Congratulations, Texas: You've Just Been Disenfranchised

I'm so mad, I'm nearly incoherent.

According to this Bloomberg News article, a US District Court in Washington threw out the Texas Redistricting map because "Texas used an 'improper standard or methodology' when determining whether minorities had the ability to elect their preferred candidates."

Let's take this apart, shall we?  In the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, redistricting was done such that good, solid Republicans had to run against each other in the primaries, and Eddie Bernice Johnson still skated by unopposed.  Yeah, that sounds real harsh on "minorities."  And that ignores the new "Majority Minority" district created that encompasses parts of Tarrant and Dallas Counties stretching from Fort Worth, through Arlington and Grand Prairie, and into Dallas.  So what the real problem here is that Republicans didn't just hand away their majority to the Democrats with redistricting.

The article does not mention which specific map was rejected.  Was it the map already rejected by the court in San Antonio?  If so, that's still not good, but it could be worse.  We're already operating under a court-imposed "interim" map.

However, if what the Court threw out was that interim map, the US District Court in Washington just disenfranchised every voter in Texas.  If those maps aren't valid, then, even if the court makes new maps and just says "yeah, if you ran for district 33, you're still in district 33, even if we moved that 200 miles to the south," then the people who voted for one candidate don't have that candidate to vote for in the general.  Worse than that is that and emergency appeal would almost have to be heard, given the fact the primaries have already been heard, which means it would take the Supreme Court who-knows-how-long to return a decision, imperiling our ability even to get ballots printed for the November election.

Let's not beat around the bush here.  The people of Texas elected a legislature to represent us.  We elected people we believed would best represent our interests.  It should be for that legislature, and that legislature alone, to decide on new districts after each census.  The Voting Rights Act deprives us, unconstitutionally, of our Republican form of government and imposes a de facto Judicial Oligarchy upon us.