[UPDATED] Texas just won at the Supreme Court in racial gerrymandering case…well MOSTLY

Texas won a case that stems all the way back from 2011 today…well mostly.

The case dealt with four districts that were said to be unlawfully and racially gerrymandered after they were redrawn following the 2010 census.

The high court didn’t agree on three of those districts and only found one was unlawful:

ABC NEWS – The Supreme Court ruled Monday that one congressional district in Texas was drawn in a way that influenced the number of Hispanic and African-American voters in that district, but that three other districts in the challenged map did not violate the law.

Justice Samuel Alito said in the Court’s decision that a three-judge federal court “committed a fundamental legal error” when they ruled that the state’s district map based on the 2010 Census was unlawful.

“When the congressional and state legislative districts are reviewed under the proper legal standards, all but one of them, we conclude, are lawful,” Alito said.

The justices said that Texas House District 90, which surrounds Fort Worth, Texas, is an “impermissible racial gerrymander” because the Texas legislature changed it to manipulate the percent of the district made up of Hispanic and African-American voters.

Here’s more from the opinion if you want to read it. The actual opinion is only a few pages long, despite the full length of the PDF:

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In the North Carolina partisan gerrymandering case from 2016, the Supreme Court punted it back down to the lower courts:

UPDATE: Here’s more on NC:

In an unsigned order Monday, the court struck down a lower court opinion that had invalidated congressional maps in North Carolina as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and instructed the lower court to revisit the case in light of the Supreme Court’s recent opinion concerning maps in Wisconsin.

Although a lower court had invalidated the maps, the Supreme Court had stayed that order, and they will likely be used in the next election.


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