Salon: Texas GOP moves to “gerrymander” state courts after Democrats sweep key judicial elections

Texas Republicans are pushing legislation that advocates say will “gerrymander” the state’s appeals courts after Democrats swept judicial races in districts serving Dallas, Houston and Austin.

The Texas Senate Jurisprudence Committee on Thursday advanced SB 11, a bill introduced by Republican committee chair Joan Huffman to redraw the boundaries of the state’s court of appeals districts. The bill and its state House counterpart in their current form propose only minor tweaks to several districts — but voting advocates warn they are “shell” bills that will soon be loaded with much bigger changes based on proposals from a powerful group to “gerrymander” court districts just months after Democratic judges swept appellate races in five of the state’s 14 districts.

The bill is expected to be based on proposals by Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a deep-pocketed legal advocacy group that urged lawmakers to merge the state’s 14 districts into five to seven mega-districts, which advocates say are designed to dilute the power of urban areas and make it difficult for Democrats to win in the future.

“This is 100% partisan driven,” Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the voter advocacy group Common Cause Texas said in an interview with Salon. “The political party they don’t like is winning too many districts, so they just want to change them so that can no longer happen,” Gutierrez testified at Thursday’s hearing. …

The Texas bill offers few details but is ultimately expected to include some version of reforms proposed by Texans for Lawsuit Reform, according to Gutierrez and news reports. The group released a lengthy report proposing a plan that would shrink the state’s 14 court districts to seven, along with three other plans to reduce that number to just five.

“We’re fairly sure it will be one of those proposals, or something closely modeled there, and generally what people expect is taking the current composition of the court and reducing it, probably almost in half, to create these mega-districts where you would have maybe one Democrat. But the majority of those court of appeals districts would then become completely controlled by Republicans,” Gutierrez said. …

Gutierrez told Salon that there is a legitimate need to address drastic differences in caseloads, but that the current effort is a political exercise.

“We’ll see what the actual bill looks like, but if you wanted to seriously address that problem, I think you would be more transparent about what’s in the bill and bring in more of the stakeholders who really know these courts and understand the caseloads and impacts,” he said. “But the people in the room who are involved in this are Texans for Lawsuit Reform. That seems to be it.” …

“If you live in a rural part of the state, the odds of you ever again being able to elect the traditional candidate that you’re familiar with, who knows your community, go down practically to zero,” Gutierrez told Salon, adding that heavily minority parts of South Texas would be heavily impacted as well as whiter, more conservative parts of the state. …

“They went out of their way to really innovate gerrymandering in Texas, which is hard to do but they figured out a way. But this is one that I feel harms so many different communities,” Gutierrez said, predicting that the impact on traditionally Republican areas of the state could doom the bill in committee.

“There are definitely a lot of groups who represent minority Texans or parts of the state along the border” who oppose the bill, he added, but “I think we’re going to find a lot of groups in red or rural parts of Texas that hate the bill just as much.”

The state’s Senate Jurisprudence Committee hearing also included SB 1529, which Gutierrez described as a backup bill “clearly intended” as a plan to offer a “different way to reconfigure the courts in Texas” if SB 11 fails.

It “basically creates what people are referring to as a business court,” he explained. “Right now, anything civil goes through the court of appeals system, but the business court would be a statewide court, like our Texas Supreme Court. Civil matters that would normally go to the court of appeals will go to that court. It’s Texas, so automatically these default to Republican judges for the foreseeable future. It definitely seems to be part of a plan to address what they see as the problem: Democrats winning a bunch of these traditional court of appeals races.”