of minority voters in Texas. "It's a compelling story about why the Justice Department's process was corrupted," said Hebert.
The Justice staff memo was obtained by the Lone Star Project and first reported by The Washington Post. The project is a spinoff of the leadership committee of former U.S. Rep. Martin Frost, D-Dallas, who lost his seat because of the Republican redistricting plan. The story broke the same day the U.S. Supreme Court was considering legal challenges to the plan brought by Democrats and minority groups. A decision on whether to affirm the plan or ask for oral arguments could be made by the court before the end of the month.
The Texas congressional redistricting plan was pushed through the Legislature by then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, during a contentious series of special sessions called by Gov. Rick Perry. House Democrats halted the plan briefly in regular session by breaking a quorum and going to Oklahoma. Senate Democrats held it up for two months with a quorum break in New Mexico.
"Washington Republicans, led by the White House and Tom DeLay, are dismantling minority voting rights as fast as they can," said state Sen. Leticia Van De Putte, D-San Antonio and chair of the Senate Democratic caucus. "It is ironic to find out now that the Justice Department civil rights attorneys agreed with us." The plan shifted the partisan balance in the state's congressional delegation from a 17-15 Democratic majority to a 21-11 Republican majority after the 2004 elections.
Redistricting upheld - - If Justice had ruled against the map, it could not have been used without revisions by the Legislature. When the redistricting plan was upheld by the department in December 2003, Hebert first raised questions about the department's political staff overruling the professional staff. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott dismissed Hebert's contention, saying: "There's no truth or evidence to support aspersions such as that." Abbott declined to discuss the Justice Department memo Friday.
Abbott spokeswoman Angela Hale and Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Perry, both said the Texas redistricting case was reviewed after the Justice ruling by a three-judge federal court and was upheld. "A three-judge federal court has exhaustively reviewed the record and unanimously found the plan to be constitutional, and we await the Supreme Court's final consideration of that decision," said Hale.
Hebert said the three-judge panel never considered any of the voting rights problems that were considered by Justice. He said issues about whether a redistricting plan harms minority voting interests on a statewide basis cannot be the subject of a lawsuit once the Justice Department has approved it. The case before the Supreme Court involves district-level minority voting rights, questions of political gerrymandering and mid-decade redistricting.
Hebert said the original decision to override the professional staff was made by civil rights division political appointees Hans von Spakovsky and Brad Schlozman. Lone Star Project consultant Matt Angle said Spakovsky had been involved in a project to remove African-Americans from the voting rolls in Florida during the 2000 presidential campaign. The Justice Department denied that either Spakovsky or Schlozman was involved in the decision. "The bottom line is that it was a legal decision and it was made by (Bradshaw). To say anyone else made the decision is not accurate," said Eric Holland, a Justice spokesman.
Justice's side of the story - - As for who made the decision, Gonzales said it was officials "confirmed by the Senate to exercise their own independent judgment." Bradshaw, as a member of the Justice Department's legal counsel's office, had been an adviser to the Bush White House in 2001. Then he was appointed to the second-in-command spot in the civil rights division under Alex Acosta, who had helped Bush's 2000 presidential campaign in the Florida vote recount. Bradshaw took command of the Texas redistricting case when Acosta recused himself.
Acosta, who is now the U.S. attorney in Miami, in congressional testimony refused to say why he removed himself from Texas redistricting. "I do believe that my recusal was appropriate, that it was the right thing for me to do. I have very able deputies, good deputies, and I have full confidence in their decision-making process," Acosta said in the March 2004 congressional hearing. Bradshaw now is the chief counsel at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Hebert and other Democratic and minority lawyers involved in the case said they hope disclosure of the memo will prompt the Supreme Court to give their challenge to the plan a hearing. "We wouldn't even have to be before the Supreme Court if the Justice Department had done its job," Hebert said.
## 4th Article ##
Democrats Seek Texas Redistricting Probe
By SUZANNE GAMBOA
Associated Press Writer
Dec 3, 11:34 PM EST
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House Democratic leader wants an independent inquiry into the Justice Department's decision to approve a Texas redistricting plan that staff lawyers concluded diluted minority voting rights.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the decision by senior officials to ignore the staff lawyers' conclusions - contained in a 73-page memo made public Friday - was political.
"There must be an independent inquiry into the contemptible politicization of the Justice Department to rubberstamp Congressman Tom DeLay's illegal redistricting scheme in Texas," Pelosi said.
The plan was pushed through the state legislature by DeLay, R-Texas, to help elect more Republicans to the House when he was the chamber's GOP leader. It was approved in time for the 2004 elections.
Because of historic discrimination against minority voters, Texas is required under provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to get Justice Department approval for any voting changes to ensure they don't undercut minority voting.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was not in that post when the plan was approved, defended the department's decision. The senior officials who approved it were "confirmed by the Senate to exercise their own independent judgment" and their disagreement with other agency employees doesn't mean the final decision was wrong, he said.
The decision appears to have been correct, Gonzales said, because a three-judge federal panel upheld the plan and Texas has since elected one additional black congressman.
Of the state's 32 House seats, Republicans held 15 before the 2004 elections. Under the DeLay-backed plan, Republicans were elected to 21 of the state's seats in the House. Six delegation members are Hispanic, one a Republican and three are black.
The redistricting plan has been challenged in court by Democrats and minority voting groups that claim it is unconstitutional and that district boundaries were illegally manipulated to give one party an unfair advantage. The Supreme Court is considering whether to review the case. The memo released Friday by a Democratic group, Lone Star Project, had been sought by lawsuit plaintiffs before going to court, but the Justice Department declined to surrender it then.
Eight department staffers, including the heads of the Voting Rights Division, objected to the redistricting map, according to the memo first reported Friday by The Washington Post.
The Justice Department said Sheldon Bradshaw, then principal deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, made the final decision in the Texas case.
The plan was approved by the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature in special session in 2003 after Democratic lawmakers fled the state capital in an effort to block votes on the new congressional boundaries.
An effort by DeLay to use federal resources to help track down missing Texas lawmakers led to a rebuke of him by the House ethics committee.
The redistricting plan is connected to Texas indictments of DeLay on charges of conspiracy and money laundering. A judge is expected to decide by Tuesday whether to dismiss the charges that forced DeLay to relinquish his House majority leader post in September.
DeLay and two people who oversaw his fund-raising activities are accused of funneling prohibited corporate political money through the national Republican Party to state GOP legislative candidates. Texas law prohibits spending corporate money on the election or defeat of a candidate.
Several of the DeLay-backed candidates won election, giving Republicans a majority in the state House in 2003, when the congressional redistricting process began.
## 5th Article ##
High Court May Take Up Texas Redistricting
Thursday October 27, 2004 3:02 am ET
Nathan Carlile, Legal Times
It is widely agreed that Republican Rep. Tom DeLay plays politics the way Ty Cobb ran the base paths -- spikes up. How lawful that style is depends on who is answering the question. The Supreme Court may soon be weighing in on DeLay's conduct if it agrees to hear arguments on his orchestrated reshaping of federal representation for his home state of Texas.
The Supreme Court will consider Travis County, Texas, et al. v. Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, et al., along with several other related Texas redistricting cases, during its private conference on Friday. They are among dozens of cases the Court will review at the conference to determine if they should be added to the Court's docket for argument.
In October 2004 the Supreme Court remanded the Texas redistricting case back to a three-judge federal panel, which then rejected, for a second time, legal challenges to the new Texas congressional map, passed in 2003 and followed in the 2004 election.
The appellants, which include elected officials and special interest groups, are asking the Court to throw out the new map in favor of one drawn shortly after the 2000 census. They also want the Court to explicitly define what constitutes partisan gerrymandering -- an act the Court last year deemed unconstitutional. If the Court agrees to hear the case, opening arguments could begin next spring.
In 2002, Republicans, who already had control of the governor's office and the state Senate, gained the majority in the Texas House. At that point, DeLay -- using his prominence as House majority leader -- started pushing a redistricting plan that would ensure Republicans could hold onto and gain federal congressional districts.
Seven plaintiffs sued to stop the plan, claiming the redistricting effort was illegal; that the data used from the 2000 census was out of date; that minority districts were overpopulated, violating the principle of one person, one vote; and that the new districts impeded Democrats' ability to mount a reasonable challenge. After their case was thrown out by the District Court, they appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellants include Texas Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee and Eddie Bernice Johnson, the Texas Democratic Party and the League of United Latin American Citizens.
"We need the Court to step in and say how often this can be done," says Dallas lawyer Rolando Rios, who represents LULAC. "Are we going to allow redistricting every year? There has to be a standard."
Supporters of the redistricting claim that after decades of Democrat-controlled gerrymandering, Republicans simply evened the score.
In June a three-judge panel unanimously rejected the appellants' claims, ruling the partisan gerrymandering did not rise to a level it could deem unconstitutional. Judge John Ward, in a separate, concurring opinion, expressed concern that the map possibly violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, but that there is currently no constitutional test for excessive partisanship.
In making his point, Ward cited Vieth v. Jubelirer, a Pennsylvania gerrymandering case the Supreme Court decided in 2004. The 5-4 decision said that partisan gerrymandering should be illegal, but the Court did not define what constitutes legal redistricting.
The appeals panel split on whether a state can redraw district boundaries when a plan already exists.
Loyola Law School professor Rick Hasen, an election law expert, says the Court's failure to agree on a judicial test for gerrymandering and the question of redistricting mid-decade may be reason enough for the Court to hear the Texas case. The swing vote on the Pennsylvania case was Justice Anthony Kennedy, who agreed gerrymandering violates the Constitution but was not prepared to author a test.
"Kennedy said he wanted to keep the issue open for another day," says Hasen. But he also warns that the Court's liberal camp may be wary of using the Texas case to write a test to distinguish redistricting from gerrymandering. "In terms of the unfair partisan gerrymandering, the facts are not as extreme as they were in Pennsylvania."
Date Correction on above article:
Thursday October 27, 2005 3:02 am ET
TAB
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