Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of November 17

You can read about this legal case in much more detail here:

There’s a backstory here that I’ll simplify mercilessly. It’s generally unconstitutional to draw district lines based on race. But, sometimes, at least for now, the Voting Rights Act requires that if a reasonably-configured majority-minority district can be drawn, then it must be drawn to avoid excessively diluting the votes of minority voters. (It’s more complicated than that, but close enough.) And drawing majority-minority districts requires being conscious of race in drawing district lines. So, summing things up, drawing district lines based on race is unconstitutional unless it’s mandatory to satisfy the Voting Rights Act.

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The gist of the DOJ letter is that, when Texas redistricted in 2020, it created coalition districts because it thought it had to under Campos. But Petteway overruled Campos. So, it turns out, Texas actually didn’t have to draw those districts. So that leaves Texas with a bunch of coalition districts that it didn’t have to draw. But wait. Texas considered race in drawing those districts. And when the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require consideration of race, the Constitution prohibits consideration of race. Ergo, the coalition districts are unconstitutional and Texas has to get rid of them.

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The DOJ Letter exhorts Texas to target coalition districts for destruction. It urges Texas to redraw district lines because of the racial composition of those districts. That’s unconstitutional! Indeed, the whole premise of the letter is that it’s unconstitutional to draw district lines based on race! Maybe if the districts were originally drawn for race-based reasons, it would make sense to redraw them. But if the districts weren’t originally drawn for race-based reasons, then the DOJ Letter would effectively be telling Texas: “Dear Texas, please redistrict in order to racially discriminate against Black and Hispanic voters.”

Or, put more concisely, we are currently living in a timeline in which the DOJ announces that race-based redistricting is unconstitutional, and then demands that Texas do that very unconstitutional thing, in the span of a single two-page document.

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If we’re being honest, it’s virtually certain that Republican legislators were motivated by both race and partisanship: they thought both that (A) it would be great if Republicans kept winning and (B) if DOJ is telling us that the Constitution requires us to blast coalition districts into oblivion, then, well, who doesn’t love the Constitution? Or maybe some Republican legislators thought (A), some thought (B), some thought both (A) and (B), and some (most?) just figured they’d do what everyone else was doing. In this situation the Supreme Court has declared that courts must assess whether race was the “predominant factor motivating the legislature.” Good luck, courts!

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[T]he plaintiffs sued as quickly as they could—before the law was even signed, in fact. Also, in an effort to get a ruling as quickly as possible, they didn’t take discovery, which prevented the plaintiffs from learning the state’s redistricting criteria before the hearing and hence (according to the plaintiffs) is the reason they couldn’t introduce an alternative map.

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Second, the district court also hustled. It issued its 160-page opinion weeks after the hearing. And to further move things along, the majority released its opinion ahead of the dissent.

Third, the district court, recognizing that there wasn’t sufficient time for the Texas legislature to enact a new map, chose the least intrusive possible remedy: a preliminary injunction that directed Texas to use the prior map for the 2026 election. This map was enacted by the Republican legislature and was already a Republican gerrymander (even under the old map, 66% of the seats went to Republicans, compared to 56% of Texans who voted for Donald Trump in 2024), so it’s not as though the court was foisting some Soros-drawn map on Texans. The dissent spends several pages arguing that the injunction exceeded the court’s equitable discretion, but I don’t understand the dissent’s argument. Having enjoined the old map, the court couldn’t just leave Texas map-less. In the absence of a legislative solution, an injunction returning Texas to the status quo ante was the reasonable thing to do.

This all seems extremely messy. It creates circumstances where the courts could easily find a reason to rule however they like.

If Trump can ride it out through the midterms, then he could step down, Vance could get two election cycles as the incumbent, but the question is if Trump is willing to give up the keys, would MAGA be radioactive by then to trade out, and can they make their base look the other way on sidelining the MAGA founder for some hanger on VP, and all three of those are hard doubts IMO.