Rick Hasen:

Well, I — if you go back and look at the earlier litigation in Texas over the last few decades, in every set of redistricting, there have been findings that Texas has discriminated against Black and Latino voters.

The current maps, as we just heard, are being challenged on that basis. And now there’s going to be a further diminution of power of Democrats. And what you have to understand is that minority voters, especially Black voters, still overwhelmingly favor the Democratic Party.

So when you discriminate against a Democratic district, you’re almost always going to be discriminating against minority voters in Texas. And so, if this map gets passed, there’s going to be a challenge claiming that it violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

This itself is now going to be questionable, because, just last Friday, the Supreme Court put into play the possibility, almost on the exact anniversary, the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, that it might strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which is the part of the Voting Rights Act that remains standing after the Supreme Court killed off the other part.

So we’re coming into this maximal political power coming from these state legislatures, and we don’t know if the Supreme Court is going to protect minority voters the way it has over the past few decades.

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